mom2collegekids

How does she calculate that?? She's told me she would get a 2nd or 3rd job if needed.

Oh good heavens. If you have adequate instate or other options, please don't put your mom into a situation where she'd have to work a second or third job. If she's a single mom, she's already working TWO jobs....her "pay job" and her "home job".

Seriously, while it's nice for your mom to offer to take on add'l jobs, if you can avoid that, please do. Four years of working extra jobs (along with her two current jobs) could be bad for her health, and shouldn't be necessary.

Ask her how much she can contribute based on her CURRENT job only.

You have an ACT 31 and a 2050 ACT. Are you retesting? What is your math + critical reading SAT score?

What is your weighted GPA for the last three years?

With your stats (if GPA is strong), there are schools that would give you good merit....like Seattle Univ, Chapman U, Redlands, and others. There are other schools that aren't on the west coast that will give you merit.

You mention some long list of schools that you're going thru. That's nice, but may be a waste of time since those kinds of lists don't take into account affordability. They just consider stats, a few other things, and maybe major.

What is your major?

The people here on CC could probably give you a good list of schools that would work with Major, GPA, Test scores, other interests, and the amount your mom will spend.

mom2collegekids

One result is that UCLA and Berkeley have relatively high percentages of Pell Grant undergraduates compared to other "top universities


I wonder how much the fact that the UCs don't use NCP info like the top univs do. I realize that Pell is based on FAFSA only, but there may be a number of Pell students attending UCLA and Cal on full/near full aid, that would not get that full aid if they attempted to attend a school that required NCP info (from an NCP that won't pay).

I also wonder if at some point UCLA and Cal will require CSS Profile and NCP info. Since Cal has gone to a more generous need based aid for instate students, it might make sense for them to better capture the family financial picture. That said, Cal still won't give aid to cover the OOS portion, which is substantial.

barrk123

UCLA won't give you aid but USC might

drax12

No doubt, the OP in his/her instance shouldn't consider a UC, and I'm thinking that he/she was more into topic-starting than anything else. He/she said something to the effect of "I was just getting started and that UCLA and USC are just two on my list."

themegastud

Semi-recent USC Marshall alum here. I find warblersrule's take to be rather spot-on.

While I agree with the general thrust of drax12's overall point regarding the flaws of the admission rate statistic, I fully disagree with him/Beyphy about "floors" as it pertains to self-selecting applicants.

Back when I was applying to college ('03), the UC's had a common app whereas USC's was a standalone. Our guidance counselors (public high school in suburban San Diego) instructed *all* of us to check off Berkeley and UCLA as schools we were apply to on the UC app, even those of us for whom Riverside was a stretch. Undoubtedly this occurs elsewhere, and undoubtedly this has inflated both schools' admit rates -- the benefit being that UCLA gets to claim the mantle of most applied to school in the nation.

Now that USC is on the common app, I'm sure it benefits from a little reaching as well. Though, to be fair, Harvard and other ivies are on the common app, so it seems to me that with the common app, you'd still be somewhat selective about your reaches (if for application fee considerations only), as opposed to with the UC app where the "reach" choices are obvious.

Moreover, considering the steady increase in USC's selectivity over the past 10 years or so (and its admit rate dropping year-over-year well before common app adoption), I'm not so sure that the numbers post-common app are statistically significant from what the trend would have forecasted regardless. However, I'm probably just being a bit of a homer here, and this all is just another consideration that underscores drax's and beyphy's point.

Nike -- my initial inclination is to tell you to just go with USC because I think paying out-of-state tuition for a public is a waste of money (unless there's a meaningful increase in prestige or other factors compared to the private school being considered... which isn't the case here).

But who knows? Perhaps you'll visit UCLA and won't be able to picture yourself anywhere else. Perhaps you're 5'6" and of Irish ancestry, qualifying you for the Aloysius McGillycuddy Memorial Scholarship for UCLA students of Irish descent, that are 5'6", and hail from Oregon. Perhaps you won't mind taking out extra loans, provided you understand the responsibilities involved, because you think the ROI on a UCLA degree would be far greater than middling schools which gave you merit aid.

Point being: I agree that EFC is probably the primary consideration here, but I think it's too early to rule UCLA out as we don't even know the EFC comparison, let alone what he/she intends to study. Sure, it's easy to predict that the EFC at UCLA will be much higher, but say they're pursuing a subject for which UCLA has the much stronger department (and in a field for which departmental reputation has a meaningful bearing on grad school/job hiring). Then the calculus suddenly becomes much less straightforward.

drax12

I'm not comprehending the part in bold. Obviously you were a higher-stat applicant, so this would follow that you would apply to Cal and UCLA and not necessarily to Riverside.

You misunderstand the reasoning behind why UCLA wants as many students applying therein as it can encourage. It does so to let holistics take its course to admit a portion, however small or moderate, to diversify its student body, generally ethnically, even more specifically wrt increasing Hispanic enrollment. Diversity to the UCLA administration, is the most important index within the whole of all demographic indices. All the indications are that UCLA isn't trying to game any statistic within USN or any other publication to improve its ranking, especially in light of how it under-reports scores. As I stated in another thread, it underreports scores so as not to dissuade those of poorer background (and therefore generally urm background) in applying to the U (because those of poorer->urm background tend to score lower, or stated more legitimately, being of wealth (or of majority background) helps students "buy" higher scores. And I realize the error in making seeming exclusive statements as in the above, but I don't mean them to be. )

The reason warblersrule is wrong is in how he/she (I'm guessing the latter, she) stated or inferred a lack of happiness of UCLA students with their classes. He/she stated, that he/she knew a math student who was ecstatic with his/her classes or something to that effect -> generally, that students were not ecstatic, or more likely were unhappy with their UCLA educations. I would say this couldn't be further from the truth.

