Though note that California’s GDP is about 1.7x higher than Canada’s as a whole.
That’s an awesome breakdown, thanks. I’ve never heard of ARTU ranking before and D25 will be interested in it. Her top choice is UBC.
We are in a great school district in California. In 2023, as a school district with multiple high schools reporting, there were 624 acceptances into Cal and UCLA. I’m assuming some, but not all, overlapped and that does not mean 624 kids got in to the Top.
(To compare to some of the even more elite schools, there were 8 acceptances to Harvard, 16 acceptances to Princeton, 27 acceptances to Stanford, 11 acceptances to UPenn, 10 acceptances to Yale. Again, assuming some of these may overlap but maybe less than the UCs?)
Going down the list, your point is even more true. Acceptance numbers for San Diego (442), Santa Barbara (582), and Davis (801). Again, same caveat as above. On paper, these numbers seem high. But there is a sense that the UCs are still a huge crap shoot, and when we hear about kids with 5.0 GPAs and state awards only getting into one UC–last year, it was my kids’ friend’s older sibling who “only” got into Santa Barbara, it increases the scarcity mindset. DH waltzed into UC as an undergrad; I did the same but for grad school. D25 is nowhere near a 5.0 GPA and has extremely modest ECs. She most likely won’t get into any UC unless she applies to Riverside and Merced.
I see the stereotype of Tiger Parenting as (1) prestige chasing, (2) excessive resume grooming, and (3) and some air of superiority about one’s children that they only deserve The Best. I can see how anytime someone makes the college application prep process explicit (especially when Moms do it, tbh), it raises the specter of the Tiger Parent. I’m not Asian and I can see how Asian parents are in a challenging position. By my working definition, I have some TP tendencies but it is pretty minor. The spectrum has an extreme that is easy to identify and ridicule. I don’t care if my kid gets into UCLA or Cal; I know she won’t. But if Davis isn’t even an option, tbh I’m going to be pissed. Because no, she won’t go to Riverside or Merced. (And there is my prestige chasing laid bare.)
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High schools do students a disservice when they use very exaggerated weighted GPAs that are much higher than the recalculated GPAs of commonly targeted colleges.
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And they used that to win all six top matchups!
So I guess my point is in many states, this would be equivalent to saying if your kid can’t go to the one top flagship, she can’t go to another public university in your state. Actually, in many states it would be equivalent to saying she had to go to a flagship in another state, since their own state would not have even one public university at that target level.
And I get the psychology, but that is indeed a function of living in a very big pond. It is easier to be the big fish in a small pond, and so even if you are objectively just as big of a fish in your big pond, you are not going to find it easy to be the biggest fish. And if your pond is really big, not easy to be one of the six biggest fish either.
But again objectively, your fish are just as big. Just not in local relative terms.
Edit: By the way, the other way to “solve” this would be to scale individual universities to state size. Like, California is in fact like 6.6X the size of Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin (Madison) has about 37000 undergrads. So, no problem, just make Cal Berkeley into a 245000 behemoth. Problem solved!
Heck, you can even divide it up into a North and South of 122500 each. Get creative!
Of course divide it much more, say into 6-7 locations each about the size of Wisconsin (Madison), and–we are back to where we started.
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This is why in many parts of the country we all scratch our heads! Agree with NiceParticularMan- there are some states with flagships which cannot compete with the likes of Riverside or Merced-- and yet we all know Californians who disdain those choices.
Even on CC-- there are about 10 states (so at least 20% of our state U system) where we all only mention certain schools when a kid HAS to have a particular type of climate or weather, or has severe budget constraints which makes one of those schools particularly (and unusually) affordable.
It’s a conundrum for sure. On par with hearing from parents “My kid’s starting salary is $150K in Menlo Park but that’s practically poverty level- he’ll have to have roommates to afford an apartment”. That’s the NORM for most college grads- roommates, in order to afford an apartment, and they’re sure not making that as a legislative analyst in DC, a marketing assistant in Kansas City, or in a finance rotation in Dayton Ohio.
