[HN Gopher] How your high school affects your chances of UC Admi...
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How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission
Author : mutator
Score : 43 points
Date : 2026-01-08 06:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sfeducation.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfeducation.substack.com)
| chaostheory wrote:
| I thought this was old news. US universities have hard quotas per
| high school, so you'll have better chances of admission if you
| attend a poor performing school.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The article makes a more extreme claim: that quotas are not
| equal per school, but differ based on LCFF+ status.
| apparent wrote:
| The charts that show changes over time reveal that it is not
| old news. The change has been happening for a couple years, but
| before the last year or so it would have been impossible to
| show that it was a trend, not just a blip. And of course the
| UCSD faculty report on remedial math shined a spotlight on the
| issue.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is super interesting because I have kids who are trying to
| apply for the UC system.
|
| However nothing in this series mentioned anything about out-of-
| state admission so I'm curious if there's any data about that.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Not relevant for UC schools but flagship tier state schools
| love being able to say they have students from all 50 states so
| if you're from Wyoming, getting a scholarship to somewhere like
| South Carolina or Maine is going to be relatively easy.
| beckford wrote:
| > One reason is that far more of their students actually applied
| than would be expected.
|
| This sentence is buried midway through the article. It would be
| good for a future post to expand on this ... how much is
| explained by students simply applying more frequently to their
| local schools. This explanation was the only plausible
| explanation in the article I saw answer "why".
| w10-1 wrote:
| > students simply applying more frequently to their local
| schools
|
| Cheaper to live at home nowadays
| ransom1538 wrote:
| I knew this secret early on. The better your high school - the
| lower your odds of going to UC.
| anon291 wrote:
| I figured it out intuitively early on as well.
| ssttoo wrote:
| There's the weird incentive for schools to appear selective.
| That's why UCSD would rather reject great candidates because
| chances are they'll go to the likes of Harvard. Why accept
| candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere? Better to be the
| dumper than the dumpee and improve your rankings. It's awful.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's not about dumpee or dumper or rankings games.
|
| Admissions has to target a fixed number of students each year,
| plus or minus. Students have to decide where to attend in a
| narrow window. If you accept a lot of students who are unlikely
| to attend then you would undershoot your admissions target and
| have to try to convince students to attend in later rounds of
| admission, but that's too late because they've already decided
| to go somewhere else.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| If the acceptance rate wasn't being gamed, they could accept
| a lot more of the top candidates - they would have years of
| statistical data knowing that only x% of those top students
| will commit.
|
| It's not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will
| commit.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Why accept candidates that will ultimately go elsewhere?
|
| Idea: When you apply for a college, you have to prepay for the
| first semester. If you get admitted, you have already paid for
| the first semester. If you get rejected, you get this advance
| payment back. On the other hand, if you get admitted, but
| decide to go somewhere else, you loose money.
|
| This should give the university a strong incentive not to
| reject strong candidates that will go somewhere else - quite
| the opposite: if you admit such a candidate, but the candidate
| goes somewhere else, the university earns even more (the
| semester fee without having to provide any service for this
| money).
| renewiltord wrote:
| I read the book _SAT Wars_ and came away with a horrifying
| takeaway: admissions programs in US universities are creative
| enterprises for the person involved. One of them talks about
| "crafting a class".
|
| Getting into many of these places is a question of playing into
| your admissions officer's biases. Knowing that they're mostly
| liberal voters, often female, and nowadays more likely to be
| childless it's presumably important to match that person's
| energy.
|
| Someone who would otherwise be writing romance novels is now
| picking students. Hence the infamous essay of the accepted
| student that went "Black Lives Matter" x100
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-39492187
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| It's always been this way; previously we just had to play to
| the old white men's biases.
| cyberax wrote:
| Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.
| anon291 wrote:
| I mean contrary to the comment above this is how American
| universities used to be. They had standing exams... Show up
| on admission day, take a test, highest scores get
| admission. Easy
| smelendez wrote:
| That's not unbiased though. You still have the question of
| what's tested and how it's graded.
| smelendez wrote:
| Yeah, there's really no way around it when you have more
| qualified students than slots, unless you just mark each
| applicant as qualified or not and run a lottery.
