Re: Berkeley,
If your class is so big that you can’t interact with your professor, then why not just take a Coursera MOOC instead of going to a class at Berkeley?
I don’t know about Harvard, but at Stanford any class with 700-800 people will be a rare exception - probably a seminar. At the large public flagships, lectures with hundreds of students for introductory classes are the norm.
But it is a football team with a university happens to be attached it.
Not so sure this is the whole reason why OOS applicants choose to apply to UCLA in such high numbers. It’s a second and separate UC application system from the Common or Coalition App that OOS students will be using for other colleges so in some ways its a burden for OOS applicants to apply to UCs because they won’t take the Common/Coalition Application.
In addition, UCLA and UCB do accept LORs (albeit not required for most majors) but I’m sure many applicants will include them as they will be getting LORs anyways for other OOS colleges they are applying to.
There is a reason UCLA is the most applied to (popular) college in the U.S. and it’s not just because of the “ease of application” or sheer population of CA and/or China lol
If Georgetown adopts Common App, it could decrease its admission rate by a few points easily.
@jzducol
Direct quote from the common application website:
“The Common Application is accepted by the following top colleges and universities:
All eight Ivy League schools (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale)
Many other highly selective schools, including Stanford, the University of Chicago, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, and Rice”
The point being: HYP and the other Ivies DO share the same application.
More covert, subtle or direct marketing and PR colleges do, more applications they receive. National or international, everyone wants to drop applications at Ivies. It’s not the same for other colleges. Their names aren’t getting mentioned in movies and books for masses to lust at.
“The point being: HYP and the other Ivies DO share the same application”
Not in a sense that UCs share its application; all these private schools have supplemental essays and other unique emphasis, which involve a lot of additional effort.
I always figured UCLA has the best combination of reputation and value in the LA area. Caltech and USC may be comparable in reputation, but they’re also very expensive. And I’m sure having so many potential students from high school and community college already in the 2nd largest metro area has a lot to do with the number of applications, too. People like applying to colleges near home. Move UCLA to Fresno and its application numbers would drop drastically.
@jzducol Know what takes even more effort? Achieving the grades and scores and other accomplishments needed to get admitted. If your barrier to applying to a school like Harvard is that you didn’t want to write a supplemental essay, you aren’t Harvard material anyway.
Not to press too hard for my Alma Mater here, but UCLA has been the most applied-to college in the world for at least 25 years. It’s a great school, in a great neighborhood of a great city. It has a great (the best?) athletic program in the country, perfect weather, a top 15 international reputation, and is a fraction of the price of similar universities (for in-staters).
Bottom line, I think trying to excuse away the popularity of UCLA to being easy to apply to (when also applying to other UCs) is a bit off the mark. If anything, UCLA is the main draw, and people then apply to other UCs because it’s easy to do so. 
Yep, I think the last two posters have hit the nail on the head re: UCLA. It may be easy for in-state to apply, but conversely it’s harder for OOS kids to apply to (simply because it’s one step beyond the common app), so “easy” doesn’t really explain it. My D19 didn’t really apply to big flagship Universities (she just started at Pomona) but after a quick visit to UCLA while in the area, she was so impressed by it that she suddenly wanted to apply there, but then didn’t, just because the UC separate system of application seemed like too much to her, at the time. Actually, thinking back, I think by the time she decided to toss in an application there, she realized she’d missed the UC system deadline! If it were on the common app, even MORE kids would be applying!
The dynamic created by the rivalry between UCLA and UCB is interesting, because traditionally it was easier to get into UCLA and most in-state students would pick UCB if they got into both. That’s been changing quite quickly in the last few years, though how much is due to bad publicity for UCB vs UCLA’s quantifiable advantages in housing availability and better food (and ranking) vs self reinforcing increases in perceptions of UCLA being superior is hard to know.
That might cause some in-state students to stop applying because it’s perceived as too hard to get in (which presumably contributes to UCB’s currently lower application numbers), but also might prompt more OOS/international applications.
https://nacda.com/documents/2019/6/11//June12OverallDi.pdf?id=3669
More so than the ranking positions, some of the less conspicuous categorizations can be meaningful. For example, the University of Rochester moved from more selective to most selective; Macalester moved from most selective to more selective.
And yet UCLA still received 41,708 applications (OOS and International) NOT from CA!”
And yet Michigan received:
From among the 44,014 applications submitted by students living in states other than Michigan and the 9,149 applicants living in other countries, 10,327 were offered admission for an out-of-state acceptance rate of 19.4 percent.
So remind us once again how UCLA has over 100,000 applications, more than any other school.? You must take into account the ease of applying to multiple schools with a simple check mark in a state with over 40,000,000 people in it. Michigan has less than 1/4 the population of CA and yet gets as many OOS applications as UCLA with a similar sized student body. Michigan will never have a 12% admit rate. It’s just too large and not located in a state with a huge population.
“https://nacda.com/documents/2019/6/11//June12OverallDi.pdf?id=3669l”
…look who’s right behind Stanford
All of the schools in California’s UC system are excellent schools.
This may be a captain obvious observation, but I truly believe that both Cal’s and UCLA’s popularity has been heavily propelled by two things when compared to the other UC institutions:
Both of these things seem to be very important factors for many deciding which universities to apply to.
And there’s no doubt that the average standardized test scores and gpa’s of the applicants accepted at these two public schools are higher than the other UCs, but I’m just not sure how that, even when combined with a popular sports program, translates into them actually being “better” educational institutions than the other colleges in the UC system, despite US News’ annual “this school is better than that school” hysteria.
I know a couple of kids attending Cal and they do not attend for #1 or #2 above. They attend solely for the academics which are top notch. Whenever we all get together during breaks the following gets discussed: What If Cal was a private school? Sacrilege to some, but always a great conversation starter.
@sushiritto Not sure what your list is ranking, but UCLA has more All Time National Championships than any other university, depending on the most recent year. It’s also sometimes Stanford. USC is on their heels, and then no one else is even anywhere near them.
All this funny shuffling to explain why people apply to UCLA! haha. Trust me, when you’re laying out reading/suntanning after class in January on your college campus nestled between Bel Air and Beverly Hills, you’ll get it. 
To me its fascinating that UCR is #1 in “social mobility”, if that’s even a thing. What they are really number one in is Pell grant recipients attending and graduating. While related to social mobility, hardly a true measure. What’s even more interesting is that the schools that meet full need do poorly in this measure. mostly due to the fact that they can’t get enough qualified Pell grant recipients to apply/attend. Yet if they did attend they would be on a total COA free ride. I guess you have to measure it somehow and USNWR took the easy way.