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Indeed, Riverside is ranked #36 in top public schools and Merced is ranked #28, making both more prestigious (if you use rank to determine prestige) than many states’ top public school.
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Perhaps some students and parents see the top flagship in another state as more prestigious than the eighth ranked in state school, even if the latter is ranked higher in typical rankings.
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Serious question here from an outsider-- why is Riverside seen as an unacceptable school? I have asked the same question previously about Merced so know that it is considered a bad college experience due to it being in an isolated “cow pasture” with nothing to do. But what about Riverside?
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Or, to a private college with enough FA to fill the proverbial donut-hole family’s COA.
Both Riverside and Merced are the two lowest ranked and least selective UCs. They are also the “consolation prize” UCs for top 9% California students (who get guaranteed UC admission) if those students were rejected by every UC they applied to.
The thing is they are really both excellent schools.
Merced it a bit isolated, but that’s not inherently bad for student who likes a more rural, less busy environment. There are shuttle buses from Merced to Yosemite National Park, one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places on earth. Great hiking to blow off steam, you can study under a waterfall. The area surrounding the university is, however, under developed and the university is not well integrated with the surrounding city. But the university is growing, moving up in the rankings, and I bet that will change in the coming years. It’s the newest UC. In my opinion, an “up and comer.”
I think Riverside has become somewhat more “acceptable” and “respectable” now that Merced is considered the UC of last resort.
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This is definitely a thing in some circles, and not just in California.
In fact this is a long time ago, but back in the day there were upscale Detroit suburb families I knew who if their kid could not get into Michigan, they would rather send them to a “flagship” in another state than Michigan State, even if Michigan State was both cheaper and arguably higher ranked academically.
Again I get the psychology, but from the outside it can seem a little strange that you see the presence of such a good public as Michigan in your state as thereby devaluing a Michigan State despite its own substantive merits.
And no, I don’t think everyone who thinks that way is a Tiger Parent, but I do think it is getting into the right sort of territory for that mindset, where what matters is not the merit of your own kid’s journey but whether your kid is beating out other kids.
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So potentially I think that can be quite different. I do think large publics are not necessarily the ideal colleges for all kids, and so I think sometimes it can make sense for families to look to see if they can get enough aid, including possibly merit aid, from privates to make a different sort of experience affordable.
But I think when you layer a strong “prestige” motive on top of that, it gets problematic because your best merit bets may not be the most “prestigious” possibilities. Sure, a few very famous/wealthy privates also have the most generous need aid–but typically little or no merit.
So getting the best possible offers, particularly for kids who are not necessarily going to get admitted to those few most famous/wealthiest privates, may involve much broader thinking.
What I’m hearing you say is that the average Merced or Riverside student would not necessarily overlap the typical Amherst or Wesleyan student. They would have to be “pointy” in one regard or another.
The experience of a friend’s kid who went there from the Bay Area (precisely because it was the best cheap school she got into) was that most students were local to LA and went home at weekends (which wasn’t feasible for her), and many were poor, first gen students without the money or time for social activities. She found it very hard to make friends and fit in, and eventually dropped out.
The high proportion of poor, first gen kids (often relatively local as well) also seems to be an aspect of the Merced experience: at our high school the few who do go there tend to be first gen URMs.
It’s a somewhat different mix of students at UCSC (and due to location not so easy to go home at weekends), and as a result it’s often looked at quite differently by middle class parents, despite being fairly comparable to UCR in admissions and actually lower ranked than UCR and UCM. You could argue that’s classism, although another explanation is that widespread publicity about the high cost and uncertainty of housing at UCSC deters many poor first gen kids from attending in the first place.
It’s an interesting thought experiment: if UCSC had ample on-campus housing (and they certainly have plenty of space, just way too many NIMBYs) how much more prestigious and competitive would it become? Location-wise it certainly has the potential to become another CPSLO or UCSB.