|
| But they do have to "craft a class" to some extent. An
| obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are
| consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars,
| like marching bands or orchestras.
|
| And you also don't want a class that's all computer science
| majors or zero philosophy majors. I imagine they consider
| other factors as well. The admissions staff may be liberal,
| but I'm guessing at most schools they deliberately admit some
| outspoken conservatives.
| umanwizard wrote:
| No they don't "have" to do any of this as evidenced by the
| fact that the US is the only country where it happens. In
| most countries it would (rightly) be considered strange to
| care how good someone is at sports or marching band when
| evaluating their ability to study academic subjects (the
| actual purpose of a university).
| its_ethan wrote:
| That feels like a fairly narrow view of what the purpose
| of a university is.
|
| Look at the charter of any university and they do _not_
| just say: "create students who excel in their academic
| subject of choice".
|
| The vast, vast majority of higher education mission
| statements/charters include goals like: "helping students
| develop their identity", "pursuing meaning",
| "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives",
| "helping others", etc. etc. etc.
|
| Things like "can this person work on as a team (did they
| play sports?)" or "have they been a part of a community
| (like marching band?)" are hugely important for building
| a community at the university that can successfully
| achieve those mission statements.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > Look at the charter of any university
|
| _Any_ university in the world? Or any university in the
| very idiosyncratic US system?
|
| Again, nobody else does stuff like this, and their
| universities seem to be working fine.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. Lots of places just sort
| by grades or test scores. Part of the reason for the weird US
| system is the low ceiling: school is relatively easy compared
| to developed countries, so there are way too many people with
| identical scores at the top.
| RobRivera wrote:
| From School Ties' Brendan Frasiers character "Youre going to
| use me for football, Im going to use you to get into Harvard"
|
| Competitive admission hasn't really changed by nature
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I thought the UC system was supposed to admit students based
| strictly on their GPA and test scores to avoid weird types of
| admission discrimination? Is that not the case? The article
| mentions UCSD going "test blind" as a turning point for weighing
| the high school someone attended heavily.
| mikeryan wrote:
| No. They're no longer allowed to use race but can, and still
| consider a wide range of factors.
|
| They have to - it's likely they have far more applicants with
| near perfect GPA/Test score combos then they have spots.
| (Noting that your GPA gets fuzzy once it's over a 4.0 since
| that "extra" is going to be somewhat school and school system
| dependent)
|
| Since each kid likely applies to multiple schools the process
| would also be extremely broken if it worked the way you suggest
| since the same cohort of kids would all be accepted to multiple
| schools and the schools would then have to backfill from a
| alternate list - which would also be the same cohort of kids...
| apparent wrote:
| UC is indeed "test blind" and until this changes, their
| admissions system will remain fucked.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > The opaqueness of the whole process is what I find most
| objectionable.
|
| I also find that objectionable. However, recalling my own college
| admission process, I think we have collectively determined that
| this opaqueness is basically working as intended. We are now
| treating it as a rite passage that qualified high school students
| can be mysteriously rejected.
|
| I applied to 6 colleges (not counting those outside the United
| States), which would be considered an extremely low number today.
| I have colleagues who have kids applying to colleges right now so
| I know. Everyone is applying to more colleges just to counteract
| these seemingly random rejections.
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's an arms race. Now that students are encourage to apply to
| huge numbers of universities for safety, the universities are
| forced to accept a smaller percentage of applicants to avoid
| overcommitting.
|
| So student, parents, and counselors see this and tell everyone
| to apply to even more colleges and the cycle continues.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| UK caps applications to 5 to combat this exact problem.
| lateforwork wrote:
| The opaqueness is unique to USA and is thanks to "holistic
| reviews", which is a highly questionable practice.
|
| Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
| https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
|
| The new holistic admissions policy worked as intended,
| successfully suppressing Jewish admissions.
| https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
|
| The 'holistic' admissions lie - The Daily Californian
| https://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/01/the-holistic-admissions-...
|
| The False Promise of 'Holistic' College Admissions - The
| Atlantic
| https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/the-fa...
|
| Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of
| California, Berkeley
| https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
| blindriver wrote:
| Every school has increased tuition without substantially
| increasing the number of students. What you are seeing is that
| schools are getting thousands of students that are exactly the
| same which is why admissions is turning into a lottery system.
