How the hell does anyone in California get into college?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OOS welcomes CA students. Purdue, UIUC, CMU, UM take a lot of CA students.

Isn’t it much more expensive though? ESP compared to living at home and attending a UC or CSU.

Yes, which is why the yield sucks for OOS students. Many admits, few enrollees.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UCs, Cal in particular, absolutely engage in social engineering. It’s very common to see kids in the top 5%, best ECs skipped over for someone in the top 20% because they meet a racial or socioeconomic institutional goal. UCs are not only test optional but they do not accept letters of reference from counselors or teachers. There is no verification of what you report on your app for admissions other than transcript and AP scores after you are accepted. You only have to report your AP score if you plan to use it for credit. This opens the door to massive cheating on ECs, awards, community engagement, where/if your parents went to school etc. UCs do not care if lie.

The above is flat out false and easy to see if you have access to your schools data.

If you are at a good public or private your first hurdle for a top UC is being 'local' ELC (top 9% in your school). If you do not achieve this your chance of getting in drops dramatically. You don't have to add it anywhere, your school is required to compute and report it. It will be on your UC app for all to see. This is a big hurdle at really competitive schools which is why so many get shut out. After that you will also be assigned a ranking based on the zip code/census tract where you live to score your socioeconomic level so poor kids going to a catholic school on financial aid will have the advantage of a good education along with being recognized as poor. This will give you a shot if you are outside of local ELC (i.e. getting state ELC which is top 9% in the state).

When it all shakes out there is nothing surprising at a top school; the kids with top GPAs and test scores (even though they aren't seen) end up with really good chances of getting in (at my kids school you could see that above a 1530 and 4.5 it was about 75% for both UCB and UCLA) but for everyone else it was about 8%.

The starting point for every school is ELC and for somewhere like Lynnbrook where 350+ kids apply and only 40 are ELC about 40-45 get in. At Mission San Francisco probably every kid that applied was ELC as well. The difference is that few non-ELC kids applied.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Folsom High in Folsom CA is middle class, mostly white and Asian and has 637 seniors. 42% met or exceeded California's math standards. Grant High School is low income, mostly Black and Hispanic and has 410 seniors. 13% of the students met or exceeded California's math standards.

UCLA
Folsom:
119 applied, 9 admitted
Grant:
27 applied, 6 admitted

So, it sounds like 1.4% of the graduates in both schools were accepted to a UC. My read on that is that UCLA purposely tries to accept the top students from all schools, and this is irregardless of the school’s overall socioeconomic status. I’m not sure if there is anything surprising here, but is that the point you were trying to make?

And to correct, my post above. This seems to be the case for public schools. At least in DC’s case, the well-regarded privates gain acceptances at a much higher (~10 pct rate.

No they don’t and that is easily verified. For top public and private High Schools UCB and UCLA admissions tend to follow the overall acceptance rate for the UC. May be a couple of points above or below in any given year but there isn’t much variability.

It is fairly verifiable, and I stick by my original post. Also note that I said % of total student population NOT the percent accepted from those who chose to apply. The question being tested is how selective they are compared to the total graduating class, and the applicant pool is less relevant in that case. Here is an example:

Per the UC website for Lick Wilmerding applicants to UCLA — 101 applied, 13 admitted, and 6 chose to enroll. Lick’s class size is roughly 140, so that is an admit rate of ~10% of the total class or 13% of applicants accepted. College Prep, Head Royce, Nueva, etc all have some rough version of the same math with the only real difference being how selective the STUDENTS were on applying to a top UC.

Finally, I looked at Mission HS in SF too since that often gets thrown out since the Chronicle ran article on them. For UCLA, they had 7 of 56 applicants accepted (13%), but they also have 260 in their graduating class (~3% of class admitted). In fairness though, 3% is still quite strong, and they do remarkably well when looking at UCB.

Below is the UC database, and you can run this as you desire. Bottom line is that they seem to be aiming to admit the top students in the school…..not the top students in the overall in applicant pool.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-source-school

I can see what you are trying to say and we are in agreement. The key piece for any student in top UC admissions is being ELC (top 9% at your school). If you are coming from Lick or any of the other schools that you mentioned and you are not ELC you have a very small chance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think we are largely saying the same thing. The top tier UCs have a quota by high school with the goal of admitting the best students irregardless of socioeconomic status. I personally agree with this approach — even if it might personally disadvantage DC. Our left leaning policies is one of the prime reasons that I live where I do.

