<p>The Los Angeles Times reports that over 80,000 high schoolers and about 10,000 would-be transfer students have applied for seats in the Freshman class that would enter the UCLA in the fall of 2013. Good grief, that's the highest ever!</p>
<p>As one comment attached to the story pointed out, there's no way on earth the UCLA admissions committee can give anything but an extremely cursory look to the bulk of the applications. Once again, admission to high-powered colleges in America is a roll of the dice!</p>
<p>This is a perfect example of why each student needs to embrace the philosophy of I have done my best, and that is all I can do.</p>
<p>It also shows why the ELC for instate students will give you a competitive edge. No guarantees, but can set you apart from other applicants who may share the same stats.</p>
I doubt that is true. UCLA seasonally hires outside readers to go over and rate applications, has done so for years. More applications means they can hire more readers, since each additional app comes with a fee. </p>
<p>The people I know that do this (and no, I’m not one of them) are not doing it primarily for the money, which admittedly isn’t great, but because they want to play a role in the process of selecting a great class for UCLA.</p>
<p>Actually the number of transfer applicants (19087) is higher, but this does not impact freshmen admissions.</p>
<p>The biggest increase is in freshman applications from non-residents as they went up by 25 percent, from 20,395 in 2012 to 25,514 this year. Applications from transfer students rose by 1.1 percent, from 18,886 in 2012 to 19,087 for fall 2013, reversing a slight decline last year. </p>
<p>For more data to chew, here is a good link for 2013:</p>
<p>^^
I remember when the limit was 3. However, at that time getting into Cal, UCLA, or UCSD wasn’t nearly as hard and unpredictable as it has become.</p>
<p>If UCLA’s admissions reading system is like Berkeley’s, it does not have the whole admissions committee reading each application the way smaller schools are sometimes said to do it. The Berkeley system has two readers scoring each application using a specified set of criteria, with a senior reader tie-breaking scores that are too far apart. Then the applicants are ranked by score to determine who is admitted (sometimes by division or major). The process scales up by just hiring more readers (which they can do with the application fees).</p>
<p>I have no knowledge of UCLA’s admissions committee procedures, but I suspect that UCBalumnus is correct in that the process has to be handled in tiers with additional staff for the initial read (who perform some sort of preliminary scoring), otherwise it’s an impossible task to thoroughly evaluate 90,000 applications and the related subjective documentation (letters of recommendation, extra-cirriculars, etc.)</p>
<p>Yes, back in the dark ages, there were only two UC campuses that were significantly more competitive than baseline UC eligibility, so a UC eligible student would almost certainly get into no worse than his/her third choice. So it was only necessary to apply to three campuses.</p>
<p>When I applied (1980) you could only apply to one UC, and then you ranked the others and if you weren’t accepted to #1 your application would move on to the next one. My third kid is now applying. He applied to 5. The reason is that the results can not be predicted. My daughter (HS '08) and a classmate had very similar stats, etc… She was denied by UCSB, but admitted to UCI, and he was denied by UCI and admitted to UCSB. Many crazy things also happened in '10 when my son applied. Last year a co-worker’s daughter applied, she was denied by UCLA & UCSD, wait-listed by UCI and accepted to Cal, Riverside and Davis. Also I think kids change a lot (especially boys) from November when they are applying to April when they are deciding where to go.</p>
<p>One thing to note about the UCs is that most of them admit by division (College of Letters and Science, College of Engineering, etc.), with some admitting by major within the division. So choice of division and major can explain some of the “odd” results, since a mostly less selective campus may have some highly selective divisions or majors.</p>
<p>UCB, if an ELC HS senior student is interested in bioengineering with Cal as first choice, are his chances better if he lists Slavic Languages and Literatures as his major for Cal in his UC application and bioengineering for UCLA and UCSD? Won’t Cal see that as being disingenuous?</p>
<p>If the student does get into Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science, s/he will have to then apply to transfer to the bioengineering major in the College of Engineering; this is a highly competitive admission process.</p>
<p>In general, if there are differences between divisions or majors for freshman admission selectivity, there are also competitive admission processes to change into the division or major that is harder to get into as a freshman. There is no “free lunch back door” by choosing a less popular major.</p>