| It's basically like a CPU maxed out at 100%. There's nothing
| you can do except build more schools and increase the number of
| students otherwise it will continue to be a lottery.
| lateforwork wrote:
| See: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-
| co...
|
| Excerpts:
|
| UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in
| the context of their own schools and communities to assess how
| much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available
| opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at
| her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at
| a school that offered twice as many.
|
| A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the
| top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower
| class rank at a more high-achieving school.
| nine_k wrote:
| That is, they are biased towards _top_ performers, not just
| high performers, even if one student 's "merely high" is
| formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit.
|
| (The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high
| school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)
| xnyan wrote:
| You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers
| whose families did this with good results. The choice was:
| did they want to be in the best high school with the highest
| level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school
| that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample
| size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.
| SR2Z wrote:
| Once upon a time, the SAT an IQ test, and it was a real
| achievement to score a 1600. That achievement has been
| hollowed out in tandem with the value of most college
| degrees.
|
| We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this
| college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative
| action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the
| entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up.
|
| It's that even the tools we've used to use to measure if
| someone was _ready_ for college have been annihilated.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| The SAT was never an IQ test, and it certainly doesn't
| measure "merit", whatever that is. It's a Scholastic
| Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that
| either.
|
| If we had a _good_ "test for merit" then we could directly
| assign people to their roles and ignore their actual
| performance.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't
| particularly good at that either_
|
| It's a pretty good measure for how a student will do in
| their first year in college.
| apparent wrote:
| One of the charts in TFA shows a discontinuity in admissions
| rate around 75% UPP. This means that if you send your kid to
| a HS that is underserved when you enroll, but drops below the
| critical 75% threshold because too many other families are
| doing the same, then the school could fall out of the strong-
| benefit category.
|
| The kid would still have a better chance than if he applied
| from a high-performing school, but it wouldn't be as much of
| an advantage.
|
| Socially, I'm guessing the kid could face some challenges
| because (1) other high performing students might not like him
| because he's a curve-breaker, (2) teachers would know what
| the family was up to and could view it as distasteful, and
| (3) if the student went to UCSD or another school where this
| is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed
| the system/being less-smart.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| This is a terrible system because it forces students and
| parents to start playing all kinds of games to navigate a non
| transparent process for admissions. What now? Are parents going
| to send their kids to good schools until it is time to apply to
| colleges? And then they are going to switch to the best school
| for applications?
| lateforwork wrote:
| Right, up until middle school send kids to the best school,
| then for high school move to an area with poor schools.
| crab_galaxy wrote:
| Maybe they can bring their resources with them too, and the
| poor schools can have things like lead paint remediation,
| honors classes, and extra curricular activities.
|
| I like this idea!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Resources are mainly property taxes. Unless they're
| building a new house whose value is significantly greater
| than the median for the area, families gaming the system
| aren't likely to have much of a lasting impact on the
| district.
| crab_galaxy wrote:
| Yeah you're right. However, resource gaps can be filled
| by things like volunteer librarians, teacher
| wishlists/donations, field trips, strong PTAs, etc..
|
| This is common in my city. It's a big underfunded school
| district with a handful of coveted, well supported
| schools. I'm assuming it happens elsewhere in America
| with the success of platforms like donors choose.
| derektank wrote:
| They should just make this explicit, like the UT system does.
| The top X% of students are admitted automatically from each
| school.
| john-h-k wrote:
| This seems terrible incentives. You are now in a purely
| adversarial relationship with your peers and hurting them
| helps you
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It's not unusual for families to change their school
| district so their kid can play for a better sports program
| and of course it's extremely common for families to want to
| live in the best district for education quality, but maybe
| some are now incentivized to move into a district with
| lesser competition for the top spots.
| bradchris wrote:
| Texan here. There's still ways to get in if you don't make
| the top X% of your class (the percentage is shrinking every
| year as the school climbs up the rankings and more people
| want to go... I think it's near top-4% now? It used to be
| top 15% I recall), and many of those high achievers go onto
| other out of state schools, so it's in the interest of UT
| system to offer automatic admission to the top achievers
| from across the state.
