UCLA vs Cal Poly SLO Aerospace

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

My daughter is trying to decide between the two.

We live in SoCal currently so we are pretty familiar with the LA area.

My son is a freshman ME at Cal Poly so we know a lot about SLO.

We don’t know a lot about UCLA except: higher national prestige, bigger, can get lost in the crowd, bigger class sizes, research institution, less contact with professors, better food, busier town.

Actually, the two schools are polar opposites!

The easy and safe choice would be SLO and I’m sure my daughter would be just fine. The risky choice would be UCLA. Is it worth it?

Any advice would be great!

2

Add this one.

Endowment:
UCLA = $2+ Billion
SLO = 228 Million

I actually think the safer bet is UCLA. Bigger sports, more school pride, more resources, more modern campus, bigger alumni network, etc.

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3

I tend to agree with @sushiritto - but - Cal Poly’s Aero program is very well regarded among the engineering majors, from what I understand. They’re doing the cubesat program, they have the wind tunnel lab - it seemed on our tour last year that they had invested a lot of money in their aero program.

Incidentally, in case this is meaningful to your decision, I work for a satellite company, and we recruit heavily at SLO. We take on over 200 interns every summer and a good number of them are SLO students.

That all being said, it may come down to school culture and environment. Two amazing options :slight_smile:

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4

Please don’t take this the wrong the way because I very much value your information. I see your posts on common threads and they are always very good (and humorous).

As an undergrad, do you think your points have a lot of weight? I see how helpful and accessible all the staff and professors have been at Cal Poly and I wonder what are the most important things to look for when making a college choice.

5

She hopes to have some sort of involvement with the US Space Force. I’m wondering does your company do satellites for the NRO or telecommunications? (Or neither) And please no worries if you can’t talk about it.

6

Consider this but take it with a grain of salt. The median annual earnings of students two years after graduation:
Cal Poly-$76,460 College Scorecard | College Scorecard
UCLA-$60,072 College Scorecard | College Scorecard

7

I’m shocked! I need to do more research. Thank you!

8

Every family and every applicant assign different weights to various factors in picking a school.

When the time came to pick a school for D18, including the choice of three Top 20 schools, sports culture, school pride, endowment, alumni network, modern campus, etc. were all important to D18. At Michigan you walk to the stadium with 111,000 other football fans and they sell out basketball and hockey too.

D18 chose Michigan not only because they offer something around fifty (50) Top 10 programs, including CoE, Nursing, Kinesiology, Ross Business School and a slew of LSA programs, but also because sports, alumni network and school pride are HUGE advantages for her.

While both UCLA and Michigan each have about a total of 45,000 students total, Michigan’s endowment is $12.5 Billion versus the $2 Billion for UCLA. Money buys “stuff,” new and remodeled facilities, pay faculty and GSI’s more money, etc. UCLA has 10x the endowment that SLO has.

D21 chose SLO based on a specific program, Animal Science/pre-Vet, NOT because of sports (obviously), endowment, alumni network, food, or a modernized campus.

Lastly, I think your kid will get adequate access to professors at UCLA. My D18 at Michigan goes to office hours and such and has plenty of access to her professors. Will it be like a LAC? No.

Anyway, it’ll just depend on what’s important to your kid and your family.

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9

My apologies, my previous post may have come across as a pro-Michigan post, but the point that I was attempting to make was that UCLA is obviously similar to Michigan in many respects.

And even though I’m a BIG fan of SLO, if the Aero programs aren’t too dissimilar, and I know nothing about engineering, then I’d personally pick UCLA.

10

No worries. Totally understood. SLO and UCLA/UMich are 2 different animals. It may even be on the verge of humorous to try to compare the two. Like comparing a truck to a sedan. :laughing:

We, as her parents don’t have a lot of experience. We both went to UCI and my husband when to USC for his MBA. My mom went to UCLA and it was awful for her. My son is a freshman at SLO and so far it’s great. So, as you can see, we don’t have a whole lot to go on.

11

I’ll PM you tomorrow :grin:

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12

UCLA, hands down, any day. UCLA is way more prestigious, great city, and better opportunities.

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13

Same thing happens every year, CPSLO people are always hyping up the university in relation to UCLA, UCB and the UCs, which is actually an admirable quality. They’re fans of their school. However, a few things…

Let me add a second edit to fix some of the things I wrote last night as I didn’t pay enough attention to what I was writing, in addition for archiving purposes.

  • UCLA just completed a $5B+ fundraising campaign and the endowment is > $4B now, {edit2} but its endowment is actually presently more like > $5B. Additionally, UCLA’s been finishing in the top-ten in raising funds and sometime{s} in the top five for the last handful of years. Thanks for your post nonetheless, @sushiritto.

  • {Edit 2, added bullet} @goosenaround in your post no. 5 to which you @GPlove assented in your no. 6, there’s a specific demographic in which these surveys took place, and don’t include the campuses as a whole. The dem would be those of lower socioeconomic background, and those who attend UCLA among this background don’t really have the full array of majors like CS and engineering, because they don’t have the science background at their underfunded high schools.

  • In further answer to the previous bullet, UCLA is by far one of the most preprofessional universities in the nation, and it produces probably the most no. of MDs in the nation with > 500 attending medical school in the US/year, as well as probably the most attorneys. {Edit 2} And a lot of these are 1st-gen students whose familial dream is for them to be MDs, so there’s a lot of drive for them to persevere, including being accustomed to college. So consequently, those who’ve studied {edit 1} as undergrads in premed do things like medical transcribing subsequent to graduating while preparing to apply to med school, and prelaw students {will often} take lesser paying jobs to prep for L-school. Overall, after 10 years, UCLA graduates make more income than SLO’s {edit 2} and also after five, but less of a material difference at that point. And income does depend on one’s location in CA, as the Bay’s {industries} pay the higher salaries by a good amount over those industries in So Cal, which is attributable to COL and specifically housing prices.

