<p>I mean...it's the same application. Why wouldn't people just click Berkeley as well?</p>
<p>I would imagine UC Berkeley would've been the most popular because it's the flagship UC and the consensus "best" UC.</p>
<p>Probably because more people live near LA and want to stay there⊠UCB is still more selective because they enroll fewer students.</p>
<p>Yeah butâŠitâs not like 90% of Californians live in Southern California lol.</p>
<p>Eh, the difference between the number of undergrads at UC Berkeley and UCLA are marginal. I believe both enroll around ~10,000 with a difference of maybe 1,000-2,000. Itâs not drastically different like Harvard or something.</p>
<p>Cal is more self-selecting. Average students apply to UCLA as a reach, whereas because Cal is seen as the flagship institution, the truly average students donât even bother applying.</p>
<p>Okay, UCB doesnât enroll significantly fewer students, but accepts fewer applicant because admits are more likely to accept their offer.</p>
<p>I agree with college 2013. Some of my friends didnât bother with UCB for that reason. Maybe some applicants see UCLA as a school that has accepted more âaverageâ applicants in the past?</p>
<p>Southern California has a great appeal: the sun, the beaches, the smog, oops, I mean the blue skies.</p>
<p>I see a trend of students who self select out of applying to Berkeley because they think they wouldnât have a chance. The reality is UCLA is more focused on academics whereas Berkeley is more focused on balanced academics and extracurriculars. Students are missing out when they donât apply to Berkeley.</p>
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<p>Thatâs not quite true. In 2008, UCLA had 50,757 (freshman) applicants to Berkeleyâs 44,155 and accepted 11,973 to Berkeleyâs 12,649. In 2009, UCLA had 55,431 applicants to Berkeleyâs 48,478 and accepted 12,667 to Berkeleyâs 12,689.</p>
<p>UC Statfinder only has data going back to 2001, and UCLA has only admitted more students twice since then, with lower admit rates every single year.</p>
<p>I like how that one poster posted âsimple factâ and âhonest opinionâ in the same sentence.</p>
<p>Simple fact: it is my honest opinion that I am the greatest being to have ever graced this world</p>
<p>it can be for quite a few reasons:
- people donât want to live in the bay
- people havenât HEARD of berkeley
- since more people live in socal, the institutions in socal simply have more applicants (wasnât UCSDs applicant number higher than Calâs this year too?)</p>
<p>i doubt it has to do with berkeley being this legendary school. For the people who pay for applications (i got mine for free) thereâs little reason of paying an extra $40 if you canât reasonably see yourself going to school there (or havenât heard of it) thatâs my idea anyway.</p>
<p>Haha, i just tried to write a 4 paragraph post explaining âobjectivelyâ why UCLA is âdifferentâ from Cal, but i just canâtâŠ</p>
<p>GO CAL!!! GO BEARS!!! #1!!!</p>
<p>=)</p>
<p>
I am pretty sure this is false for 95+% of UC applicants.</p>
<p>Because LA is more appealing to most people</p>
<p>yeah, people want to go to the Hollywood school rather than the âfamed for engineeringâ school.</p>
<p>UCLA is closer to the Playboy mansion:)</p>
<p>id be first to admit, i never thought of UC Berkeley as a good school until i toured the campus. being from socal, i heard all the time about UCLA and USC, and how those two are some of the best universities in the world. so when i got accepted to UCLA, i was pretty sure i wanted to go there. of course, until i went on a tour at Cal. chose cal of course, and it was perhaps one of the best decisions i have ever made.</p>
<p>local distortion certainly happens - the better schools near where you live are so often mentioned over the years that they assume a kind of inflated reputation compared to more distant ones. Someone who lives in the midwest is going to hear a school like Chicago mentioned as a most desirable place, with high prestige attached to locals who attend, but it is not only the schools that are in the top 30 or 50 nationwide, but every school down the hierarchy in that area that gets a kind of brand boost in the local consciousness. If you are in the mid atlantic region, UVa looms larger than elsewhere. Down in Oklahoma or Texas, a different set of nearby schools are distorted. I deliberately chose examples that are defensibly quite good even without the bias of nearness. </p>
<p>Now, take a mid tier UC and we from California are going to see it in a stronger light than someone from the east coast, who instead have heard of their own institutions of roughly similar objective ranking, while we might barely know the name. Is the Stonybrook campus the flagship of SUNY or low in that hierarchy? Is it regarded higher or lower than the flagship Rutgers of next door New Jersey? A local would have a very good sense of those answers, those further away would not. Internationally, even more so. What is the most prestigious, Oxford or Cambridge in the UK? What are the top two or three universities in Japan? What is a top university in Australia? </p>
<p>This even extends to the nocal/socal divide - someone from northern Cal is going to tend to know the nearby campuses more than the far ones like Irvine, ignoring UCLA and to a slightly lesser extent SD, while a socal student may not think much about SC or Davis. SB, straddling the areas, maybe is the exception. </p>
<p>It is not surprising that someone from socal would recognize the brand powerhouses in their area, just as those from nocal would know Cal, Stanford and the like.</p>
<p>Cal receives more apps from internationals and those OOS (which makes comparisons of yield meaningless). Thus, UCLAâs big app boost is instate. I can only guess that the biggest reason for that is location, location, location. Weather. Beaches. No grittiness. More people live in the lower half of the state, making LA âclose-to-homeâ. More people live within âcommutingâ distance of Westwood. Also, UCLA has a rep in in the Southland of being more balanced, more âfunâ, i.e., sports and social activities are more prominent part of undergraduate live in LA than they are in Berkeley. (I donât believe that to be true, but I think high schoolers do.)</p>
<p>I think many high schoolers in California are more convinced that they have a much bigger shot in getting into UCLA than Cal. Itâs sort of a mentality amongst Cali students that UCLA is much easier to get into than Cal.</p>
<p>A lot of people do not care for the location of Berkeley. UCLA is in a much better neighborhood and the weather is also better. I havenât heard of anyone applying to UCLA over Cal because they thought they were more likely to get in (or because they were average).</p>