Make sense. In fact quarter system is not as bad as one would think, it stills ~30 weeks per years (10 + 10 +10 Vs 15 + 15 for Semester system), “always keep you on your toes” but there is always a break between quarters, in case you get a “bad professor” you only need to be in his/her class for 10 weeks instead of 15. 
For classes that normally offer 1x per year in Semester system, quarter system has the flexibility to offered twice a year if they are in enough demand.
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Are the waitlists for UC Berkeley and the other UC campuses still open? Just curious as UC Berkeley freshman arrive for Golden Bear Orientation in less than 2 weeks.
Only UCR has officially closed their waitlist. Some other UC’s have not admitted any students since end of June but still have not denied all waitlisted students or posted they have met target enrollments.
Does release of admission data indicate the end of admission cycle/waitlist. This was released on 8/8/2023. A few other UCs also released admission data on the same date.
Releasing admission data does not necessarily mean that the waitlist has closed since there has been preliminary admission data posted for a few months, however since student dorm move in has begun, I would say that the waitlist is probably closed.
Historically all the UC’s would post that they have met their enrollment targets and are closing their waitlists, but so far this year only UCR has officially posted their waitlist is closed even though there has been no recent activity on any of the UC waitlists.
I can understand the UC campuses that operate on the quarter system keeping their waitlists open as they’re still managing “summer melt” and the admissions office might need to utilize the waitlist for a few more spots as they manage the enrollment projection.
But at UC Berkeley, incoming freshmen are checked into dorms and ‘Golden Bear Orientation’ starts tomorrow. I can’t come up with a good reason why Berkeley wouldn’t close its waitlist and give closure to those students who elected to accept the waitlist offer in the first place.
I completely agree with you that UCB should at least send the waitlist applicants an email stating they have closed the waitlist and give these students closure. Last year, they did not send an official waitlist closure statement to the remaining waitlist students, but just sent out denials on July 7.
From my son who is attening Cal:
Admitted %: 7.472178060413355
The incoming class is 9400 people
7.4% is not the percentage of applicants admitted. It looks like that number was calculated from dividing 9400 (incoming students) by the number of first-year applicants (125,874 according to the news articles)? However, the number of enrolled students isn’t the same as the number of students admitted. The news article above states that 14,565 first-year applicants were admitted, resulting in a percentage of 11.6%.
Note that the incoming class of ~ 9,400 enrollees is the sum total of 1st year freshmen enrollees + transfer enrollees.
In recent years, the incoming freshmen count is between 6,700 - 6,900, and the incoming transfer count is between 2,500 - 2,700.
Also, here’s the link to this year’s application count & admit count for Berkeley, for the freshmen and transfer pools:
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/berkeley/
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Thanks! I wasn’t thinking about incoming transfers, but it makes sense there are a lot of them, too.
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Assuming the 2023-24 data extract from Cal Answers (as shown in the excerpt posted above) is accurate, here’s the 3-year admissions trend by undergraduate college at UC Berkeley.
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160 for LSCS (2.6% admit rate) and 467 for EECS (4% admit rate) is far less than the last years (166 + 547). Either they are expecting a higher yield or the EECS funding challenges have taken a toll on enrollment limits.
edit: Looks like across all of COE, admits are down 11% so may be the drop isn’t necessarily isolated to EECS.
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From the students’ perspective, if they already committed to a school with semester system and waitlisted in quarterly school. Waitlist decision comes from the quarterly school in “Sept 1” is already too late. For example, admitted to UCM and waitlisted in UCSD. Or admitted to Berkeley and wanted/waitlisted in UCLA.
@sfbayareaforUC Maybe I’m missing your point, but I’m thinking we are saying the same thing. My point was that for UC schools on the semester system (read: UC Berkeley, UC Merced), both of those campuses had the freshmen/transfers move in last week. For those schools, I couldn’t quite understand why their waitlists were still open.
However, for a UC school on the quarter system (ie., UCLA, UCSD, UCI, Davis, etc.), it does make sense that their waitlists remain open since their incoming classes don’t even move in until late in Sept.
My point is if I am waitlisted in a school that is in quarter system, but I SIR-ed/planned to attend my “2nd choice” school that is on semester system. It is “too late” for me to switch if I admitted from waitlist in Sept or even mid-August. I would have committed/paying for classes, housing and a few other things by early August. The cost is too high to switch after that point. In that perspective, schools on quarter system probably should close their waitlist in August too. 3-month of “Waitlist torture” (May, June and July) is “long enough” for anyone. Ops, miscounted, actually, 4 months, including April.
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Total agree, which is why I was so surprised that UC Berkeley did not announce that they had closed their waitlist. As of a week or so ago, @gumbymom pointed out that only UC Riverside had closed their waitlist. An interesting development, as I thought in prior years the UC campuses did “officially” close their respective waitlists later in the summer.
I just google college on quarter system, if this list is complete (CC doesn’t allow me to post .com), there are like only 40 colleges are in quarter system, and 13 of them in CA. There is really no good reason for these colleges to keep their waitlist pass early August, IMO.
[List of Colleges on the Quarter System | CollegeVine Blog]
My friend just told me when he was touring UCLA with kids early this summer, they were told that some UCs are considered switching from Quarter system to Semester System. That was what Berkeley did in 1983.
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