Chances of Valedictorian of Title 1 School with Excellent EC, Very Good PIQs and 4.7+ GPA [4.0/4.25/4.75 for UC] Getting Shut Out of UCB, UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, UCI?

Colleges & Universities University of California - GENERAL
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Aren’t most ‘top’ colleges chasing a similar thing - rigor, grades, extras, test scores (not UC). You can expand your statement to USC and U Texas and Harvard and U Florida and Rice etc.

California provides a gazillion opportunities for these kids to get a great education and even further a U of California education. Many thumb their nose at it.

That sounds like a student / family problem to me.

My daughter’s valedictorian was turned down by 16 of the top 20. 36 on the ACT. Got into NYU full pay and went to U Tenn. guess what - there are kids like yours at most e try hs in CA Sone will go to CC, regional CSUs and UCs some will go to less selective public and privates others to top privates. Some choose for sports team or cost or programs or location. Some for weather or for skiing - I know several of those.

Others like mine voluntarily chose less selective - and have done great by the way. The engineer who turned down Purdue for Alabama’s single room dorm vs overcrowded housing or daughter who turned down the top Honors Colleges, UF and top LAC W&L for a regional, because she loved the urban campus and activity around. Again her intern and job outcomes were outstanding, I’m guessing because she is outstanding.

All kids have choices. And yes, short of budget issues or health issues, it should be the kids, not the parents freaked out.

I’m guessing that parent’s student will get into a school of choice. But you are a taxpayer and they owe you a great college education I suppose. And they’re going to offer you one.

That many choose to knock it is not the state’s problem. They’ve met their end of the bargain.

And don’t forget, there are equally accomplished kids likely at most every high school in the state - and that’s a lot. Class sizes (large) and bureaucracy are already extreme - is this what people truly dream of ?

Look around you at work - I’m guessing you see a lot of colleges represented. My million dollar neighborhood runs the gamut from from Miss Syste to Lipscomb and Belmont to Nebraska, UTK, Alabama, Midd Tn State, W Kentucky, Long Beach State, Syracuse, Vandy and we have a Cornell that the parents, not kids living in it bought. I’m sure your street and work place is no different.

The fact that parents/kids continue to believe success or lack thereof will be based on the school name truly confuses me because these kids will learn it’s not true.

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You can’t stop colleges wanting to choose the best students, and yes it’s possible /likely they overlap a lot between the colleges.

One way to do this - to get your 120k admits more spread - would be introduce a system like UCAS in the UK for the UC application - say, you can only apply to either UCB or UCLA, not both, and a maximum of 3-4 other UCs. That would reduce the competitive applications angle. But oh boy can you imagine the outcry if they did…

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I said chasing demographics not the best students. There are lots of mandates for UCs being HSI and BSI which greatly drives their admissions process. They even admit it.

”He said the UC Davis application was successful because of, among other things, its “mission-level commitment” to serving black students.

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Whatever their criteria are - if the institutional priorities overlap the outcome is the same. Unless you limit the number of applications, that’s not going to change.

Are there stats anywhere for the number of students who tick 7 or 8 boxes on the UC app?

Fwiw our school is not very diverse and has great success with UC applications each year, so I doubt it’s “just” demographics.

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Of course it is - each school has a yield - not just total but in state, out and international - and maybe in state is by county - the closer you are.

Schools that mis guess either over enroll - ie housing nightmares - like kids living in lounges, tripling or quadrupling or schools renting hotels etc. Schools that under guess go to their wait lists.

Demand and available class size, plus at many schools the major - all of that goes into this.

So last year 48% accepted UCLA’s offer. They don’t break out in the CDS but you can be assured the yield was far higher in state than out of state or international. They have models to determine how many they can take but they may also err on the side of caution. They can reject kids but then leave them hanging. That’s the cruel thing.

13.5k accepted. 6550 enrolled. Guess how many get offered a Wait List spot. Over 20k. They are screwing with these kids minds - so if there’s a rant that should be it. And how do I know they erred on the side of caution ? Over 1500 initially rejected were let in off the wait list as the wait list is a sorry we can’t take you - until we realize we misplanned and need you.

People also can choose where to apply. If you apply to 20, aren’t 19 wasted ? You’re not attending. At the same time a person can apply to one assured and be done. Or 2 or 3 etc. It’s choice people are making to apply to x schools that cost y dollars. No one is forcing this to happen. But those making the choice. Do I wish there were no feed ? Of course, but the schools, not us get to decide. We are consumers - we can say no.

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The supplemental is not just for borderline students but for a variety of other reasons and they often target Title 1 school applicants, that is why I asked. As pointed out by @worriedmomucb, top students have been asked for LOR’s.