|
| Just because the top X% is guaranteed admission, that does
| not mean all (or even most) of the school is from the top
| X%.
| dustincoates wrote:
| I believe it's only UT Austin that's shrunk the
| percentage. All of the other public universities are
| still at the original top 10%.
| terribleidea wrote:
| How much control can your classmates have over your own
| GPA? What percentage of 'control' over your GPA is up to
| you vs. your teachers, parents, classmates, and everyone
| else? I put those in order intentionally, as I think your
| classmates are below teachers and parents on the hierarchy.
| wyldfire wrote:
| This kind of competition happens in other areas of academic
| pursuits too. Is that strictly a bad thing?
|
| The bad thing about UT's policy is that it encourages well-
| off students to move to a less-competitive school district
| (usually rural) in order to improve their chances.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Not only that, but high performers are incentivised to move
| to worse schools.
|
| It may actually improve mean outcomes, but harm societal
| outcomes, as the scientific impact of educated individuals
| may tend to be power law distributed (e.g. the most
| important breakthroughs come from a small sector of the
| population with wildly disproportionate impact)
| SoylentGreenGPT wrote:
| What breakthroughs are coming from high school students?
| gizmo686 wrote:
| The bottleneck on research is funding. We have a glut of
| students wanting to go into research who don't because of
| how competitive the field is. We then have researchers
| constantly leaving the field for the same reason.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It is hard to hurt someone when their score is a
| standardized test.
| apparent wrote:
| UCs don't consider standardized tests.
| lostmsu wrote:
| IMO they'll roll back. It was a bad decision, and a few
| unis already rolled back.
| apparent wrote:
| Many other schools have rolled back their temporary
| suspensions of SAT-optional/blindness, but UC made a
| decision that was permanent. And when they made the
| decision, it was over the objection of the UC faculty
| recommendation. They might roll it back, but I'm not
| holding my breath.
| blindriver wrote:
| UCs already guarantee this to the top % of students in every
| school.
| tzs wrote:
| California has that. The top 9% from each high school and the
| top 9% statewide are guaranteed UC admission. This does not
| guarantee admission to any specific campus, so if you are
| only interested in say Berkeley or UCLA you might get
| admitted but UC will find you a place at some campus.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| It's all publicly funded universities in Texas, not just the
| UT system.
|
| In other words: you've just pissed off a lot of Aggies
| grouping them in with, ahem, tu.
| torginus wrote:
| Honestly, I don't know how do you even compare students with
| different backgrounds against each other.
|
| That's why standardized testing is good - it gives everyone the
| same chance to excel.
| dmoy wrote:
| > it gives everyone the same chance to excel.
|
| How does the existence of standardized testing give everyone
| the same chance? As an extremely over-exaggerated example
| example, someone whose home study time is disrupted
| frequently by gunfire outside is probably not getting the
| same chance as someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with
| private tutors for every subject.
| blindriver wrote:
| The schools that went test-optional already have switched
| back because this actually gives lower income students the
| best chance to distinguish themselves. The narrative that
| lower income students with less opportunities would benefit
| from not submitting SATs turned out to be false.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Ear plugs are under $5. If you could not think of that over
| years, you're not gonna be able to score well in SAT for
| different reasons.
| pepperball wrote:
| Most likely the people living somewhere continuously with
| gunfire wasn't ever going to succeed academically either
| way. There are exceptions of course.
|
| You'd have to basically rebirth and resocialize them in a
| different culture entirely.
|
| Far too many people already have been educated past their
| natural state and it's going to get ugly.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| " _People who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt
| those who are doing it_ " -Bernard Shaw
|
| I'm pretty tired of progressives insisting that people who
| grew up in poverty but were able to improve our lot in life
| through study, doing well on grades, and, yes, on
| standardized tests, like me, do not exist.
| alex43578 wrote:
| How does the existence of a standard hoop height in the NBA
| give everyone the same chance to play? Shorter players
| should get lower hoops, and slower runners should get
| electric scooters. That way, everyone can _appear_ to be
| equally capable.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _someone whose home study time is disrupted frequently by
| gunfire outside is probably not getting the same chance as
| someone who lives on a 20 acre estate with private tutors
| for every subject_
|
| Is there any world in which the first student, struggling
| in that context, treads water at a UC?
