Yes, but how many have true remedial summer programs? It becomes a resource question and raises concerns about being politically correct in labeling students.
Some of that differentiation exists already in schools. Take UCLA. They offer three different versions of math and physics. They have one for life sciences (the easy version), one of engineers, and they have honors physics sequence for kids wanting and capable of top rigor. The size of large schools allows them to differentiate.
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Some schools do a mandatory summer start to get students caught up.
If the top UCs had acceptance rates similar to the schools that you mention that might be true. But relative to demand they are big outliers.
The most selective school on your list UMich has an acceptance rate twice that of UCLA. GT acceptance rate is 4x of UCLA and over over 3x UCB. Purdue’s 75% rate is over 8x of UCLA and 3x that of UCSD, and Indiana’s is 9x that of UCLA. The comparisons are apples to oranges.
Every single seat at the top UCs could be filled with qualified CA residents without any reduction in student qualifications.
The schools in your list all use OOS students to subsidize costs, CA does the same. The difference is that the top UCs do not have excess capacity.
There are plenty of CA families who would be willing to pay more for access to UC seats. A step towards better aligning with in state demand would be to reduce non-CA seats drastically (say 10% like some other top publics) while increasing both tuition and financial aid to ensure that those who can pay do and those who cannot are not hurt.
I really do not like this approach, especially at schools like the top UCs which are demand constrained and very schedule constrained. Because of these constraints students already have trouble getting the classes needed to graduate, they are unable to change majors and they are limited in the number of semesters that they may attend. Every class section dedicated to remedial work makes magnifies these problems.
A better solution is to leverage the CC system to provide this support. The UC system already does this far better than most but they could do much more. They can increase rigor and allocate spaces in high demand majors for students coming from the CC system, something that isn’t currently done. This would be a more cost effective solution than increasing huge factory style remedial courses taught by TAs at crowded UCs.
I disagree. Honors physics is on level of Caltech and MIT. Most kids there are physics majors and very high caliber. If those options didn’t exist, top UCs would lose top kids to privates where such an approach is a norm. Both U Chicago and Cornell offer honors physics and so do many more school attracting the caliber of kids able to handle that rigor. I don’t think a bio major needs the same depth in physics as physics major. I think it’s wonderful that schools are able to differentiate.
I have very low opinion of CCs in rural areas like mine. I am sure in Bay Area and Los Angeles CCs offer quality instruction, but my son found STEM classes were lower level than APs. We are thankful that his drive for knowledge meant he spent free time watching MIT lectures in high school. Otherwise he would not have been prepared for upper divisions from our CC. I don’t want to generalize, because I am well aware that caliber of kids and hence caliber of teaching is very different in many areas.
I think that we are on the same page. I am all for extra rigor classes in the UCs; I do not think that we should be admitting underprepared (but promising) students to them who have to spend a good portion of their first year completing remedial work on campus. Every class section devoted to such work is one that cannot be used for more meaningful classes.
Many CCs are weaker but they don’t have to be. There are very rigorous CCs in the CA system that feed large proportions of their students into the UC system. Most are in SoCal and the bay area but they know what works and how to prepare kids for success in the top UCs. Leverage their learnings and programs to uplevel the CCs and provide better paths into competitive majors at the same time.
One downside is that some students would miss out on the full “4 yr college” experience but I personally think the positives outweigh the negatives for the system as a whole.
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I think the problem with CCs is they can only teach the kids they are getting. So in a very rural area with very bad high schools, the preparation is so poor that you get kids in Calculus 1 who can’t do algebra. You used to be able to remediate that somehow, but now they can’t offer algebra at CCs anymore and even with remediation, you can only do so much rigor when 12 years of poor educational foundation.
Nothing is perfect. I have over time become a proponent of testing so we can have some sort of benchmark so kids can succeed.
My kid’s best friend came into UCLA with 4.7 GPA (ton of local CC classes) and couldn’t even handle freshman bio and had to change the major. That should never happen.
We all envy CCs in Bay Area Los Angeles.
