Yes, you can get into top B Schools - in fact, you’d be Direct Admit for Indiana Kelley
Yes, it can be easier to enter certain roles from certain schools - but even attending a “target” school provides no assurance and attending a non-target doesn’t eliminate you.
Nothing matters more than affordability - you don’t want loans - from the feds or your parents but if you take them, no more than what the feds allow - $27K.
There is no assurance that a business major will be lucrative. Possible - yes - but assured.
Business can have a high ROI… but given your interest in sustainability and climate science, it appears that you’re interested in a values-driven approach to business… so it might not be the best choice to put yourself in a position where you could feel pressure to maximize your income from day one, in order to repay your parents, as opposed to seeking the opportunities that are best aligned with your values and long term goals.
You mention liking UCB and UCLA; have you taken a close look at Irvine? They have a robust undergraduate business school (which a majority of the UC’s do not), and their center for entrepreneurship has some interesting sustainability initiatives: Sustainable | UCI ANTrepreneur Center
As a potential safety, Colorado State participates in WUE reciprocity, so costs would be similar to a UC even without merit, and your stats could potentially get you merit that would improve on that baseline. Their “Business for a Better World” strategic vision includes a strong sustainability focus that has earned recognition: Sustainable Business- Business Undergraduate Program
Likely a lot of that is more correlation than causation. Very intelligent, hard-working, ambitious, savvy, and connected kids are more likely to eventually get the most selective business employment positions, but they are also more likely to attend highly selective colleges with a reputation of being good for such positions. So whether those colleges are truly adding a lot of value is hard to isolate.
And in fact, depending on what you are talking about, the overall percentages are still pretty low at even the most famous undergrads. So if there is some sort of value-added effect for some students, it does not appear to be automatic, more the sort of thing you might have to compete against your fellow students to get. Which is not going to be easy in a school full of very intelligent, hard-working, ambitious, savvy, and connected kids all competing for the same thing.
I agree it would be great if you could agree on a budget with them and then you could explore different options for meeting that budget. Like if that budget went up to just in-state California public costs, that might be the way to go, but you could also look at other options where perhaps merit could get you within that budget.
I think people here could help you identify a lot of interesting possibilities like that, but without knowing if your parents would pay (without demanding repayment), that may not make much sense.
You should pin your parents down in terms of exactly how much they would pay towards your college without requiring re-payment. That way you can choose schools that will get you to a budget number that works for you and doesn’t present a huge financial burden after college.
Here is some statistical information regarding the UC’s and Cal states if you have an interest in applying.
Only 3 UC’s have Undergraduate Business schools: UC Riverside, Irvine and UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley starting this Fall 2024 has allowed Freshman direct admission into their HAAS Undergraduate school. All the other UC’s have Business related/adjacent majors.
For the Cal states, all campuses offers Business majors and the top CSU’s are impacted: Cal State Long Beach, San Jose State, San Diego State and Cal Poly SLO.
Below are the admit rates for the UC’s and some CSU’s along with admitted overall GPA ranges for each campus.
My son just started at UCI as a business major through the Paul Merage School of Business and is very happy so far (he had almost identical stats as you and got a Regents Scholarship).
His reach/target schools were: Babson, Carnegie Mellon, Boston University, University of Rochester, USC, Cornell, Northeastern, Cal Poly SLO, SDSU, and most of the UC’s. His safety schools were: UC Riverside, Chapman, Cal Poly Pomona.
He had a tough choice choosing between UCLA, UCSD, UCI, Northeastern, Babson, and Cal Poly SLO. He was interested in UCLA b/c of the prestige factor but their business economics major wasn’t what he was looking for and UCI was the best fit.