|
| I used to volunteer to tutor high-school aged students in
| New York. I gave up and moved to grade schoolers. A refugee
| who will take the SAT in six months and wants to go to
| college, but is struggling with basic reading comprehension
| and symbolic math is just not going to do well in college
| in a year.
|
| Note: the student who excels in that first setting should
| absolutely be admitted. But they're, by definition, already
| excelling.
| galkk wrote:
| > A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school
| might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school
| that offered twice as many.
|
| Damn, this is as stupid as it gets.
| gopher_space wrote:
| The students operating at this level are identical. There's
| no practical difference between a 4.0 and a 4.5 GPA when
| comparing students from different schools.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Conversely, the correlation between university eliteness and
| occupational eliteness is weakening.
|
| Who is more elite - a new grad who has founded a YC backed
| startup who attended UIUC (an elite and selective CS program at a
| university that is not viewed as prestigious by society at large)
| _or_ a Yale grad working on the Hill earning $50k?
|
| As of today, all UCs are viewed similarly from a tech hiring
| practice perspective, though there is a bit of a geographic bias
| helping UC Berkeley, but this same bias also helps much less
| selective and less socially prestigious SJSU.
| blindriver wrote:
| UC Riverside, UC Merced etc are not viewed similarly to UCLA or
| UCB.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's treated as "good enough", and now the the second
| generation of SWEs, PMs, and AEs are getting hired I've seen
| their parents (a large number of whom are now mid-level
| leadership in most tech companies here in the Bay)
| increasingly lobby to include these "lower tier" UCs to the
| recruiting pool.
|
| My point is, for the younger generation a university's
| societal eliteness just isn't a strong predictor for success,
| and I strongly believe data will back up this observation
| within the next decade (there's usually a 5-7 year delay on
| data gathering in the social sciences, eg. Data from 2018-22
| is only now starting to be analyzed).
| ajoseps wrote:
| idk man, I've always thought UIUC was pretty selective,
| especially for their EE and CS programs. I'm also 10+ years out
| from college applications so maybe things have changed.
| djoldman wrote:
| Looks like the data is available here:
|
| https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...
|
| I'm surprised to see this granularity (# of
| applicants/admitted/enrolled to a college broken out by high
| school).
| danans wrote:
| > Nevertheless, the average private school applicant had only a
| 18.3% chance of admission, well below the 25.8% average for
| public school applicants.
|
| As a parent of a student in a private school, this is how it
| should be. For the amount of support and resources that private
| school students receive vs their public school peers, the
| standards should be higher. My child understands this, and knows
| that they will have to achieve more to get admission to a UC than
| a kid at a low income public school.
|
| There should be exceptions, for example: very low SES student
| attending a private school on scholarship - although such
| students are usually exceptional or else they would not have
| qualified for private school scholarship.
|
| The working class shouldn't be subsidizing the higher education
| of the wealthy.
| qwerpy wrote:
| This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing
| strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country
| needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce,
| valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students,
| regardless of why they are the best students.
| addaon wrote:
| > This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing
| strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country
| needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce,
| valuable resource and should be reserved for the best
| students, regardless of why they are the best students.
|
| It seems unlikely that Americans would be so massively
| overrepresented in American colleges under this policy...
| kccqzy wrote:
| > Colleges should be prioritizing strong students
|
| I agree with this, but I think you didn't get the point. The
| point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in
| light of the environment. If a student is in a high school
| where the average strength is 100, and the student has
| achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has
| tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be
| in a high school where the average strength is 200 and has a
| strength of 200, and this shows that the student is content
| to be just average. After admission, the first student has a
| much higher potential of outperforming the average freshman.
| The first student's strength could very well be limited by
| the amount of resources available in this high school, and
| not by his/her innate ability.
|
| At least, this is what is supposed to happen, if you believe
| the UC admission officers.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I understand that point and I still disagree with it. There
| are objective, direct measurements of strength
| (standardized tests, performance at state/nation-wide
| academic competitions, admissions essays), and we don't
| need to resort to this more flimsy chain of subjective
| comparisons that use "relative strength of student within
| school" and "relative strength of school across all
| schools".