Also, the point warbersrule misses, and I generally inferred in my prior post, was that UCLA is usually a preparatory for grad school. Students there generally study academic subjects preparing for grad professional school (or, eg, use history, polisci, econ, etc to place within the various bus-sector jobs -- you'll see a lot of UCLA grads in finance that have history, poli-sci baccalaureates without having attended grad school). This leads to UCLA being more impacted for subjects within the social sciences and some of the humanities. You won't find this at USC, because academic subjects at that U are not as heavily enrolled in which students there would even go as far as to major in them, but would just more or less be there as breadth reqs. (~ 1200 students take bac degrees in bus-related fields out of a total of ~ 5,000 at USC.) This leads to less crowding at USC in these (academic) subjects because they are roads less traveled. (I've heard of a Physics grad at USC, and he apparently stated he was the sole person in the department in the year he graduated, and said it lacked rigor.) Students who choose USC want their specific majors: bus, pub relations, communications, film, etc. Conversely, a lot of students who attend UCLA are just happy to be there and will take an anthropology, math/econ, or philosophy (sorry, beyphy) opening as the only resort to attending.

AtypicalAsian

Ucla has much more prestige outside of southern California.

Sent from my HTC One X using CC

bluebayou

Let me fix this for you:

"Diversity to the UC administration, is the most important index within the whole of all demographic indices."

In other words, it comes from upon high, Regents & Legislature (who still hold some purse strings), and is one of the most important non-gpa factors at every UC campus.

warblersrule

Let's not put words in my mouth. My point was obviously not that undergrads at UCLA are unhappy with their educations. Rather, my point was simply that I think USC is currently devoting more money and resources to its undergraduates than UCLA is. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing or something UCLA needs to "fix" -- it's simply a matter of institutional focus and needs. UCLA is first and foremost a research university with a lot of top-flight programs to support, and its funding is limited; undergrads therefore sometimes get the shaft. In some programs, particularly the smaller ones, I do think undergraduates at UCLA are receiving the attention and small classes they deserve - in many other programs, less so. A go-getter would obviously excel at either.

You are welcome to counter that by pointing out that I have never attended UCLA as an undergraduate, which is true. I would respond by pointing out that neither have most UCLA undergraduates attended another college to see how well it treats its undergrads in comparison (aside from the obvious contingent of CCC transfers, which for the purposes of this discussion don't count). Most grass looks green until you compare it to the neighboring field, eh?

ucbalumnus

Some people think that their own grass is always greener.

Some people think that someone else's grass is always greener.

beyphy

That might not even be true if phantasmagoric's graduate school point is.

Is USC on the rise academically?

It also doesn't help that USC's operating budget and resources are smaller than UCLA's.

Is USC on the rise academically?

themegastud

Drax,

I'm not saying UCLA's gaming the system in some nefarious manner; merely that it has and continues to benefit from a common app. (Assuming there still is a common UC app... I don't follow such things so closely anymore).

Also, when I say that our guidance counselors encouraged all of us to shoot for UCLA/Berkeley, I mean "all of us" -- from the Irvine kids, to the Riverside kids, to the CSU-bound kids who were filling out a UC app hoping to get into Santa Cruz on a whim, they too were instructed to check-off UCLA and Berkeley... based on the very rigorous analytical conclusion of "hey, you never know!"

Needless to say, we did not have the best guidance counselors.

themegastud

Beyphy,

I have my doubts. As someone who pores over financial statements for a living, I'm eminently aware that drawing conclusions from high-level detail (especially when making comparisons!) is dangerous. The devil's always in the details.

From a revenue standpoint, we know that USC charges a multiple of UCLA's tuition, and consistently out fundraises UCLA. (Contributions would normally not be considered revenue for a business, but it's my understanding that for not-for-profits, they are... as with CA state appropriates in the case of UCLA). Empirically, we know that the UC's have been in the news quite often, describing their budget constraints as "dire." USC has a meaningfully larger endowment than UCLA.

From just a common sense standpoint, I don't understand how UCLA people can mock private school tuition totals... but then claim they somehow make more money (???).

Perhaps most tellingly, I'm trying to look up UCLA's financials because my hunch says it includes UCLA hospital system revenue, and the landing page for its financial report says "The 2010-11 report was not produced in hard copy due to budget constraints." (UCLA Annual Financial Reports (1001969)).

So, perhaps spending the time to dissect these numbers is a semi-fruitless endeavor?

themegastud

Whatever, I did it anyway because I need a break from work.

Indeed, hospital systems revenue is the bogey. Of UCLA's revenue, it's hospital system was *by far* the largest contributor -- $1.7B (or 34%). Tuition totaled $503M, 10%, (vs. $1.3B or 40% at USC) while gifts to UCLA totaled $195M, 4%, ($318M at USC, 10%).

That was before USC's capital campaign was launched, so I'm not sure if we'll see a sudden surge in that number when the next set of numbers is released, or if gifts donated during the "quiet period" would indeed be reflected here.

It's also worth noting that in UCLA's annual report, both Chancellor Block as well as the separate MD&A contribute a significant word count to talking about the school's constrained budget.

So, when:
-- the Chancellor says "hey, we've got budget issues,"
-- and the Regents say "hey, we've got budget issues,"
-- and UC's auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers, say "hey, they've got budget issues"
-- and the school's numbers indicate that the University itself (i.e., not its lucrative health system) has budget issues
-- and the website itself which hosts UCLA's annual report says "hey, we couldn't even print this out, because we have budget issues"...

... perhaps concluding that UCLA is on stronger financial footing than USC -- or can afford greater outlays for its students than USC -- is a bit of a stretch, no?

tsdad

Whatever works for you. Were you can get in. What you can afford. Which school is stronger in your interests.

Trojan Parent