  • SLO is undoubtedly more of a STEM campus, which should mean {edit 2} that some of their grads do better initially professionally, but UCLA students are picking up the STEM theme up by majoring in math and using these majors for quant-based bus majors, etc. and as well as in some of the other physical sciences for professionally related careers.

  • In addition (a sub-bullet to above), UCLA’s engineering school including CS presently is pretty small {edit 2} only ~ 4,000 undergrads. But it’s received a $100m donation for its E programs {by the namesake of the E school, Dr. Samueli}, and it’s in the process of increasing its E faculty by 100 professors, and this will lead to more E and CS undergrads. But too, there are more CS-type programs in its L&S Math, Psych, and Bio programs, and even in linguistics; there’s also a CS specialization that anyone can take {for those who want an L&S CS perusal}.

  • UCLA is as a school more theoretically based and SLO is more hands on, so a lot of companies like SLO’s E grads {edit2} as well as, say, CSULB and SJSU’s E grads, but UCLA’s do go more for PHDs and more researchy/design type positions. The potential of UCLA’s E grads is generally > overall than SLO’s.

  • Absolutely, SLO is more teaching oriented and UCLA more research based, which means that professors are trying to prop their departments at the latter by producing paper, and therefore, classes aren’t broken as much into lecture sections as at the former – I believe community college is the prime example of high student : faculty but really small classes; i.e., they are fully teacher-based. Depending on the major, of course, UCLA would rather have fewer lectures, whereas SLO probably breaks things into more smaller ones, but that can be deceiving because the same professor could be leading 3-5 smaller lectures at SLO, and at UCLA there {would be} only one or two.

But regardless, @GPlove, your daughter should go where she will be happiest, and that obviously would be SLO. All the best to her. Sorry for the book.

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14

Thank you for these helpful insights.

And unfortunately we don’t know where she would thrive the most. We hope we can learn as much as possible so she can make an informed decision.

15

You’re welcome. She’s smart enough to get into both – no easy task – so she’ll do well wherever she goes. No wrong choices here, and it does sound like she’d be happiest at SLO.

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16

UCLA engineering feels much more like a private school than L&S. We have our own counseling department that is very easy to get in touch with counselors. We also are assigned faculty advisers that we must see at least 1x per year or they put a hold on our account. Most engineering classes outside of the math and physics are 60 students or less. Many 25 students. I actually preferred 180 person classes since it felt more like “college”. All engineering classes are taught by professors. The graduate students teaching classes is from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Other schools like to point that out about UCLA but its misguided. I loved my UCLA engineering experience and can provide more info. It also has an unrivaled school spirit and environment. Its also alot smaller than you think. Since all the students live on the hill together you’re never far from your friends. You run into people all the time on campus due to how small it is at 400 acres. I also never had trouble going to office hours or emailing a prof. Most of the time people don’t go to office hours since the students are so smart its easier to just ask the person next to you and they were always willing to help.

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17

This is great information that I did not know! We will be doing all the virtual events so we will gather as much info as possible.

Now I wish I had paid more attention to your posts on other threads so I wouldn’t have to ask questions that you have answered so many times already. Did you go to UCLA for undergrad? If so, what major? I think I remember that you went to or are currently in grad school? Where did you go and what major?

Thank you!

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@eyemgh… Care to add anything here?

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This is an apples and oranges discussion.

I can’t speak to UCLA other than it’s BIG and has a solid reputation. To my knowledge. lectures have never been taught there by grad students, but labs and discussions still are to this day. They are not at Cal Poly.

CubeSat does not just “happen” at CalPoly. It was invented and still headquartered there. There are two CubeSat clubs. One designs payloads, including Bill Nye’s LightSail. The other makes and updates PPODS (the launchers) and schedules payload distributions for universities and businesses all over the world.

They don’t just have a single wind tunnel. They have multiple on campus including a mach+ tunnel.

My experience is biased, because my son went there. People tend to want to affirm their choices so take this with a grain of salt. His experience was outstanding and paid off very well for him. He got great hands on experience. Multiple practicing engineers from highly ranked programs have told me that his senior project far exceeded anything that was happening at their alma maters. That, his campus job, and his Masters thesis, made a huge impact on landing his job.

He works for a startup run mostly by former Apple employees. They hail from all over, including UCB, Stanford, etc. My son was the first new grad they hired. They’ve hired two…both were from Cal Poly. Two years out, he makes almost 50% more than the median mid-career ME salary.

She should choose the place that she feels she’ll like the best. She’ll have plenty, but probably different, job opportunities either way. There are strengths and weaknesses either way. She just needs to decide which school offers the most that line up with her interests.

Good luck and congrats to her!

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20

No one on this thread was “hyping” SLO. But the irony here, and for the few years that I’ve been on this site, you’ve always been UCLA’s “hype man.” If you actually read my posts above, then you’ll see that I was actually suggesting the OP’s kid to go to UCLA.

UCLA doesn’t have an undergraduate business school. SLO does, it’s called the Orfalea College of Business. So, if the OP’s son decided to double major, aero and business, he could at SLO.

So, you’re speculating. :grinning:

None of this matters to the discussion about aero engineering. More UCLA hype.