First, I don’t agree with this. Merced is currently ranked alongside other well regarded institutions like RPI, George Washington, and in recent rankings above Riverside and Santa Cruz. Merced is also climbing rapidly.
Second, who cares? Those rankings are mostly self-propagating feedback loops of people wanting to go due to high rank and then being high ranked because people want to go, and aren’t an accurate reflection of the educational or developmental opportunity.
“It’s rural and isolated with hardly any town”. Well, so is Dartmouth, and Middlebury, and Colgate.
I’m not going to be Merced’s cheer squad, but I think a lot of the dismissiveness towards it is undeserved, and a lot of students are passing up a good opportunity by dismissing it out of hand.
Yep, it would be small, but if we’re trying to add some transparency to the UC system admissions there has to be something more than a “holistic review.”
There’s a big difference between Merced not being anyone’s first or second or even third choice and dismissing it out of hand. For one thing, you could go to Merced and do well and then try to transfer to your previous first or second choice.
Ehhh everyone would still be upset when they don’t get computer science or engineering and their auto-admit to UCLA only applies to Philosophy or Russian Literature or whatever. They will never make everyone happy.
Everyone is always looking for guarantees in college admissions. Why should there be? Nothing else in life is guaranteed.
That’s great! It’s things like this that will make Merced more attractive over time. Two things can be true at the same time - Merced can be a great opportunity AND Merced is not in the vast majority of kids’ dreams when they think of going to “a UC.” For example, it doesn’t have a football team while all the other UCs do. This may seem trivial, but for many it isn’t.
It’s really quite paradoxical. People want guarantees, but then if you give one, they don’t want that either because just anybody can have it, and you don’t get to feel special for having it.
I’m as prone to this thinking as anyone else, I don’t exempt myself. It’s just kind of human nature.
We loved everything we saw at Merced. I really believe Merced would have been an amazing choice for our daughter. Better access to teachers, classes, dorms, research opportunities…etc. We think it is a top school. trying to convince/influence/advise our 18 year old daughter of this was hopeless. Merced needs a top tier marketing campaign for its student social life, and market it to the high schoolers.
The peer pressure not to attend Merced was just brutal from my son’s schoolmates. Validation from peers means a lot to young people this age, whether we like it or not.
You can guarantee admission to a public university in California. Why isn’t that enough? Do I think it would be significantly better if the top 5 GPAs (of 500) at my high school were guaranteed admission to UCLA and Berkeley? Absolutely not. Students already pick classes to maximize GPA in an attempt to game the system. Imagine raising the stakes for them. I think that creates more stress, not less.
People seem to think that drawing an equal percentage across each high school would create more equity and socioeconomic and racial diversity in acceptances. I am skeptical. My high school has a majority of minority students and a huge income range, but if you took the top percentage of GPAs from the class it would mostly be wealthy and white.
Merced is also called “the gateway to Yosemite” and there is a shuttle that goes from Merced straight to this most glorious of national parks. It’s strange to me that this doesn’t entice more potential students. I would love to be so close to Yosemite!
I think Merced is such a hidden gem. I am glad it is getting a little more recognition in the rankings, but wish more students would be open to it. It offers an excellent education, still has a high acceptance rate making it a sure shot for high achieving students, and is a great value for the money. And while some may bristle at the location, I think that is a potential plus, if you like being out in nature.
I am not sure they are doing themselves much of a favor with their advertising/branding. In my area, we have billboards that say things like “First, Further, Forward”. The subtext (as I take it) being that Merced is a good place for first gen students, that they can feel comfortable that they will fit in there. And while I get the goal is to entice new first gens into getting college educations who might not otherwise think it is “for them” - an admirable goal indeed, I think it has the unintended (?) effect of implying that it’s not a great place for someone from a college educated family or who never had any doubt that attending a good college was their goal.
Just because some kids and parents, or even a large number of kids and parents, are disappointed in the results of a system does not indicate that the system not “fair”.
I’m sorry, but “fair” doesn’t mean “my kid was accepted to the school that my kid and I believe that my kid deserved”.
There are, and there will always be, fewer places at the most popular colleges that there will be graduating high school students and their parents who believe that they should be accepted to these colleges.
A very large proportion of those high achieving students who are not accepted to colleges to which they believe that they deserve to be accepted will feel that the system is unfair, and that it is rigged against them, or people like them. Their parents are often even worse.
Whether this is true or not, that is the way that these applicants and parents feel, and they will often get hung up on anecdotes or unproven claims to bolster their feelings of be treated unfairly of of suffereming discrimination.
In some case, they are right. However, in many other cases, they are not correct, and they are defining any rule which doesn’t work in their favor as being “unfair”.
The thing is that “fair” is very subjective. For a fairly wealthy family whose kid has a High GPA and great ECs, the fact that the kid was rejected while a lower income kid with a lower GPA and less impressive ECs was accepted.
However, a lower income family will feel that accepting an applicant based on achievements that were made possible by families having a good amount of financial resources that are available to them is unfair.
The point of systems like that of Texas public colleges is that it is supposed to be looking at what high schools students did with the resources that were available to them. That way, smart high school graduates aren’t penalized for lacking financial resources at home and at school that allow an equally smart kid to get better grades and engage in more impressive ECs.
Now, in that system there is an inherent “unfairness” for all students in every high school. If you are accepting the “top 5%”, that means that, by any measure, there will be students who miss that cutoff by an insignificant margin. In a class of 100, the different between #5 and #6 can be miniscule, like a GPA of 3.951 versus 3.945. Is it “fair” that a students “miss” auto admission to their top choice because of a 0.15% difference in grade?