How the hell does anyone in California get into college?

[Anonymous]

should have gone to a lower SES school, especially a URM one

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is how most of the kids view the UC schools:
Tier 1. UCLA, UC Berkeley
Tier 2. UCI, UCSD
Tier 3. UCSB, UC Davis, (Cal Poly SLO falls here too)
Tier 4. UCR, UCSC
Tier 5. UCM (Automatic admission)

Minimum GPA for UCs - 3.0
Minimum GPA for CSUs - 2.5

UC GPA - Only includes 10th and 11th grade. 9th grade is ignored.

This is right. Also when UCs calculate your GPA, not only do they only count Grades 10/11 (not 9) they also only cap "bonus points" (for AP/IB or College-level courses) up to 8. So you don't get unlimited weighting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone talks about how competitive the DMV area is, but it's even worse in California. In the Bay Area, every large high school is just as competitive as Langley or McLean in NOVA. Everyone is taking 15+ AP classes and getting 5s on the scores. Teachers refuse to give out As. Sports teams are impossible to join. Extracurriculars are impossible to stand out. Everyone is doing research, starting non-profits, winning chess tournaments, and doing other niche extracurriculars. And it sucks too because high schools in LA, Orange County, and San Diego are also brutally competitive and cutthroat. It's why someone with straight As in California can get denied from UC Riverside.

UC Riverside accepts 75% of in-state applicants.

Of course, yes someone is part of the 25%...seems hard to believe it is a straight A student taking tons of APs.

At my high school, I was not even in the top 40% despite having straight As in 12 APs

That is grade inflation.

It's not grade inflation. The weighted GPA sets the rank. The schools are filled with large numbers of extremely competitive students and teachers in advanced classes are handing out only a small amounts of A's. The situations in normal and easier lanes are different stories.

[Anonymous]

Private high school in CA is the way to go to get into great colleges! The courses are very rigorous and it's hard to get in.

Here's the matriculation page for my daughter's private HS. There are about 100-ish of the 150 person class listed so far:

https://www.instagram.com/lick25decisions/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The UC's admit by high school. So a low performing high school in the ghetto will get as many acceptances as a high performing one.

The trick is to be in one of these school.

University High in Irvine is treated the same as Dominguez High in Compton. University High has 30 plus SAT NMSF, 100 Commended scholars. Dominguez High has zero.

Dominguez High sends the same amount of students to Berkeley and UCLA as does University High.

Honey, you shouldn't say things that are easily proven wrong. Dominguez High had 14 admitted to Berkeley and UCLA. University High had 55.

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

Dominguez High has 1,600 students Dominguez High has 0 NMSF finalists and 0 Commended.
University High has 2,363 student. University High has 33 NMSF finalists, 102 Commended

Keep dreaming if you think their applications are being treated equally.

Dominguez High
Berkeley
21 Applied
6 Accepted
28% acceptance rate
UCLA
72 Applied
7 Accepted
7 Enrolled


University High
Berkeley
266 Applied
31 Accepted
14 Enrolled
11% acceptance rate

294 Applied
24 Accepted
12 Enrolled

For Berkeley at University High 11.3% of the school applied compared to 1.31% at Dominguez High. If you assume only 25% could apply that something like 45% of the seniors applied from University High vs 5.25% from Dominguez High. Let’s say Berkeley took the top 10% from each high school, you didn’t even get the top 10% of students applying from Dominguez High but may have had almost half the class from University High. I’m not sure what is meant by “treated equally” when you are comparing maybe half of the seniors class applying from one school (and clearly they aren’t all the top 5 -10% at their school) versus maybe 5% applying and it being from the top students at the school.

[Anonymous]

University High's student cohort is 100x stronger than Dominguez High, yet their outcome is crushed by the outcome of Dominguez High.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Everyone talks about how competitive the DMV area is, but it's even worse in California. In the Bay Area, every large high school is just as competitive as Langley or McLean in NOVA. Everyone is taking 15+ AP classes and getting 5s on the scores. Teachers refuse to give out As. Sports teams are impossible to join. Extracurriculars are impossible to stand out. Everyone is doing research, starting non-profits, winning chess tournaments, and doing other niche extracurriculars. And it sucks too because high schools in LA, Orange County, and San Diego are also brutally competitive and cutthroat. It's why someone with straight As in California can get denied from UC Riverside.

These kids cannot apply to popular majors, mist do quirky things to stand out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Private high school in CA is the way to go to get into great colleges! The courses are very rigorous and it's hard to get in.

