Transfer Admission Guarantee is a great program. However, there are some limitations.
- UCLA, UCSD and UC Berkeley do not participate in the guarantee.
- Computer Science is excluded at UCSB, UCI, UCSC and UCD (only available at UCR & UCM)
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On a completely different note, Iām going to be very interested in watching the movement off the waitlist this year for all UC campuses.
I donāt know if my perception is skewed, or if what Iām seeing is correct but it certainly seems as though there are many, many well qualified students with only waitlist offers.
Once the highest gpa kids with multiple offers choose a campus, I really do wonder if we might see a large movement off the waitlist. I could be wrong. Itās just Iāve done this twice before and this year just feels different somehow.
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Yes, he applied for CS. He goes to a private school and usually lots of kids from his school go to Cal, UCLA, UCSD and of course MIT, Stanford , ivies . But this year is different/ crazy. Most of the kids got rejected or waitlisted from these schools. But itās like winning a lottery these days to get into these colleges for CS. He is okay now and very happy to go to Georgia tech. I donāt think there is any point in waiting to get off the waitlist. Time to move on! All the best to your daughter. I am sure they will do good wherever they go.
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The location there is, and always will be, a deterrent.
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At least there are plans now for UC Merced and the city of Merced to finally grow/merge together so students donāt have to take a 20 minute bus ride into town to find the very few burger/pizza places. CA and UC should have done that 15 years ago. I predict that when/if thereās a true ācollege townā available, UC Merced might finally become a more popular rural option like UC Davis or Chico State.
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UC Merced opened in 2005. It has been 18 years! What are they waiting for?
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DE helped my daughter immensely with UC admissionā¦ 50 challenging semester credits, taken for free that will save us 1.5 years of tuition at least. Itās a win all the way around.
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I hope you are correct and many kids come off waitlists but I thought this last year and know the waitlists didnāt move much other than Irvine at the beginning. I heard very few moves on competitive majors. My son didnāt opt into any of his waitlist options.
Waitlist movement depends on their yield which is getting harder to predict! I feel like the UCs intentionally waitlist waaaay more kids than they will ever need to avoid having to deal with excessive appeals. But this is just a guess with zero back up data.
I believe that in the test free/test optional environment, many more kids are now competing for the same number of spots at competitive schools.
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Thatās my feeling this year as well just based on what happened two years ago and last year. In 2021 all the experts were sure waitlists would move, and they didnāt (though lots of UCSC kids got in off waitlist that year). Then last year they said the waitlists would have to move because schools had been cautious, but some places they didnāt move really at all, including UCSC! Might depend on an individual campus and how conservatively they admitted to start, but for the most part schools seem to account pretty accurately for yield at the point of admissions, and so for sure Iām telling my kid (and having her tell her friends) that waitlist is just āsoft noā and while itās okay to have it, they should move on and love the schools that loved you back.
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What is shocking about this admissions round is how low acceptance rates have gone. With estimating yield, UCSD will have maybe a 15% acceptance rate? What world is this? UCLA maybe 7 or 8%? Our public schools have Ivy range acceptances rates. That is nuts. Unless we see this change with the coming demographic cliff, out of state and international admissions need to be reduced even more. Regents agreed to 18%, probably needs to be more like 9%.
Where did you hear that?
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Estimating from the numbers they quoted in their waitlist and rejection letters. UCSD had 140,000 applications for 6,900 spots I think they said? Figure 30% yieldā¦
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Yield is not that high at UCSD. Itās more like 20-something. Plus the topline application number includes transfer applications.
Weāll see when they release actual acceptance rates. In their waitlist letter they cited 140,000 and 6,900ā¦ so I donāt know why that would include transfers?
Iāll find the data. It was released in February. Looks like yield is just under 20% for UCSD. The reason Cal and UCLA are so selective is that they are the only ones with high yield.
So you think they would have accepted 34,500? That seems way too high, especially with the extensive use of the waitlist.
Here is the data ā 131K freshman apps https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_files/factsheets/2023/table-1.1-freshman-applications-by-campus-and-residency.pdf
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In 2021 they had 118K apps, admitted 40K. https://ir.ucsd.edu/_files/stats-data/common-data-set/c.pdf
Yes and they admitted a little over 31,000 freshman in 2022. The number was 40,000 admits in 2021 and they were over enrolled, had to cut back on almost 10,000 admits in 2022. It took the acceptance rate down from around 33% to a little over 23% in the course of one year. Guessing this year admits may be around the same number as 2022. They seem to waitlisted way more than they need, wondering if they cut back on waitlist this year. I think all of these schools are still trying to understand yield after the application increases the last few years. This year applications at most UCās are about the same as last year, aside from LA and Berkeley that went down in applications.
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So hereās the ultimate question.
We discuss these waitlists in terms of numbers and statistics, but behind every number is a real life student wanting and hoping theyāll be admitted. (And yes, we tell them to treat it as a soft no, but of course they continue to hope) so, is it cold and unfeeling of the UCs to manipulate the waitlists based solely on controlling their yield and if so, does that make you more or less attracted to them as an institution?
Personally, I do want the UCs to be very practical in making admission and waitlist decisions. They have a responsibility to admitted and enrolled students to avoid overcrowding their facilities and capped programs. It might seem ācold and unfeeling,ā but it would be worse if they overenrolled.
(And yes, Iām speaking as a parent of a student who is waitlisted to his desired UC, and is likely to end up going OOS!)
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