Can you share a link where they say there’s a “quota?”

I have asked UCLA this and they said NO.

If you look at the historical admissions from each high school, you will see the quota. It is not necessarily a bad thing- admit by high school, not an entire applicant pool. The UC's know the high schools and know how many they will take from each, each year.

The number one rule for UC admission: You compete against your high school classmates, not against the broader applicant pool. Pre-covid this was seen in the SAT scores of the colleges. UC's had very average SAT scores, for example UCI's 25th percentile SAT score was below 1100. Even UCLA had 25% of its class in the 1200's.

I don't begrudge this policy choice even though much more accomplished students are rejected as compared to others.

How is this possible if you don't submit SAT scores for the UCs?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Getting into a UC not named UC Merced or Riverside is not that hard.

Generally don't suck and be in or near the top 10% of your class, participate in your school's community, show you are a decent human being and you'll get into one of them. Will it be Berkeley or UCLA? That's the crapshoot, but you will get into one of them.

Admission's statistics are available for every high school in the country. It isn't impossible or frankly even that hard because of all the UC's.

You say it isn’t that hard but then also say you have to be in the top 10% of the class which means it is hard to get in particularly at schools with a lot of high achieving kids. UW 3.9 GPA DC with ECs including significant volunteer work applying for a psychology major didn’t get into any UC except Merced nor did several of her friends get into UCs other than Merced or Riverside as well as few who got UCSC.

The top 10% at schools like Lynbrook and Cupertino would eat TJ kids as snacks. Every day is a pressure cooker.

https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1743439230/fuhsdorg/owmxetiqoxllgcphfxmi/CHS24-25SchoolProfile.pdf - 15% of Cupertino grads are going to a CC. That’s pretty interesting. The other thing that stood out to me is that the average class size is over 32 students!

My husband’s alma mater, Westlake High School, sends 40% of its students to CC. It’s is not as super extremely competitive of place as Cupertino or some of the other public HSs in the Bay Area, but definitely a VERY nice, upper middle class area and highly ranked school.

The stigma just isn’t there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The UC system is supposed to take anyone with above a 3.0. Prior to the creation of Merced, it was failing at that. Merced was set up to help those qualified students without tippy top statistics, particularly from the Central Valley — and it has done an exceptional job of educating those students. So, yeah. If your goal is to get into UCLA or Berkeley straight out of high school, it is hard to do so but that’s not that different from many other in state flagships.

And, California’s higher ex system includes and is bolstered by the Cal States and their excellent community college system, which helps fill the gaps for students who don’t want to or can’t attend a research school. There’s still stigma around community college but they are far more affordable and Gen Z is particularly mindful of that.

If I were a high school student there are worse places to live than California.

Not true that UC system is supposed to take anyone with above a 3.0. Their mission is to take the top 12% of California students. Cal States are for the top 33%. And Community colleges are for everyone. UC's have a goal to take one transfer student for every 2 freshman with priority given to CA community college students. Just because you have a 3.1 does not mean you will get admitted to any UC.

It is hard to compare a school that people have posted about called Lick whose tuition they post online is over $60,000 and it is NOT a boarding school. My kids public high school of 1,000 students does NOT offer AP Biology, Ap Chemistry, AP Physics 2, AP Physics Mechanics or AP Physics EM. There is no music offered. If you want to take a music class you have to go to another high school and it is up to the student or parent to transport themselves there and back. Almost all students have to take Math 1 as a 9th grader, Math 2 as a 10th grader, Math 3 as an 11th grader then get to calculus senior year. Class sizes in AP classes are often 40 or more students. The AVERAGE class size in our district for high school is set at 36. So the school tends to put 39-42 students in honors / AP classes and around 30-32 on on level classes. One of my kids took APUSH with 43 students in total. There were not even enough chairs in the room. A couple of students volunteered to be rovers and sit in chairs where the assigned students were absent. If everyone showed up someone volunteered to stand. This is at a middle to upper middle class school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Community college is free in California. Many, many intelligent kids opt there first because it makes sense and has guaranteed transfer programs.

