To pretty much get a full ride at Berkeley, your family income has to be less than 40k.
Harvard and Princeton do not consider home equity as asset. For Regents Scholars having family incomes between 40k and 60k, it’s cheaper to go to Harvard and Princeton than to Berkeley. It gets much cheaper for incomes between 60k and 120k.
Yale has a 200k asset exemption, including home equity. Now, 40k income and 200k assets(excluding home equity) for Berkeley would yield an EFC of 7-8k.
There is no priority registration at Berkeley.</p>
<p>i dont think the OP has told us his intended major. </p>
<p>if its engineering or chemistry Berkeley would be the obvious choice. as for Business berkeley has the Undergrad BS in business admin from haas. if you get accepted as a junior. i dont think harvard has an undergrad. business degree. for biology, some may argue they are equal in terms of quality of faculty. for all other degree i think harvard is better</p>
<p>another thing is whether, Berkeley is hot, harvard is cold</p>
<p>location, maybe the OP wants to stay in cali. to be close to his family</p>
<p>they are both fine schools, if he got into harvard in the first place he should be real successful at Berkeley</p>
<p>yeah i agree with sunfish. i also live in a decent home in socal, and i also received a full ride with berkeley regents. my income IS less than 40k, and i only have to pay 1500 to go to princeton, whose FA is comparable to that of yale and harvard. something is missing in the OP’s story.</p>
<p>there is a priority registration in berkeley. in my case, i will be getting priority registration as there is a CA law requiring public universities to give veterans priority registration. indeed, im a veteran also, if im not mistaken, cal also gives priority registration to athletes and disabled students. so yes, there is priority registration too bad i cant use it until my second semester at cal. </p>
<p>i dont really know the whole situation of the person who originally started this thread, and i wont speculate. but in my situation, i wasnt required to give my parent’s info for FAFSA since i was considered financially independent for a qualifying military service. however, that stupid CSS/Profile that I had to fill out for Yale, i still had to put my parent’s income information and much of their properties… my step dad in particular owns a business, a small trucking business in los angeles so thats more money against me. this is the reason why there is huge disparity between my Yale and Cal Financial Aid</p>
<p>really, i could have used my GI Bill for yale (my mom wanted me to do this), but it is better used for grad school. i could have asked my parents to help me with school, but they are struggling financially right now. so Cal indeed was the better choice for me. Yale is a great university but it wasnt the right fit for me. to be honest, my top choices for schools were Harvard and Stanford. but those schools denied me… so now, im going to Cal right now though, i am SOOOOOO in love with Cal. the air is so crisp, it is a BART away from San Francisco, the filipino community is great (Im filipino btw), they have a great legal studies major, and this is the probably biggest factor, i wont be that far away from Los Angeles. :)</p>
<p>so i dont really have any regrets… go cal. go bears!</p>
<p>im an incoming undeclared Pre-med about to have a really hard time at Berkeley. i know for me its going to be hard but atleast i know what to except</p>
<p>EECS kicks ass here. It’s also very hard, they’re not lying. </p>
<p>Berkeley is good at basically everything academic as a university, in fact generally world class. It is unique in how it’s superb at mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering and many subjects in the humanities all at once. Not something you get so easily.</p>
<p>The burden is you YOU [generally addressed], the student, to take advantage of it.</p>
<p>I believe I’ll call a bluff on this one… Harvard gives more money than UCB… the Reagents scholarship is need based, so Harvard should have given more money… and the OP never responded to explain this…</p>
<p>I chose Berkeley over Princeton. A semi-tough decision, but the money ultimately decided it. To be honest, it’s only undergraduate college. As long as you do well and get in a good graduate school, there’s almost no difference. If you’re still bragging about going to Harvard or Princeton for your undergraduate as one of your most worthy accomplishments, you really haven’t accomplished much since then. This in my opinion of course.</p>
also, if im not mistaken, cal also gives priority registration to athletes and disabled students. so yes, there is priority registration