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For sure in my circles, those sorts of LAC kids are in the same competitive mix with the Ivy+/“T25” kids (and service academy kids, which no one seems to talk about in my online circles but I like to mention as they are very much a thing in my real world circles). And they may not have applied to publics at all because that isn’t the environment they want, but if they do it would be your traditional short list of “top” publics, plus also William & Mary which is a special case.
And actually, we send relatively few (and I gather declining) kids to Cals specifically because for our kids they are OOS and they are really getting very uncompetitive on cost. So obviously it is one thing to say you wouldn’t go in-state to Riverside, another thing to say you wouldn’t pay $78K/year to send your kid to Riverside. Because that would indeed be kinda crazy, no?
But the schools I was more referring to are like forum favorite St Olaf, or Kalamazoo which I know about from a long while back, and so on. Like I think there are a lot of kids who are competitive but not a sure thing for a “top” UC who would also be very competitive for a large merit offer from LACs like that. And I could totally see a given California kid preferring that sort of option to going to Riverside if it was competitive on cost after merit (or need if applicable). Not because it would be objectively better, but it is a very different experience for sure.
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People rightfully do not consider Merced anywhere in the top 30 public universities despite what USNWR might say. Why? Because a top college is filled with academically strong students. But California’s strong academic students avoid Merced and instead join the UCs that are above it. In contrast, a typical state flagship gets most of the strongest students in the state.
California has abandoned the SAT and ACT, but we can look at the last time that UC-Merced collected these scores. Back in 2019, Merced had an ACT spread of 18-25. In contrast, the University of Iowa, ranked considerably lower than Merced, had an ACT spread of 22-29. Stated differently, the median student at Merced is likely below the 25th percentile at Iowa.
This matters because the speed at which a class can cover material depends upon the median student in the class. Calc at MIT will be very different than calc at UC-Merced.
https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/merced/freshman-admission-profile.html
The difference in strength is also reflected in how well the students do after college. Students from UC-Merced show earnings of $64K on collegescorecard, whereas the Iowa students earn $65K despite living in a much lower cost state.
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Please get back on topic. There are already existing threads about the UC system. Thank you.
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I think there is a perception only kids who go to certain schools do well in life. My friend’s kid got into USC and the only thing he told me was, I won’t be poor since USC is a target school for banking. 
What makes me sick about tiger parenting (and my area isn’t as bad but becoming as more Bay Area folks move here) is how little people care about education itself. The reason to go to U Chicago is to immerse in its amazing core, not because it can put you in an investment bank. The reason to become the best at violin is because you love to play and it’s your calling not because you want to get into Harvard and never touch an instrument again. All of this makes me sick to my stomach. Sometimes I think some of the more interesting kids are no longer at the very top schools because they haven’t been curated by parents.
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I agree completely. The grade outweighs the actual learning for many - but this is a product of the hyper-competitive culture in many areas. People want to know your GPA, not your thoughts on The Brothers Karamazov. This is truly disappointing to me, but as long as our culture is one of competition, I don’t see that changing.
(Not that anyone even seems to care about literature at all anymore since STEM is so often seen as the only respectable pathway for the high-achieving, ambitious student. If there is no money to be made in literature, then what is the point? As some/many around here seem to think…)
Well, yes, and I am speaking as someone who lives in the Bay Area.
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I know this issue concerns various AOs as well, but they have a problem with some kids getting very good at faking being interesting! The really crude formulaic approaches probably don’t work, but I do wonder if sufficiently sophisticated consultants can actually help make that happen sometimes.
Heck, I think sometimes us free “consultants” are potentially doing that. Like, not necessarily for the kid or parent we are actually conversing with, since we typically trying to help them understand how to make the most of who the kid actually is.
But surely it is possible for third parties to look at those conversations and think, “You know, I am not actually someone who is interesting in that way, but if I said I was, how would the colleges know otherwise?”
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