How would you say UC Santa Cruz compares to Cal Poly SLO for someone majoring in the social sciences? (possibly sociology, gender studies, etc.) My D’17 has a UC GPA of 4.428 uncapped, and her ACT is 34. Since she is not a STEM major, both of these schools seem like relative safeties.
My question is, what would you say are the pros and cons of these two schools? I don’t even know how relatively competitive they are for non-STEM majors.
I see that Cal Poly’s freshman profile lists a GPA of 3.94 and ACT of 29 for Liberal Arts majors – but is that the average, and if so how wide is the range? UCSC is listed by Princeton Review as having a 25%-75% range of 22-28 for the ACT. That makes it sound like it’s less competitive than Cal Poly. (For whatever reason, the only Cal State that’s listed in the Princeton Review is CSU Stanislaus. Not sure what that’s about.) My D is not at all hung up on prestige, but I want her to go where she’ll be challenged.
In terms of fit, UCSC is a good fit for her – she’s a quirky loner who likes Japanese anime, (some) video games, and whose activities are art and dance. I’m not sure if Cal Poly would be as good of a fit. She would prefer a small school (her top choices are liberal arts schools) but we visited UCSC and she liked how it felt like a smaller campus than it actually is. Dislikes: sororities, sports, school spirit, loud parties, obnoxious people, etc. You get the picture.
UC test score ranges often seem to be on the low side because they tend to weight GPA relatively more heavily than test scores compared to most other colleges (including CSUs).
CPSLO is often thought to be similarly selective as the middle selectivity UCs, so it is likely more selective generally than UCSC, although choice of major and the student’s GPA versus test score balance mean that some students may find it easier to get into CPSLO and others may find it easier to get into UCSC.
CPSLO, like other CSUs, generally has a more pre-professionally oriented student body, based on choice of majors.
Cal Poly is mostly known for engineering while UCSC has a wider range of reputation. Just based on how you describe her, I think UCSC is the better fit as it more for the artsy type.
Thanks for the replies. It looks like the Princeton Review numbers are out of date. I expect the stats for UCSC (and probably all of the UCs) have been rising for a few years and will continue to do so as more students choose UCs over more expensive private schools, so that’s something to consider.
My take of Cal Poly as more pre-professional and UCSC as more liberal arts/artsy/hippie seems to fit with what you’re both saying. I don’t know any students at Cal Poly who aren’t very sure about what they want to do – which doesn’t mean they won’t change their minds, but of course Cal Poly makes that difficult to do.
In terms of national reputation, these two are not in the same league (except for engineering and business at SLO are very good). UCSC is prominent in humanities and social sciences, and its faculty is outstanding. UCSC will offer more intellectual rigor. My son, who is also into the arts and literature, visited SLO last summer and did not care for the atmosphere.
My niece is a on the quirky side and she would have been a perfect fit for UCSC but alas did not get accepted. She is attending SLO as an Environmental major and has had some difficulty in finding her niche. As a Sophomore, she has finally found a good social group of friends. She does love the school but a bit too “conservative” for her tastes , but definitely would never consider staying in the area once she graduates. Again this is her opinion. I know many students that absolutely love SLO so visiting and spending time on each campus is important. I believe a good “fit” is very important in having a student succeed. Good luck to your daughter.
I’d encourage you to wait until the results are in before getting too excited about one or the other. Once they’ve arrived, spend some time on both campuses, talk to students and faculty - I bet the choice becomes pretty clear.
Well, the reason I’m thinking about this now is because I’m trying to plan what campuses we’ll try to visit before acceptances come out. I figure April will be kind of crazy so I want to fit in one more campus visit on President’s day weekend. It will probably be either UC Davis or Cal Poly, neither of which she’s seen yet.
CP is probably more selective than UCSC overall. However, CP’s strengths are in technical fields, like engineering; the School of Liberal Arts is a (relatively) weak spot. For Fall 2015, the average test scores for CP Liberal Arts were 599 CR, 595 M, ACT 26.8.
I don’t have comparable data for liberal arts at UCSC. However, I wouldn’t expect the liberal arts students at UCSC to be much weaker than average, as is the case at CP.
In terms of campus culture and atmosphere, I would agree that UCSC sounds like a much better fit in this case.
@dustypig, if you haven’t visited, I would go to SLO. At Davis, you can do a virtual tour or even walk around campus yourself and get the same feel as what you would get on their guided tour (and we took it twice!). At SLO, their “Learn By Doing” philosophy is something that you should be on campus and hear about first hand. SLO has multiple tours - department, general campus and housing tours. We took all of the tours they offered so received a different perspective from each guide. For us, the department tour was the most insightful.
UCSC is another campus where you could walk around yourself. Our tour wasn’t the best but it still gave a feel about the vibe of the campus community. Their college system, lack of central hub, etc. is unique for that school. For the right kid, it is a perfect fit. For others, it is a miss.
Will there be tours available at all of the campuses over Presidents’ Day weekend? That makes a big difference. UCSC and UCD you can do on your own but, IMO you should do a tour at SLO.
I found the tours at all the campuses: SLO, UCD and UCSC very helpful. I would definitely suggest you at least look at the dorm tours if you bypass the regular campus tour. UCSC and UCD are very spread out campuses so even with the tour, we did not see everything we wanted. We did go around campus on our own to really get a better perspective and you should spend time in each town. My older son loved UCSC’s campus did not like the town of Santa Cruz, too much of a “beach bum” vibe and not as easily accessible as Davis or SLO from campus.
Those probably aren’t the numbers that you want. This page shows the stats for the 14,190 students that were admitted to CP as freshman for Fall 2016. But only a fraction of those students – about 4,400 – actually enrolled at CP as freshmen in Fall 2016. The rest of the admitted students decided to go to some other school instead. And turns out that the best qualified students are the ones most likely to get attractive offers from other schools. So the stats for enrolled students are normally lower than the stats for admitted students (this is true at any school, not just CP).
You probably want the stats for the Liberal Arts majors that actually enrolled at CP. Those numbers aren’t available for Fall 2016 yet, but the Fall 2015 data are available as per the link in post #8 above. For new freshmen enrolling in the CP School of Liberal Arts in Fall 2015, the average GPA was 3.79 and the average ACT was 26.8. These numbers are significantly lower than the ones quoted above, but they are representative of the students who actually study Liberal Arts at CP.
You look for the school and specific major. Find the FTF Target multiply by 3 (1/3 of accepted applicants enroll) and divide by the FTF apps. This will give you a projected acceptance rate by major. Again this is projected and depending upon the stats of the in-coming Freshman class, they could be higher or lower but using this data along with averages for the school can help you gauge her chances.
Take for example Sociology: FTF target is 44 and FTF apps are 648 so the projected acceptance rate is 48x3/648= 20%.
For non-STEM, I would strongly recommend UC Santa Cruz. And for some bespoke engineering fields, the Baskin School is good choice (bioengineering, data science, computational media, etc.).
I believe the UCs are known for sciences in general whereas SLO is a niche heavily specialized in engineering (hands on type careers) and increasing notable for its business.