The criteria for referring an applicant for Supplemental Review may include the following:

  1. Evidence of focus on an area of special talent which may have limited a student’s time to participate in a broader range of activities.
  2. Evidence of character traits that imply a strong likelihood of making a significant contribution to campus life.
  3. Evidence of significant academic achievement or the potential for academic achievement at the University in spite of extraordinary or compound disadvantage or learning difference, or physical disability or other unusual circumstances.
  4. Evidence of significant improvement in the academic record accompanied by one or both of the following: (1) reasons for the initial poor performance; and (2) sustained and in-depth participation in educational outreach programs, which demonstrate the applicant’s commitment to succeed academically within a challenging environment.
  5. Evidence of relative lack of access to, counseling about, or support to take college preparatory, honors, Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) classes or required college entrance examinations.
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Freshman admission by discipline | University of California has recent (2024) admission stats that may be of interest:

Campus Broad Discipline Admit Middle 50% GPA (WC) Admit Rate
UCB Life Sciences 4.16-4.29 18%
UCLA Life Sciences 4.21-4.30 13%
UCSB Life Sciences 4.13-4.29 40%
UCSD Life Sciences 4.12-4.29 36%
UCI Life Sciences 4.10-4.28 34%

Of course, commenters here cannot know how the PIQs compare to those of other applicants.

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UC ELC was apparently inspired by that Texas system, but it was implemented with some key differences:

  • Top 9% (originally top 4%) meant admission to some campus in the UC system, not a specific campus.
  • Top 9% status is based on the student’s weighted-capped GPA meeting a top 9% benchmark weighted-capped GPA set by a recent previous class at the high school. Presumably, this is to avoid the cutthroat rank-grubbing found in some Texas high schools where current class rank is used to top 5%/10% automatic admission there.

These days, ELC applicants who get shut out of the campuses they apply to generally get offers from UC Merced.

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According the the data published by U of California, for the 2025 school year, they had 103,138 applicants who had weighted and capped GPAs of over 4.0. That’s a large number of kids who are high achieving, far too many for UCLA, Berkeley, and UCSD together.

According to the U of California data, 90% of the students accepted to Berkeley for school year 2025 had weighted capped GPA of over 4.0, and for UCLA, it was 92%. That means that, among students accepted to Berkeley and UCLA, students with high GPAs outnumber kids with low GPA 9:1.

So I don’t know where people have gotten the perception of kids with lower GPAs were being accepted to Berkeley and UCLA at higher rates than kids with high GPAs.

You and others on this thread seem to be under the impression that you know the GPAs of every applicant from you kid’s school who was accepted. Just because a kid didn’t hang out with the people who were supposedly hard workers doesn’t mean that they have a GPA of 3.5.

I will repeat - you don’t know what the transcripts of the kids who were accepted looked like.

You can feel frustrated that your high achieving student wasn’t accepted, but the number are saying that they were replaced with an equally high achieving student.

What is true is that around 20% of the applicants admitted to Berkeley and UCLA are non-residents, and another 10% are international. So a high achieving California resident is far more likely to be “losing out” to a high achieving non-resident, American or not, than they are to a low income kid from California whose GPA is low.

You have no idea what will happen. What we know now is that, in the fall of 2025, only 4% of their freshman class was African American. Admission rates for African Americans was 32%, the lowest of all ethnic groups. This is exactly the same pattern for Irvine as there has been for the past 25 years.

Upping that 4% to 10% which they may, or may not, do, may, or may not, change things. You don’t know, and you are speaking from a place of what you “feel” will happen. Unless you have data to support this claim, you shouldn’t state is as a fact.

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To be a state-designated “Black Serving Institution”, “at least 10% or 1,500 of its students (including undergraduate, graduate and professional) must be Black and African American.” Since UCD has about 40,800 students, of whom 1,701 are Black, that means that it qualified as a BSI with 4.2% Black enrollment (and could qualify with as low as 3.7% Black enrollment based on current total enrollment).

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I can also speak to this from personal experience. My D, who I mentioned is a Regents’ Scholar at Cal so clearly no slacker, had a rough transition into high school. She had attended a visual and performing arts middle school, then transferred to our district high school which is a typical Bay Area competitive (sometimes toxically so) high school. She was behind her peers academically and quickly grew academically frustrated and socially disoriented. She ended her first semester with a C in math (the lowest freshman math level, just regular Math 1) and a B in bio, also just regular bio, not honors, not AP.

After that, she was marked as a slacker and, in the context of this school where math level is considered by many students to be a proxy for IQ, not terribly smart. But she refocused, buckled down, and did great after that (at least academically, not so much socially as many had already formed their opinions of her and that was that). No one around her knew the changes she had made and how she was actually performing. People were shocked that she got into Cal. But they hadn’t seen her transcripts, and had made assumptions about her and her likely grades following freshman year. You really don’t know as much as you think about other students.

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It’s amazing - every year - a parent will come on - my kid had better #s than all the kids who got in? As if they know everyone - what they’ve done in school, rigor wise, out of school.

My son’s school had a top 25 breakfast. Every year I went. Every year, short of an absence, there were 25 kids. Know who was never in the top 25? The student who went to Princeton. I don’t know if anyone else got in or even applied but she was the one who went - not in the top 25.