But really, I don't know anyone who's been shut out of all UCs and CSUs they applied to.

Does CA have academically more-rigorous community colleges to accommodate those high performing students?

DP. I don’t think students look for academic rigor there. They want to get their As and transfer to a decent school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Community college is free in California. Many, many intelligent kids opt there first because it makes sense and has guaranteed transfer programs.

But really, I don't know anyone who's been shut out of all UCs and CSUs they applied to.

Does CA have academically more-rigorous community colleges to accommodate those high performing students?

DP. I don’t think students look for academic rigor there. They want to get their As and transfer to a decent school

Californian here. This is false. They want academic rigor because these kids generally want to hit the ground running at Cal or UCLA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Getting into a UC not named UC Merced or Riverside is not that hard.

Generally don't suck and be in or near the top 10% of your class, participate in your school's community, show you are a decent human being and you'll get into one of them. Will it be Berkeley or UCLA? That's the crapshoot, but you will get into one of them.

Admission's statistics are available for every high school in the country. It isn't impossible or frankly even that hard because of all the UC's.

You say it isn’t that hard but then also say you have to be in the top 10% of the class which means it is hard to get in particularly at schools with a lot of high achieving kids. UW 3.9 GPA DC with ECs including significant volunteer work applying for a psychology major didn’t get into any UC except Merced nor did several of her friends get into UCs other than Merced or Riverside as well as few who got UCSC.

The top 10% at schools like Lynbrook and Cupertino would eat TJ kids as snacks. Every day is a pressure cooker.

https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1743439230/fuhsdorg/owmxetiqoxllgcphfxmi/CHS24-25SchoolProfile.pdf - 15% of Cupertino grads are going to a CC. That’s pretty interesting. The other thing that stood out to me is that the average class size is over 32 students!

My husband’s alma mater, Westlake High School, sends 40% of its students to CC. It’s is not as super extremely competitive of place as Cupertino or some of the other public HSs in the Bay Area, but definitely a VERY nice, upper middle class area and highly ranked school.

The stigma just isn’t there.

They are going to feeder CC’s like Foothill which are loaded with kids TAPing into the UCs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UCs, Cal in particular, absolutely engage in social engineering. It’s very common to see kids in the top 5%, best ECs skipped over for someone in the top 20% because they meet a racial or socioeconomic institutional goal. UCs are not only test optional but they do not accept letters of reference from counselors or teachers. There is no verification of what you report on your app for admissions other than transcript and AP scores after you are accepted. You only have to report your AP score if you plan to use it for credit. This opens the door to massive cheating on ECs, awards, community engagement, where/if your parents went to school etc. UCs do not care if lie.

The above is flat out false and easy to see if you have access to your schools data.

If you are at a good public or private your first hurdle for a top UC is being 'local' ELC (top 9% in your school). If you do not achieve this your chance of getting in drops dramatically. You don't have to add it anywhere, your school is required to compute and report it. It will be on your UC app for all to see. This is a big hurdle at really competitive schools which is why so many get shut out. After that you will also be assigned a ranking based on the zip code/census tract where you live to score your socioeconomic level so poor kids going to a catholic school on financial aid will have the advantage of a good education along with being recognized as poor. This will give you a shot if you are outside of local ELC (i.e. getting state ELC which is top 9% in the state).

When it all shakes out there is nothing surprising at a top school; the kids with top GPAs and test scores (even though they aren't seen) end up with really good chances of getting in (at my kids school you could see that above a 1530 and 4.5 it was about 75% for both UCB and UCLA) but for everyone else it was about 8%.

The starting point for every school is ELC and for somewhere like Lynnbrook where 350+ kids apply and only 40 are ELC about 40-45 get in. At Mission San Francisco probably every kid that applied was ELC as well. The difference is that few non-ELC kids applied.

moron, the UC's are banned by law from even looking at SAT for admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Community college is free in California. Many, many intelligent kids opt there first because it makes sense and has guaranteed transfer programs.

But really, I don't know anyone who's been shut out of all UCs and CSUs they applied to.

Does CA have academically more-rigorous community colleges to accommodate those high performing students?

DP. I don’t think students look for academic rigor there. They want to get their As and transfer to a decent school

This is correct, they definitely aren’t more rigorous. They serve a broad range of students with no gatekeeping.

