Maybe some of the results have to do with comfort level. My d19 is in a large public high school with very little personal attention. When I told her the size of some of the private colleges she laughed. She couldn’t believe some schools were so small and made it clear she was not interested in any school smaller then her high school and doesn’t need or want small class size. Wants to be independent, wants lots of choices, doesn’t worry about large lecture classes, etc… Large public high school students might be more successful at large publics like the UC’s. Conversely it might be more natural for students at private high schools to gravitate to private colleges with more personal attention.
@19parent My D said the same thing, exactly.
Going along with the current conversation and to back up some points being made re tendencies - our private hs had an event with a talk by the principal open to current and prospective parents. When showing stats on where the most recent graduating class was attending college, a prospective parent from a local public middle school asked, “Why so few/none to UCLA or the UC’s in general?” It was funny because his attitude when asking came off judgmental like he himself had discovered a pattern that pointed to something scandalous, that he wanted everyone to notice. And in some polite and politically correct manner in which a principal should answer, they said “Very few of our students apply to the UCs. It is not path they tend to take from here… Any other questions?”
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This was in our local paper. An interesting read. 35K a year, and you get an email from the professor encouraging you to watch a webcast instead of attend a lecture…
@hop . Sorry didn’t mean to misrepresent distance from CLU to LAX or even Burbank airports. Thanks for clarifying for those folks unfamiliar. In my experience it is 35 min to Burbank and 45 min to Lax. Guess I consider that a fairly short drive to a major airport in So Cal… and airfare is far cheaper to/from LAX than other regional CA airports which can be a major factor when figuring costs of travel.
@RedwoodForest this problem is not only for UCs, it’s at a lot of places, even privates. Believe it or not Stanford University has some of the ugliest facilities for their employees known to mankind. The offices look like something that was last upgraded 40 years ago. The world class hospital and medical school offices, same. (They are planning on finishing a new hospital soon and many employees are moving to a brand new facility 15 minutes away.)
- Awesome professor. One of the most popular Profs on campus. Nobel winner.
- Intro course covers a science GE.
- Grading is definitely not STEM-typical.
As a result, first day of class includes dozens (if not more) of kids hoping to Add, but are not currently enrolled. This happens everywhere. The most popular class at Cornell has over 1,000 students in it; many watch on video all semester.
And yes, there are plenty of other courses available that fulfill a science GE.
So here are the gory details of where my kid’s HS classmates are going. Pretty decent public school in northern California that is primarily Asian. Around 650 grads if I am not mistaken. I don’t think this is everyone, since there are a few of my kid’s friends who I know got into good schools whose name I don’t see. Note that these are results of where they are attending, not how many got accepted. The interesting thing to me is that there were about 50 NMSF kids, and almost half decided not to go (or perhaps the decision was made for them) what I would call an elite school. The usual disappointment is that as usual, not a single one going to Stanford.
UC:
UC-Berkeley - 36
UCLA - 7
UCSD - 14
UC-Davis - 24
UC-Irvine - 17
UCSB - 18
UCSC - 11
UCR - 8
UCM - 1
Total UC - 136
CSU:
SJSU - 27
CPSLO - 12
Chico - 3
EB - 3
Humboldt - 1
CSULB - 1
Ponoma - 3
Sacramento - 2
SDSU - 3
SF State - 6
Sonoma - 1
Stanislaus - 1
Total CSU - 63
Among elites of note:
Harvard - 2
Columbia - 2
Princeton - 2
Cornell - 2
MIT - 2
CMU - 4
UChicago - 1
Oxford - 1
Fudan (Shanghai) - 1
Other notables:
NYU - 10
Northeastern - 1
WUSTL - 1
USC - 1
Harvey Mudd - 2
UW - 3
Penn State - 1
Purdue - 1
Michigan - 2
UIUC - 4
UT-Austin - 1
Maryland - 1
^^the big surprise to me on that number is the one to USC…with their auto discount for NM, I would have assumed that more would have taken that offer.
Where do you get this stuff? that is fully 1/3 of the freshman class at Harvard and Stanford, are you suggesting that 1/3 of these cohorts are CS majors? Definitely not at Harvard and very unlikely at Stanford.
@bluebayou I would say that the typical profile of the household that almost all the good students have is the 1st generation, STEM highly educated, 300K+ median income, Berkeley or bust aura. I don’t think many perceive USC as a good value. I can only speak for my kid and his best friend, but my kid didn’t get into USC, mainly because once he didn’t get the scholarships that they were offering he didn’t even bother to send in his first semester senior grades. His best friend got into USC but got little merit and switched to UCB the minute he got off of waitlist. Neither were NM, or NMSF for that matter.
The other main observations I saw was that 1) UCB is still king, at least for this school. 2) No population shifts to UCLA, though it seems UCLA was much more selective than UCB this year. I’ll need to check the official numbers later. 3) students who were outside the top 10% of the class were getting into the mid-tier UCs. A rough guess would indicate that their unweighted GPA averages were in the 3.5-3.7 range.
@CU123 The numbers…
Harvard:
Ec10, CS50 Once Again Top Course Enrollment
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/11/course-enrollment-2017/
On Stanford I found numbers (from 2011) like this…
I’m sure in 2017 it was much higher.
@CU123, not everyone who takes the introductory CS class at Stanford is a CS major, and not all of them are freshmen. Here’s an article from the Stanford Daily in 2012 about the 700+ enrollment in CS 106A, which is the introductory class.
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/10/04/cs106a-enrollment-reaches-record-high/
Are the courses taught by a single professor? UCB has 1400 freshman in EECS alone where I’m sure they all take the freshman CS course, you need apples to apples comparison here. The way your cutting it would be equivalent to UCB having 2000+ kids in one course taught by one prof.
The UCB CS61A 1st major CS course is one big ol class per semester. 1700 max entries.
At Stanford it’s one class/one professor. See the article linked above by Mom2jl.
@ProfessorPlum168 Any matriculating to Santa Clara University which has very good engineering, sciences and business programs and is in the heart of silicon valley?
“but my kid didn’t get into USC, mainly because once he didn’t get the scholarships that they were offering he didn’t even bother to send in his first semester senior grades”
you DO realize that fewer than 3% of USC early applicants are selected for scholarship consideration, dont you?
In otherwords, its harder to make that cut than it is to get into any elite college.
https://admissionblog.usc.edu/faqs-on-scholarship-decisions/
USC NM scholarships are now competitive and half tuition (net price would still be higher than in state UC).