Very interesting responses....

<p>Davis is only lower in the ranking due to an error in reporting at USnews which vastly under-reported the number of full professors in teaching positions. Since this is a critical number used in USnews rankings this error caused Davis to slip. The same thing happened to SB awhile back. This situation has been beaten to death on these boards. Davis and Irvine are in a virtual dead heat. This year Davis got the clearly better applicant pool (with SB next) and will reduce its admissions to 50%. I wouldn't bet on Irvine being in front of Davis. Now that they are moving to D1 sports and have a football stadium Davis will easily become the top of the three middle UC's.</p>

<p>wecandothis you will have to wait awhile. My guess is that the stats for 2007 will be quite different than in the past. UCD had a 7% increase in applicants, with the next closest school being UCI at 4%. UCSD had a better overall applicant pool this year than UCLA (lots of cross-over applications though). Both UCSD and UCD over-enrolled last year and will be significantly more selective. The statistics probably won't be available until summer.</p>

<p>I got into UCSB, but not UC Davis, and then got an email about being an "exceptional applicant" from UCSD....I have no idea whats going on...haha</p>

<p>don't those stats seem a little low...?</p>

<p>jouraynalism it is clearly stated that these are the stats for the applicant pool, not the accepted students.</p>

<p>Again, that is an AVERAGE applicant pool, which most of the time doesn't mean anything and doesn't tend to reveal much about the overall quality of the students applying, and admitted. If a company has 50 employees and 1 CEO, and the 50 employees make $20,000 a year while the CEO makes $4million a year, the AVERAGE salary of the company would be $98,039. Clearly, that doesn't reveal anything about the company, and statistics like the ones mentioned don't necessarily mean that one college is worse than another. Right now, once can argue that rankings in USNews are baseless, but until there is a more accurate ranking system, there is no alternative. </p>

<p>Interestingly enough, the admissions data shows that the AVERAGE HS GPA of students admitted to UCSB is slightly (.01 slightly) higher than Davis OR UCI. Irvine admitted students had, however, a slightly higher SAT score than both other schools. The admissions alone hardly prove a good school. U Michigan AA has an impressively high 33% acceptance rate, and it's ranked comparably to UCLA. Johns Hopkins is ranked 13th in the nation, but it's admissions is also 25~33%, depending on when an applicant applied. These rankings are virtually indisputable, and yet, oddly enough, their admissions standards don't seem to reflect the high quality of education at these schools ;)</p>

<p>well i think the acceptance percentages are out of how many people apply to a particular UC. Let's say out of 10,000 people who applied to UCSB and only 3,600 get in, the percentage rate is really high. Now if 45,000 people apply to UCI and 3,600 people get in, the the percentage rate is really low. The same amount of people get in, but it's just a matter of how many people actually applied. Secondly, i don't think that the acceptance rates of UCSB of UCI is a fair representation of how competitive or how good a school really is. I just think they are mere facts. Because if you think about it, I've read that the acceptance rate of CAL POLY San Louis Obispo is about the same as UCSD--45%. That doesn't mean CAL POLY isn't as good as UCSD. (Not saying that CAL POLY is bad or anything)</p>

<p>UCSB cannot control who submits an application to its school. The only thing that is of substance is the quality of the admitted students, and even more importantly, those who matriculate to the school, for these are the students who are actually at UCSB.</p>

<p>that's true. In the case of UCI vs UCSB the mean GPA's of students admitted to both schools are 3.65--so i'm guessing that the quality of students are about the same right? I'm not sure =/
but I'm kind of wanting to go to UCSB just because it seems more "well-rounded" with both education and college experience....except that UCSB has less of a rep then UCI..im still undecided i guess.</p>

<p>^Is there a special reason why you can't go visit to see in person which environment you like better? There is just no substitute for being there. Do you have friends who go to SB and UCI you could stay with? Your decision will be easy once you have done this.</p>

<p>Yeah that's true. I'm going this spring break. =)
does anyone have any personal preference though that i could maybe compare my decisions to? </p>

<p>-thnx for the help too</p>

<p>I was not seriously considering UCSB until I visited and talked with the students there. When I compared my UCSB visit to all my other visits, I realized what was most important between the schools I was looking at was how I felt emotionally about the school, the intangibles ... could I see myself enjoying life at the school, could I see myself walking (in UCSB's case, biking) to class here, could I see myself with my future classmates at Commencement in front of my family? Would I be proud to tell people I graduated from this school? Could I donate money back to this school, can I see my name on a building?
UCI and UCSB are very comparable schools academically, considering there are over 300 schools on the doctoral rankings and many more competitive schools on different rankings. So I think visiting these school should help you figure out the intangibles of each, and which of these is are most important and are a better fit for you overall.</p>

<p>yeah...i'll be goingg to make a visit</p>