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This is mostly a function of their small size relative to the state population.
| School | UG population | State population | State/UG |
|---|---|---|---|
| UCB | 33k | 39M | ~1200 |
| UCLA | 33k | 39M | ~1200 |
| Arizona State | 65k | 7.4M | ~110 |
| Georgia Tech | 20k | 11k | ~550 |
| Michigan | 33k | 10M | ~300 |
| Purdue | 39k | 6.8M | ~170 |
| Texas | 42k | 30M | ~710 |
You can see from Transfers by major | University of California that UCs do allocate spaces in high demand majors for transfer students, most of whom come from community colleges.
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They do:
https://laney.edu/mathematics/catalog-descriptions/ (201, 203)
Mathematics (210, 212, 114)
Agree completely; as I mentioned in the response it is a demand problem within the UC system. Since the UC schools are small relative to the CA population they should not be admitting significant numbers of OOS and international students until their capacity is more in line with demand from qualified in state applicants.
CA does a great job here in the general. But admission into highly impacted majors at the top UCs from the CC system is very difficult. Align CC prep courses with core requirements and at the same time improve access to high demand UC majors. Both need to be addressed.
Ha! Our CC discontinued them and told us it was a state mandate. I am forwarding this link to their office today!
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Many of the high demand UC majors are in engineering or CS, but are readily available at UC Merced, which has plenty of space to expand, unlike other UCs.
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A small portion of students being admitted to high demand majors is not the same as doing more to allocate spaces into them. If students had a better shot at getting into CS from a CC more could go that route. But, they don’t and that is just one example.
The tendency of some to equate all UCs as equal is a huge part of the problem. Pretending that ELC benefits someone by guaranteeing them a spot at Merced is just virtue signaling. It is completely meaningless because they could have had it without issue by checking the “box” on the application. Giving them something that they obviously do not want and pretending that it has value just makes things worse because it shows how out of touch people in the UC system are regarding how the UC system is perceived. They may want to see all UCs as equal but most people outside of the system do not agree.
Yes, most people like the eliteness and exclusivity of UCB and UCLA until they or their kids are the ones excluded.
If the state in the distant past had bought up a lot more nearby land so that the UCB and UCLA were able to expand to 100,000 students each (not needing other UC campuses to be built), then more students could go to the “top two” flagships, like in other states such as AZ, NV, etc. But then there would be much less appeal to those who look at them as elite and exclusive.
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I do think that is the case for some, for others it is the quest for the highest performing peer group possible, and other like the locations and dynamic environments. I think that the challenges extend beyond the top two at least down to the top six. If they had planned for expansion things might be better. They already are big schools and to get to where they would need to be to achieve results similar to some other flagships they would both need to become bigger than any schools currently existing in North America.
The exclusion piece is a big issue. No matter how people feel about the elite private schools I think that a majority of people feel that admissions to public schools should be transparent and it is anything but in the UC system. When people with elite level stats are denied admissions at a T20 they are frustrated. When they come from a public school in CA and the same things happen to them in the UC system they get angry because in most state the publics are relatively predictable for in state applicants.
This is not the case with the UC system and it is very obvious that a finger is put on the scale for some to the detriment of others. I generally agree with the reasoning but the implementation is so opaque that it feels rigged against certain groups and areas. That is a problem because people lose trust in the system and we are currently living in a time where system trust is at historic lows.
Personally my family never had to go through the UC application process and I do not have any more kids who will have to navigate the college admissions process. When the process feels broken to someone with no “skin in the game” I suspect that the angst of those going through it far exceeds how I feel about it.
Have you spent much time on the discussion threads for other state flagships? It seems to me that folks in other states complain about similar issues. Unless the flagship is purely non-holistic, admission may seem unpredictable, and when OOS students are admitted, families may feel that they are taking spots away from in-state students.
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What do you think would be a system that people would feel is less rigged? Switching to the top x% of the graduating class model like Texas? Top 2% can be guaranteed Cal or UCLA? Top 5% are guaranteed one of the “top 6” UCs? Top 9% are guaranteed a UC?
Or what would be your recommendation?
That comes back to the top two (or six) campuses in the desirability rankings being small relative to the state population. If there were just two UCs of 100,000 undergraduates each, then they would be about as selective as UCM/UCR, but then every UC student would have the prestige of attending a top two university in the state, which would be comparable to many other states’ flagships or top two.
We do already have a whole thread about that (I believe it was started after a similar discussion including @Aimlesscat1 on this topic in the UC forums).
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