[Anonymous]

A good deal of California's community college classes are online, asynchronous. It is so bad that 20% of all students are fraudsters, some using AI.

There is no rigor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UCs, Cal in particular, absolutely engage in social engineering. It’s very common to see kids in the top 5%, best ECs skipped over for someone in the top 20% because they meet a racial or socioeconomic institutional goal. UCs are not only test optional but they do not accept letters of reference from counselors or teachers. There is no verification of what you report on your app for admissions other than transcript and AP scores after you are accepted. You only have to report your AP score if you plan to use it for credit. This opens the door to massive cheating on ECs, awards, community engagement, where/if your parents went to school etc. UCs do not care if lie.

The above is flat out false and easy to see if you have access to your schools data.

If you are at a good public or private your first hurdle for a top UC is being 'local' ELC (top 9% in your school). If you do not achieve this your chance of getting in drops dramatically. You don't have to add it anywhere, your school is required to compute and report it. It will be on your UC app for all to see. This is a big hurdle at really competitive schools which is why so many get shut out. After that you will also be assigned a ranking based on the zip code/census tract where you live to score your socioeconomic level so poor kids going to a catholic school on financial aid will have the advantage of a good education along with being recognized as poor. This will give you a shot if you are outside of local ELC (i.e. getting state ELC which is top 9% in the state).

When it all shakes out there is nothing surprising at a top school; the kids with top GPAs and test scores (even though they aren't seen) end up with really good chances of getting in (at my kids school you could see that above a 1530 and 4.5 it was about 75% for both UCB and UCLA) but for everyone else it was about 8%.

The starting point for every school is ELC and for somewhere like Lynnbrook where 350+ kids apply and only 40 are ELC about 40-45 get in. At Mission San Francisco probably every kid that applied was ELC as well. The difference is that few non-ELC kids applied.

so the game plan is to go to a school which allows a ton of 5.0 weighted courses (uc-approved honors, AP, de) relative to 4.0 weighted courses in order to maximize your weighted gpa, then transfer to a school that doesn't in your senior year so your GPA is impossibly high for that school's students, thus making your valedictorian or, if you underperformed at the first school, at least boosting your odds of ELC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Community college is free in California. Many, many intelligent kids opt there first because it makes sense and has guaranteed transfer programs.

But really, I don't know anyone who's been shut out of all UCs and CSUs they applied to.

Does CA have academically more-rigorous community colleges to accommodate those high performing students?

DP. I don’t think students look for academic rigor there. They want to get their As and transfer to a decent school

This is correct, they definitely aren’t more rigorous. They serve a broad range of students with no gatekeeping.

Community Colleges near prestigious universities (Caltech, Berkeley) sometimes have professors from the prestigious schools teach at the CC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Folsom High in Folsom CA is middle class, mostly white and Asian and has 637 seniors. 42% met or exceeded California's math standards. Grant High School is low income, mostly Black and Hispanic and has 410 seniors. 13% of the students met or exceeded California's math standards.

UCLA
Folsom:
119 applied, 9 admitted
Grant:
27 applied, 6 admitted

So, it sounds like 1.4% of the graduates in both schools were accepted to a UC. My read on that is that UCLA purposely tries to accept the top students from all schools, and this is irregardless of the school’s overall socioeconomic status. I’m not sure if there is anything surprising here, but is that the point you were trying to make?

Exactly. And yet in their mind the 45% of seniors that apply from a “high achieving” high school should ALL get in over the top students of an economically disadvantaged high school. If only 2 applied from the economically disadvantaged Hugh school and only 1 got into UCLA, could have been the valedictorian, they would say that’s a 50% acceptance rate from the school and absolute proof of a conspiracy to keep their kid out.

What’s crazy about all of this, is assuming it’s a real person, if they went to college in the US in the 90’s, either they went to a competitive college, that likely means you were the top whatever you needed to be back then, maybe 30% (or have the kind of money where that doesn’t matter) , OR you didn’t go to a competitive college and did just fine. I do sympathize that the issue might be even if the colleges took the top 10% from each high school what about the other 90% and what is affordable. The community college-transfer pipeline is strong in CA. You also have CSUs. If you have money you also have private colleges and public colleges in nearby states as an option.