We attended Friday’s events, mainly stuck to the college of engineering and my son’s department. The faculty and students we talked to said a lot of the right things to our ears. The visit boosted CalPoly into a dead heat with RPI in my kid’s eyes. The engineering clubs at CP are so impressive in their scope, accessibility and student dedication. Also visited Davis this weekend, beautifully landscaped campus, good college town although surprisingly empty campus for a school with 40k students. One more to go next weekend, but IMO the agenda appears lackluster there, so I would be surprised if it cracks the top two.
The only thing that bothers me about CP (outside of no library for the next year) is the reputation for difficulty getting major or required support classes if you don’t come in super-advanced with AP/dual enrollment credits…
Asking for a friend, does Cal Poly meet Need when it comes to financial aid? It seems they have a SAI of 15k and only received approx. $1400 in Pel Grant along with another $4600 in Loan offers. Not sure if there is a possibility of additional aid maybe coming? (they will be reaching out to financial aid but was trying to help figure things out for them)
No, none of the Cal states or UC’s claim to meet full need. There is always a student/parent contribution towards college costs which can include loans. Running the Net price calculator on any school would help before applying.
If they are California residents then they may get some amount of Cal Grant if they were also eligible for a Pell Grant from the Feds. And, depending on income/asset levels, they may qualify for some amount of Middle Class Scholarship.
CP SLO was on Friday and SDSU was on Saturday. We did both as well. CP professors and students were way more inviting and informative than our experience at SDSU. SDSU was number one for my son until we visited. After 2 hours at SDSU, he committed to CP SLO.
@dad15- How did this past weekend visit go? Re: the concern on the difficulty getting major or required support classes at Cal Poly SLO, is that something that you/your kiddo could follow up with the department chair or faculty?
Just saw a post from Cal Poly indicating the Library will be closed for 2 years. They have set up tents for use in the interim. I don’t know enough about the campus and other spaces to study but this seems like a hurdle for the kids to figure out.
My current CP student would never use a library. Would rather study in their room.
My other student at CAL, doesn’t like studying in their room and would rather study at a library, lounge, coffee shop or sorority house.
What CP does do more so then the UC’s is organize many of study groups for certain classes, such as Calc, Chemistry, Physics, etc which will be on campus in a designated space.
Also, all the dorms have study rooms and lounges to study in as well.
In four years at Cal Poly, I studied three times in the library, when all my other options were exhausted/full. That said, I was in the library hundreds of times to get books and do research, but then left to go study elsewhere.
Former Biochem major from CP. Yes, very small class sizes, I think my intro to Theatre class was my largest with almost a 100 students. My Chem classes ranged from 8 students to 25. You get to know all the professors pretty well and they all know you, even if you don’t have them for any classes.
I don’t know about the tours, but if they’re anything like the “Week of Welcome”, it is likely planned and run by the students.
I was very involved in the Week of Welcome for a couple years and in the 80’s it was ENTIRELY run by students, with planning beginning the year before and intensive and fun counselor training the Spring Quarter.
So, events like these tours and stuff may not be a smooth and slick as some of the other schools, because they don’t have large professional staff whose jobs revolve around this. But the Cal Poly philosophy of “Learn By Doing” isn’t an empty slogan. Your son and daughter will have multiple opportunities to learn real life skills that will prepare them for the real world even before they finish their degree.
Professors at Cal Poly were always willing to pitch in and help student organizations and were excellent mentors as well, and would use their resources and contacts to bring in visiting professionals to coach and interact, all the way out to San Luis Obispo. Looking back on it as a professional myself, that couldn’t have been easy for them to arrange.
In the last week or so, I have decided to just chill on all of these details. We have visited 6 universities in the past 3 weeks, all of them are great, they all have their share of different smaller +/-. The risk of difficullty getting classes issue at CalPoly is mitigated by its value proposition. For example, the difference in total COA for us between CalPoly and RPI is more than 4 years of CalPoly Tution and fees. So at the end of the day if a fifth year at CalPoly is required to graduate, that is more than mitigated in differences in cost of attendance. That said, RPI is still in play because it may be worth the price premium due to its curriculum, research availability, unique intense but collaborative atmosphere and some smaller issues. The engineering club scene at CalPoly is really unique and superior to all of the places we looked. A risk with CalPoly is that a lot of its benefits are linked to the economy in CA (i.e. state support, corporate support for clubs etc…), like I said I could spin in circles about this, so I have decided to just see if my kid can decide on his own. If not, next weekend we will create a spreadsheet to semi-quantitatively parse what what my kid values in college vs how he scores the college in each metric, and hopefully come to a decision.
We built and added to our Excel spreadsheet for over a year.
It really helps, because it forced all of us to find both objective and subjective factors and actually document them instead of relying on vague impressions and imperfect memories and anecdotal evidence.
Another note, it is decades out of date, but my experience at Cal Poly was that the required General Education classes and some of my vital classes for my degree (until Junior year) were always difficult to get into during registration.
I always went the first two weeks of class, early, sat toward the front of the class, respectfully told the teacher I was serious about trying to add the class, and would attend and hope that a spot would open up. They would either add me that day, or within the next two weeks after seeing that I meant what I’d said.
I’ve given that advice to others going there since that time and it seems to still work. “Learn By Doing” in action.
Yeah, getting classes seems to be a particularly annoying thing at CalPoly, but these problems happen at UC’s as well. Your strategy is one to keep in mind particularly for key prerequisite must-have courses, summer classes are another, knocking off a few GE’s online at community college may be another. I suspect this also varies with major at CalPoly as well, all of the kids we talked to in my kids major were graduating in 4 years. Most of them didn’t come in with massive transfer credits, had to do the full math sequence at Cal Poly and some even admitted to failing a class and having to repeat while attending.