Not to downgrade the 14.1% acceptance rate and while that percentage is impressive, I don’t believe it is very meaningful. There were > 200K plus UC applicants in each of this past year and the previous year. If all or most of the applicants just simply checked the UCLA box, that would have cut and lowered the acceptance rate significantly or by 1/2. There can be many applicants who may be well below the average stats for UCLA acceptances and by simply checking the UCLA box, that person is an applicant. More meaningful analysis would be to look at the average GPA, SAT scores or the middle 50% (25 to 75 percentile) of UCLA admitted students. If UCLA had its own separate application, say like Stanford (which stands on its own and has a very impressively low acceptance rate) then a low acceptance rate may not be subject to argument or some doubt.
@UCBUSCalum Indeed, acceptance rates can be misleading – especially for UCs. This year, for instance, UC Irvine had an unusually low acceptance rate, 28%, which makes it the third lowest in the UC system despite the fact that GPA, SAT/ACT scores were the 5th strongest. In other words, admit profile and acceptance rate didn’t correlate in terms of where it stood in the order.
As for UCLA, the UC main office has recently released all the information you mentioned for Fall 2018. You can take a look at it below. It gives the middle 25% to 75%
Actually, UCB doesn’t care. Those numbers are for the admitted students. But most of the students that UCLA or UCB admit won’t actually enroll; the “yields” for both schools are under 50%.
The stats of greater interest are the GPA/SAT/ACT scores for the enrolled students. Historically, UCB has had a higher yield than UCLA, and has been more attractive to the top-performing students. So UCB has historically had higher stats for the freshmen who actually show up on campus in the fall, although UCLA has been closing the gap.
If I were in UCB admissions, the thing that would concern me is applicant volume.
For Fall 2018, UCLA got more freshmen applications than UCB. But it wasn’t just UCLA – UCSD, UCI and UCSB got more applications too. So UCB has dropped to fifth place.
And for Californian applicants specifically, UCB also fell behind UCD, into sixth place. In terms of California resident applications, UCB was only ahead of UCSC, UCR, and UCM – all of which are significantly smaller schools.
It’s not like applying to UCB is any more difficult than applying to any other campus. You just have to check the box. But for whatever reason, a lot of UC applicants – especially California residents – simply aren’t checking the box for “Berkeley.”
UCB is still getting a lot of quality in its applicant pool, which is the most important thing. But they are falling behind other UCs in terms of quantity, and that’s not a good sign.
I mean, just being totally blunt here, UCLA is regularly ranking higher that Cal in a variety of rankings (not always, but repeatedly) and is now officially (by a sliver) harder to get into by every trackable measure. I think the gap has been officially closed.
I was referring to the current Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the US News tie, hence the “not always, but repeatedly” qualifier. At any rate, thank you for proving my point that Cal was gonna be upset about it! :))
Only if the country’s most widely read college rankings don’t count as a “trackable measure”.
US News National University Rankings, 2018 Edition, Selectivity Rank:
19 UC Berkeley
26 UCLA
It’s true that UCB and UCLA are tied in the overall USN&WR rankings. But that’s because of factors other than selectivity (e.g. “Financial Resources”).
Is it possible that UCLA could match or beat UCB’s “Selectivity Rank” in the future? Yes, that’s not an unrealistic scenario. But it hasn’t happened as yet. Look again when the 2019 rankings are released next month.
I think we are at the point where most people aren’t shocked that a kid who gets into both would choose UCLA over UCB, at least amongst the Bay Area people we know (my twins got into both but wanted to go further away than Berkeley). That’s probably more relevant than the minor differences in rankings, which can go both ways depending on the metrics used. Historically most kids who got into both at our school chose UCB but that’s shifted in favor of UCLA this year.
I don’t have any statistics, but I think more Southern California kids would choose UCB over UCLA. Yesterday, I was flying back from the Burbank Airport to Oakland and there were a few So. Cal.kids heading to Oakland for the start of school at Berkeley.
Last year, at D’s SoCal high school, 71% who were accepted to UCB, attended while only 50% who were accepted by UCLA’s attended. Interesting enough, more applied to UCLA (129) than UCB (106). The acceptance rates for both schools were around 20%.
@Corbett
Understanding that none of this actually matters in real life, but if UCLA’s Fall '18 GPA scores, SAT scores, and ACT scores are all higher than Berkeley’s, AND the acceptance rate is lower, I struggle to see how Berkeley would be considered “more selective”.
Perhaps, of those applicants that are accepted to both, more choose Berkeley than UCLA. Perhaps. But that is a measure of desirability, not selectivity. Semantics, yes. But words are important.
My sense is that UCLA admissions are more about the numbers (GPA, SAT, etc) whereas Berkeley tilts slightly more towards a holistic judgement which makes more allowance for non-stats based achievements, although nothing like as much as most top privates. Anecdotally for example the smartest student at our school (with a perfect ACT score) got Regents at UCLA but didn’t get into Berkeley at all (and meanwhile the kids admitted to Stanford weren’t even close to the top of the class on the basis of stats or pure intelligence). So it might be expected that UCLA admits have slightly better stats if Berkeley is selecting for something else. But what does “more selective” mean in that case?
Berkeley being more holistic wouldn’t explain why more students apply to UCLA - in fact it ought to go the other way if lower ranking kids thought they had a better chance on “holistic” grounds. I’d put the higher UCLA application numbers down to some combination of LA being an attractive city, UCLA being thought of as more “fun” and Berkeley being perceived as more academically selective historically (even if that is no longer true). LA also has a larger population in its local catchment area for kids who want to stay close to home.
Take a look. It is for the “Admitted Freshman Class”. You can see that UCLA had 16,020 admits.
Will UCLA actually enroll all of those 16,000 admits? Of course not – they only have room for about 6,000 freshmen. UCLA admitted 16,000, because they know that most of the students that they admit will also get acceptance letters from other top schools, and will decide to go to one of those other schools instead – maybe Berkeley, Stanford, USC, UCI, Ivies, etc.
In other words, most of the 16,000 students in UCLA’s “Admitted Freshman Class” will never take a single UCLA course. The only connection that they have to UCLA is that they filed an application, sent a check, and maybe took a campus tour. There are probably many international applicants in the “Admitted Freshman Class” that did not even have the opportunity to take a tour, and have literally never set foot on the UCLA campus.
So which group truly characterizes the UCLA freshman class? The 16,000 who were admitted, most of whom will never sit in a UCLA classroom? Or the 6,000 who actually decided to enroll at UCLA? You are looking at the former group. But for most people – and most or all college rankings and reference books – the latter group is what counts. The college selection process doesn’t end when the schools send out admission letters; it ends when students make their final choice about where to enroll.
So how do the enrolled student stats compare? For Fall 2018, we don’t know yet, because the UCs haven’t released the numbers. But here are the numbers for Fall 2017, from the Common Data Sets:
SAT Reading/Writing:
650 - 750 UCB
630 - 740 UCLA
SAT Math
650 - 780 UCB
610 - 760 UCLA
ACT
29 - 34 UCB
27 - 33 UCLA
GPA
3.91 UCB
3.87 UCLA
At the end of the college selection process, UCB had the (slightly) higher stats for Fall 2017. And that’s why UCB maintains the higher “Selectivity Rank” in ratings like USN&WR.
Could this change in the future? Sure. It wouldn’t surprise me if the gap narrows for Fall 2018, or if it eventually disappears entirely. But there was a still a measurable gap as of Fall 2017.
