Actually auto admit at ranges from 10% to 50% already exist for about 33 public universities in Texas. It is 10% for Texas AM College Station, UT Dallas, Texas Tech and the University of Houston to name a few.
IMO, the major advantage of any auto admit regime for publics is that it sets an objective standard to set a floor “safety” for many, many students which is likely to be affordable. The beauty of the Texas system is that it is simple to understand and is completely transparent as to college admitted. I just don’t think it is practical for large publics not to be selective in certain majors because of resource (human and facility) constraints.
I am not saying UC Merced is not a good school. The truth is it has an 89% acceptance rate. If a student in the top 9% applied to UC Merced, they would definitely get in, so then what good is the guarantee? I think the issue with the school is more the location. From pictures it appears to be this big college campus in the middle of nowhere. That is not enticing to most. Like others have said, it doesn’t have a football team. My son is really in to sports and that is a dealbreaker for him. It really depends on what a student is looking for in a school. It is not the same for everyone.
I think it is completely reasonable to have whatever dealbreakers a student, and their family, is comfortable with. Seriously.
At the same time, the presence (or lack thereof) of a football team has nothing to do with education. It is an extra. An extra that some people value greatly, which again, is totally reasonable. If you have the resources to pay for extras - that’s great! If not, then trade offs are part and parcel of college admissions.
It is ok to be sad you can’t get all the ‘extras’ you might want for a college experience. It isn’t a tragedy.
Seems like being in the “middle of nowhere” does not deter students from thinking that colleges like Dartmouth, Middlebury, or Penn State (main campus) are desirable.
Yes, except for the impacted majors and campuses where they offer redirection.
Redirection provides the opportunity to forward your Cal State Apply application to a CSU campus that has capacity for additional students. It is offered to eligible applicants who were not admitted to any CSU that they applied to due to limited enrollment capacity.
However, this does not guarantee admission to a specific campus (7 out of the 23 are considered campus-impacted, meaning that they do not have enough capacity overall to admit applicants at the CSU minimum), and some majors at some campuses are at capacity (nursing and pre-nursing are impacted at all campuses it is offered, so higher than the CSU minimum is needed).
On the other hand, a student meeting the CSU minimum can study computer science at any of the 15 CSU campuses that are not impacted at the campus level or for the computer science major. But those 15 CSU campuses do not include the popular ones like CPSLO, CPP, SDSU, SJSU where admission to the campus and computer science major are competitive.
The problem UC Merced has is not Merced’s relative isolation, it is the geographic isolation of the campus from the city of Merced. It gives the impression of a campus plopped in the middle of a big swath of ranch land. I don’t think there is any extra-campus development around (walking distance) of the university. Imagine if UC Davis lacked the town of Davis around it, and was just called UC Woodland after the small town 5 mi away. I think there would be a similar dynamic.
Texans seem happier with their system than some Californians do with that system. Fortunately, Texas is seeing great improvements in schools beyond the flagship ( specifically, UT Dallas now has higher stats than flagship), so it is successful in building up its other schools, which is needed given the 30 million in population.
Texas residents can access the flagship through the CAP system if they are willing to spend a year elsewhere.
I am truly interested in this statement. Also, I’m not sure if your word choice was intentional, but it seems to compare Texans in general to some Californians? That doesn’t seem apples to apples from a statistical point of view.
No, I don’t know of polls covering this, just my personal experience with UMC Texans, compared to the CC cohort of Californians reporting here. If you care to commission a poll, I am sure there likely would be interest
Of course, it should go without saying that those who are unhappy make up a disproportionate percentage of those who speak up. Not to mention the CC demographic is largely skewed to the more privileged classes and does not include the much larger population of California college applicants.
Native Texan, Naturalized Californian here. I received an auto-admit to UT back in the day. I just want to give some framing here. I think a big difference - one that can’t be stressed enough - is that the #1 and #2 public universities in the country are California’s flagships - Berkeley and UCLA then #6 and #7 are Davis and San Diego. For years, a quarter of the class has come from out of state which UC system has justified because they want to continue the national draw to the schools and for finances. There’s been a rebellion among California taxpaying parents asking who are we saving these spots for if we’re rejecting our own. The UC are now on a trajectory to lower that out of state number, but IMO, Berkeley and UCLA will never let it get as low as UT.
To be clear, my earlier statement was not limited to those Californians at community colleges. There is also a very large number of Californians at CSU and UC campuses who are not represented by the disappointed College Confidential posters.
The other aspect is that when Texans are dissatisfied with the high-school-to-college process, they may be dissatisfied at earlier stages of the process (versus the college application process), such as they (or their kid) not “winning” the cutthroat rank competition that is sometimes mentioned as being prevalent at some Texas high schools.
There’s so many LAC’s in the middle of nowhere. In fact my son applied at Grinnell. But Grinnell can’t match UC Merced location next to Yosemite National Park period.