Terrible dysfunction at UC administration

[Anonymous]

The T20-T50s can mess up all they want, they have hoards of parents and kids obsessed with rankings that are clamoring to go there and will put up with all sorts of nonsense for the 'prestige'.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:UCs are not worth it for undergraduate studies. With tens of thousands of students, you are a number to the administration and faculty. You will not get access to research and you will be taught by research assistants not professors. If this is the experience you want for your kid, and willing to pay $70,000 a year, then fine and accept the situation.

Not just here in the U.S. but globally, the UC system is perceived as the gold standard for U.S. public education, and by a large margin. After UCLA and Cal, the drop-off to Michigan, Texas, Washington, UNC, UVA, and Florida is significant (especially globally). Everything else you said is reflective of the experience for a very small group of students who failed to do their part in pursuing the ample opportunities available to everyone in the UCs.

I take issue with this. The UC schools have an excellent reputation for post graduate research. Very few of the hundreds of thousands of students attending a UC have anything to do with this research.

PP here. I have EXTENSIVE personal experience over the past 25 years at one of the top UC campuses, with dual appointment on the clinical side. Across multiple labs, I have personally supervised junior faculty, postdocs, project scientists, grad students, and yes, dozens of undergrad students.

Most of my colleagues staff their labs the same way, with undergrad students forming an essential layer of research assistance. Lab manager, no. But not a year has passed where I didn’t have at least 4-5 undergrad students working in my labels throughout the year.

You appear to have limited knowledge of the subject matter.

A whole 4 to 5 out of how many undergrads? I didn’t say no undergrad students worked in labs only most don’t. Assume a thousand undergrad students work in labs at ucla in any given year. We can even assume 2000, although that’s unlikely. It would still be the case that more than 90 percent of ucla undergrads aren’t working on such research.

Exactly right.

4 to 5 students says nothing. How many applications were there? How many kids want to do research but are turned away?

Ironic that the researcher with "EXTENSIVE personal experience" doesn't have the data analysis skills to realize how stupid their argument is. (And this person is supervising faculty, postdocs, and scientists!)

4-5 undergrads per year, on average, in one of perhaps 120 - 140 labs like mine. You and the prior poster also assume that 100% of the undergraduates at a top public like Cal or UCLA have academic or professional interests that would even benefit from research experience. Given the foregoing, I’ll defer editorializing on the quality of your response.

People outside California are consumed by taking shots at the UC system. I understand that many seniors are undercut by rejection letters from UC schools every year. I understand that these rejections often lead to sudden declarations like “I wouldn’t let my child attend a UC if you paid me!”.

But make no mistake: not a single parent of a child who gets a UC golden ticket shares that sudden disdain for the system. It just doesn’t exist. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.

So who broke your kid’s heart? Cal? UCLA? UCSD? UCI? UCSB? UCD?

(Imagine having six of the Top 15 public institutions in the U.S. in one system?!)

So by your calculation, 700 kids out of 32,000. The opposite of impressive.

Look, your agenda is clear. In addition to that, you appear to lack the ability to understand that 550 - 700 undergrads in research lab settings in a School of Medicine does NOT represent the only research opportunities - not by a long shot - available to students at what has been a Top 1 or Top 2 public institution for the past several decades.

There are clinical settings, others schools and departments within the university, and collaborations with research and clinical partners outside the various schools that expand the opportunity footprint considerably. Are there slots for all in graduate students? Of course not. It’s a competitive staffing process, but much less competitive than the process these students faced in getting here.

The research dollars flowing into this kind of school is massive. As in, there are less than two handfuls of institutions in the nation with more research funding. And it grows year after year, I guess much to your consternation.

Look, if you cannot overcome your resentment because your kid received an unwelcome surprise in March, it’s really time to get over it.

Are you representing the point of view of a researcher at a UC or of the experience of an undergraduate student at a UC? They might yield very different perspectives.

The former, and perhaps you raise a worthwhile point. I'll simply say in response that if an undergraduate student is bright, has a plan (for grad school, etc.), and is willing to put in work, there are ample opportunities to acquire the research experience in furtherance of that plan. There just is. Anyone trying to sideswipe the UC system as lacking in these opportunities is intentionally distorting the facts.