Last year, I remember, someone got into MIT but not BU. The same - turned down at SDSU but in at Berkeley.

There’s so many components to making these decision that people shouldn’t guess - because they don’t know the why.

But they do, and then they assume they are hosed -when the truth is they aren’t, because they have millions of places to do the same thing….because let’s be honest, at this point, education is mostly a commodity.

33

I don’t think the OP mentioned this clearly enough. It’s the same in my kid’s school. There are two populations: The kids doing the IB full diploma essentially do all HL/AP/IB classes and there GPA is effectively out of 5. But the non-IB kids can’t do most of these classes (they are capped and enrollment by invitation only at my school) so there GPA is at most 4.0 (maybe a tad higher if they do an AP class).

There really is two bodies of students in these IB schools.

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So they can take APs and perhaps they can also take dual enrollment classes? All of those increase the UC weighted GPAs, which means they can at least approach the GPA of IB students, no? IB, AP, DE all demonstrate rigor, and all contribute to the UC calculated weighted GPA. IB might be considered by many to be the most rigorous, but at some point it becomes splitting hairs and the UC weighted GPAs do not distinguish between them. Maybe such things are not common at your school?

Even if this is not common, the UCs use three GPAs, as you know, so the unweighted UC-calculated GPA would be out of 4 for all students, regardless of IB status. There is also the capped weighted GPA which may also present increased parity for non-IB students. It would like only be the uncapped weighted where there would be a greater potential gap (unless mitigated by AP classes of DE classes). But that is just one of the three GPAs that the UCs use in admissions decisions.

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I’m sorry she went though that stereotyping by her peers. Based on your other posts, it sounds like she is thriving at Cal. Kudos to her for sticking with it and kudos to you for supporting her all the way.

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She definitely is and couldn’t be happier :slight_smile:

All credit goes all to her and her hardwork and determination.

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Looks like effectively two schools, one with high opportunity for rigor, and one with low opportunity for rigor due to rationing of space in the more rigorous options.

When is placement in the IB program determined, and is it rationed or capacity limited? Of course, there are also students interested in high rigor but may not find IB to be a good academic fit.

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Reminder to please keep your responses focused on the OP. TIA.

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While the unweighted GPA of IB kids may be lower, their weighted GPA is going to be higher, unless the non-IB kids were doing as many AP classes as the IB kids were doing SL and HL classes. They are attending the same high school, and there is no reason to believe that AOs at UC are “culling” the “IB kids” at that particular school.

However, you wrote (or maybe it was the OP) that the IB program was by invitation only. That means that kids are being admitted to the IB programs based on decisions made by school administrators using opaque criteria. That is an inherently biased system, or at least potentially so. If I were an admissions officer and I was told that “the IB program at this school is by invitation only”, as opposed to testing in or based on classes and grades of previous years, that would play into how much importance I would assign to a kid being part of the “IB kids”, as opposed to “only” doing AP classes.

Back to rigor, though. Colleges have repeatedly said that a student who does 25 AP classes had little advantage over a kid who does 10. UC calculations also means that the weighted capped GPAs of kids who have 8 APs is going to be the same as kids who have 15 APs. The GPA for UCs is also only for 10th and 11th grades.

Since the UCs only consider grades from 10th and 11th grade for GPA, only the first year of the IB program classes will be considered. That means that a non-IB students can have as many AP and honors classes as an IB students will have IB + AP + honors. As a result, a non-IB student can have the same weighted and the same weighted capped GPA as an IB student.

Bottom line, in your schools, you can indeed have “non-IB kids” who have the same weighted GPA as “IB kids”, and have fulfilled the “rigor” requirements that UC AOs are looking for to the same extent that “IB” kids have. Depending on the relative numbers of IB and non-IB kids, their may actually be more non-IB kids who have fulfilled the “rigor” requirement for the UC AOs than there are IB kids who have done so.

Many believe that “rigor” SHOULD be calculated on a linear scale, based on the total number of AP, IB, and honors classes that a student does, with “no honors or AP” at the lowest, and “every AP or IB class the school offers” as the highest. However, that is not how it is done. The “rigor” of a student’s transcript is a diminishing returns curve which can plateau, and generally do. So AO will probably not consider having 12 AP and IB classes over 10th and 11th grades as adding more to the “rigor” category than having 6.

Both parents and kids do not accept this.

Every year we get kids and their parents believing that “25 APs are better than 20, which are better than 15, which are better than 11”, and every year these kids and their parents are disappointed when this does not prove to be true.

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This is college dependent. There are quite a few unsupported claims in your entire post. UGA is an example of a school where 16 AP courses is perceived/calculated/evaluated to have greater rigor than 10 AP courses (as one part of the holistic read.) Maybe start a new thread because this is interesting, seems off topic here. I’m just an n of 1 (and don’t work at a UC) but at the school where I work the non-IB students at a school like OP’s (where it sounds like there aren’t opportunities for AP and DE courses) would have very little chance of admission.