I can see where Maria was coming from. We did the same thing - last year my kid applied to all reaches, no safeties, using the second tier UCs as safeties (UCSB, UCI, UCSD, UCD) which in retrospect now is pretty laughable. In my kid’s case though he was perfectly willing to go to CC if none came through. Luckily his main choice came through. I think there are lot more parents and kids that do this than you think. I doubt if my kid’s GC offered him any advice whatsoever on where to apply and where not to apply.
A guidance counselor should have told this kid he needed some more attainable schools on his list. And Medina did, in the comments, say that she wished the guidance counselor had warned that UCs were so competitive. But who knows whether the counselor did warn the kid, and he didn’t pay attention? The ultimate responsibility is on parent and child.
“last year my kid applied to all reaches, no safeties, using the second tier UCs as safeties (UCSB, UCI, UCSD, UCD) which in retrospect now is pretty laughable”
At the senior parent college info evening at D19’s high school (with copies of presentations on school website for those who couldn’t attend) one of the first things the GC presenting said was “NO UCs should be considered safeties anymore”.
UC Merced and UC Riverside have been looked down on, but I suspect in the next ten years that will change.
I think that’s exactly what happens.
None the less, I am still dumbfounded that some people don’t take the time to check and see if things might have changed at all in the interim 20 years or so since they attended college. It’s not like this stuff (costs, acceptance rates etc…) doesn’t cycle through the news periodically.
Most people understand that the drug that grandma took to control her high blood pressure in 1965 might no longer be the best practice in 2019. Most people do some research to make sure that the radical mastectomy which their mom got in 1980 might not be the current standard treatment, especially for a stage 1 tumor. They do some homework.
I know people who have done more research about which phone to buy- a thousand dollar purchase- than they do about college costs for their kids. They have done more homework about their big screen TV, upgrading their cellular plan, or even where to eat dinner (multiple yelp’s, instagrams, etc. and THEN the Groupon search for a discount) than they do homework on their retirement plan at work. I know my company has to beg people to actually read the details of the plan before they opt out of participating (hint- it’s FREE money).
I have no answers for this conundrum. Except that some people don’t want actual facts clouding their brains, and the idea that college is much more expensive and more competitive to get into than it was in their day is either so terrifying or so snore inducing that they’d rather go back to watching You-Tube videos on how to do a proper french braid or use contour makeup.
No words.
You don’t know what you don’t know. A first gen single mom, with a kid in what I’m guessing to be a middling to poor high school, sees her kid getting straight As. She thinks, good students go to top schools. She thinks, my kid is a great student, for sure he’ll get into UC Santa Cruz. She doesn’t realize there are lots of good students who want to go to Santa Cruz and they all can’t get in. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and there are many parents just like her.
They did research schools. They visited, they figured out what schools had the program the kid wanted, he applied. They didn’t know to look at acceptance rates and profiles of accepted students to see whether the kid had a chance. I think the crucial error was to look at Santa Cruz, see it accepted about half of applicants last year, and not realize that the engineering school was much more competitive. I’ve been trying to figure out last year’s acceptance rate for Santa Cruz’s undergraduate engineering school, and despite my Google fu, I haven’t been able to do it. So I don’t blame another parent for not doing it.
@blossom Cynical, but unfortunately true…
“My son shot high, and he only shot high. Because we were so blindly confident in his academic success and commitment, we didn’t think about applying to colleges that we knew he’d definitely have a chance of getting into.”
Reading the last sentence, one could reasonably infer that she knew getting into the schools he applied to wasn’t a
fore gone conclusion.
^ That’s true but if you read the whole thing, she apparently thought he’d get into Santa Cruz and was surprised he didn’t. “We thought he’d get into UC Santa Cruz, no problem. It has a 47.7% acceptance rate.” Her mistake was believing he’d get into Santa Cruz, no problem. The average Math SAT of this year’s enrolled class at Baskin, the engineering school at Santa Cruz, was 700; the average for an accepted student was probably higher. I don’t know what “average” SAT scores are, but I’m willing to be it’s not close to a 700 Math SAT. The kid was shooting high for Santa Cruz, and MIT and Berkeley were out of the question, and he did not know this.
What state school would have been a good safety for him, for computer science? I’m guessing he’d be competitive, but by no means a shoo-in, at San Jose State.
@“Cardinal Fang”: SJSU’s Eligibility index for CS this year was 4675 so a UC capped weighted GPA of 4.17 would require a minimum SAT score 1339 to be competitive.
I wouldn’t have counted on our guidance counselor to give us any advice on college choices. He didn’t even know what Naviance is.
It’s not the GC. This is a reporter? How could she not have researched the colleges and associated factors? Yes the schools she chose engage in wholistic selection but one look at any site about college should have told her that her kid lacked credentials for those schools. What’s with this notion that everyone deserves to be in these very selective schools? There must be something in the water that has convinced everyone their kid belongs among the strongest students in the world (in contrast to everyone else these people know). Talk about widespread superiority complex. Is there a vaccine for that?
GCs dont even see California state school apps.
@lostaccount makes a good point. This is a reporter. This is not someone who is uneducated, unsophisticated or who struggles with English. It takes very, very little research to find out that you need reaches, matches and safeties and to figure out which school falls into which category for you. Either the GC was at least semi-decent and told them that or it should have been apparent that they were getting very little help or information from the GC. In that case, even if they didn’t know what they didn’t know, the need to look elsewhere for information should have been obvious.