Here's the matriculation page for my daughter's private HS. There are about 100-ish of the 150 person class listed so far:

https://www.instagram.com/lick25decisions/

Do you know if all the “undecideds” applied that way (doubtful) or perhaps applied to super undersubscribed majors instead? The latter happens at our private, though everyone lists “undecided”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Everyone talks about how competitive the DMV area is, but it's even worse in California. In the Bay Area, every large high school is just as competitive as Langley or McLean in NOVA. Everyone is taking 15+ AP classes and getting 5s on the scores. Teachers refuse to give out As. Sports teams are impossible to join. Extracurriculars are impossible to stand out. Everyone is doing research, starting non-profits, winning chess tournaments, and doing other niche extracurriculars. And it sucks too because high schools in LA, Orange County, and San Diego are also brutally competitive and cutthroat. It's why someone with straight As in California can get denied from UC Riverside.

Yup, dime a dozen

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The UC's admit by high school. So a low performing high school in the ghetto will get as many acceptances as a high performing one.

The trick is to be in one of these school.

University High in Irvine is treated the same as Dominguez High in Compton. University High has 30 plus SAT NMSF, 100 Commended scholars. Dominguez High has zero.

Dominguez High sends the same amount of students to Berkeley and UCLA as does University High.

Honey, you shouldn't say things that are easily proven wrong. Dominguez High had 14 admitted to Berkeley and UCLA. University High had 55.

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

Dominguez High has 1,600 students Dominguez High has 0 NMSF finalists and 0 Commended.
University High has 2,363 student. University High has 33 NMSF finalists, 102 Commended

Keep dreaming if you think their applications are being treated equally.

Dominguez High
Berkeley
21 Applied
6 Accepted
28% acceptance rate
UCLA
72 Applied
7 Accepted
7 Enrolled


University High
Berkeley
266 Applied
31 Accepted
14 Enrolled
11% acceptance rate

294 Applied
24 Accepted
12 Enrolled

What majors do they apply to?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The UC's admit by high school. So a low performing high school in the ghetto will get as many acceptances as a high performing one.

The trick is to be in one of these school.

University High in Irvine is treated the same as Dominguez High in Compton. University High has 30 plus SAT NMSF, 100 Commended scholars. Dominguez High has zero.

Dominguez High sends the same amount of students to Berkeley and UCLA as does University High.

You're absolutely right and the data shows it. "In San Francisco, students at Mission High, a public school with a large population of students who are economically disadvantaged or come from marginalized communities, had a higher acceptance rate for UC Berkeley than any other public or private high school in the city, the UC data shows. Of the 78 Mission High students who applied to UC Berkeley this year, 29 were admitted, amounting to a 37% acceptance rate."

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/calif-high-schools-surpassed-elite-schools-uc-20258305.php?utm_campaign=CMS%20Sharing%20Tools%20(Premium)&utm_source=share-by-email&utm_medium=email

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Private high school in CA is the way to go to get into great colleges! The courses are very rigorous and it's hard to get in.

Here's the matriculation page for my daughter's private HS. There are about 100-ish of the 150 person class listed so far:

https://www.instagram.com/lick25decisions/

Do you know if all the “undecideds” applied that way (doubtful) or perhaps applied to super undersubscribed majors instead? The latter happens at our private, though everyone lists “undecided”

NP. That “(doubtful)” is weird.

The admits with “Undecided”s are at schools — Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Penn, etc. — where you apply to the school as a whole, not to a major. So it’s reasonable that they’d say “Undecided” there. In fact, I’d bet that a lot of the majors that are listed there aren’t formal declarations as much as they’re just a note saying “off to study X!”

[Anonymous]

For those touting the Community college route, admission is not guaranteed for popular majors like CS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone talks about how competitive the DMV area is, but it's even worse in California. In the Bay Area, every large high school is just as competitive as Langley or McLean in NOVA. Everyone is taking 15+ AP classes and getting 5s on the scores. Teachers refuse to give out As. Sports teams are impossible to join. Extracurriculars are impossible to stand out. Everyone is doing research, starting non-profits, winning chess tournaments, and doing other niche extracurriculars. And it sucks too because high schools in LA, Orange County, and San Diego are also brutally competitive and cutthroat. It's why someone with straight As in California can get denied from UC Riverside.

The rest of the schools in California are really, really low quality. Like absurdly low quality for a state this wealthy. Their teacher unions are a huge part of it, along with their focus on nonsense.

I taught in southern California at several schools in a "good" school district and had kids in northern California in another "good" district. The school quality was so bad compared to even the low and middling schools in northern Virginia.

The best CA public schools are world class. The worst are also world class in the other direction. Money means everything in CA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Florida's test scores outperform California's. Let that sink in.

I think Mississippi outperforms California as well.

That is far from true.