| apparent wrote:
| This doesn't describe what UC is doing, however. LCFF is
| for (1) kids in foster care, (2) English learners, and (3)
| low income. If you go to a school that has lots of these
| kids, but you yourself do not have one of these
| disadvantages, then it doesn't mean that you've risen up
| out of poverty to achieve relative greatness. It means that
| you're not an immigrant/poor, but you go to school with a
| lot of such students. And in the age of grade inflation,
| getting good grades at a school with lots of low-performing
| kids is especially easy.
| apparent wrote:
| You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the
| wealthy" and public schools with "the working class". Plenty of
| people are wealthy and send their kids to public schools. They
| fund them via property taxes rather than tuition payments.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Community colleges are the real heroes of California's higher
| education.
|
| Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at community
| college. You can then transfer later and generally you'll have a
| better variety to choose from.
|
| The UC system is sorta weird though. Maybe the top 2 , UCLA and
| Berkeley compete nationally. After that you're paying UC tuition
| for an average school. Out of state that's around 50k, 16k in
| state.
|
| You then get an unholy fraken monster patch work of different
| financial aid programs. Make over 160k as a family ? No aid for
| you!
|
| It's a different welfare cliff. Parents get a paper divorce, live
| with the less affluent one, college is going to be free.
|
| I'm still very very pissed I couldn't get my parents income info
| and had to drop out. I was making around 100k when I came back to
| finish. I paid out if pocket at a Cal State.
| apparent wrote:
| > Unless you get a full ride you probably should start at
| community college. You can then transfer later and generally
| you'll have a better variety to choose from.
|
| This does not make sense if you (like most UC students) are in-
| state. You're right that it's easier to get in as a CC
| transfer, but you'll miss out on a lot of the bonding
| experience that happens as freshmen. And if you want, you could
| always transfer from one UC to another, if you're looking to
| upgrade your diploma from Irvine to LA, for example. It's
| probably worth it to have the better network of the freshmen
| you met at Irvine rather than going to a CC in LA for two
| years. It would be cheaper, but networks can be incredibly
| valuable.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Is that bonding experience worth another 12500$ a year ? CC
| is about 1500$ in tuition for a full 30 units vs 14000$ at a
| UC per year.
|
| I made life long friends in community college.
|
| Plus college doesn't work out for everyone, better to spend
| 3000$ figuring that out over 28k.
|
| If you pay your own way and go the absolute cheapest path,
| your spending 3k at community college for 2 years and about
| 14k for 2 years at a Cal State. 17k total.
|
| Vs 14k a year at a UC and around 56k for all 4.
|
| This really depends on your financial situation though. For a
| lot of families this isn't a lot of money.
| apparent wrote:
| Yes, it very much depends on family circumstances. In some
| families/communities, there is somewhat of a stigma to not
| attending a 4-year college straight out of high school.
| That will probably fade over time, but it is a reality for
| some.
| resumenext wrote:
| Excellent point about CC's. The downside is that instructor
| quality varies considerable both within and between CCs, and
| many students drop out or are not provided with adequate
| guidance in terms of GE requirements and transferability.
|
| In terms of costs of UC other than Berkeley, (Davis, Cal Poly,
| UCLA, etc...) 16k in current times is a great bargain
| especially given the pipeline to grad school which is great
| even at non-Berkeley UCs.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I can only speak for my own experiences, but I found my
| instructors at community college to be absolutely fantastic
| and even better than the ones I had when I eventually
| transferred to a UC. I had transferred to a UC first, ran out
| of money and then I wrapped up at a cheaper CSU years later.
|
| At a UC you're probably going to be interacting with teaching
| assistants anyway.
|
| I have to completely disagree with your last paragraph. No
| one should be thinking grad school right after a B.A. Go and
| see the world for a little bit. Excluding maybe law and
| medicine.
|
| Even then, I've seen this horribly backfire in families. The
| kid is expected to do really well in college and then become
| a doctor, the pressure is too much and they just spaz out.
|
| Next thing you know your a college dropout couchsurfing
| because your parents are threatening to send you back to the
| old country for an arranged marriage.
| sfblah wrote:
| This is just doing DEI in a different way because it's
| technically illegal. It's obvious what's going on here.
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