Some of you know that after I retired, I became a full-time volunteer college coach with a particular goal of helping students from low-income families.
One of the families I am working with lives in California. The dad reached out to me because their daughter had a disastrous time with her college admissions, and he wanted help to make sure his son didn’t suffer the same fate.
The family lives in a relatively wealthy south bay suburb, but the family is low-income (complicated to explain). I never saw the daughter’s transcript, but I was told that she “stumbled a bit” freshman year and then did fine afterwards. But she also became National Merit Finalist, so obviously her grades were pretty good. She also clearly brilliant as evidenced by some of her extracurriculars.
As the dad admits, “mistakes were made” with respect to college admissions, and that the public high school counselors didn’t offer much guidance. All the private colleges she applied to were high reaches. But she also applied to a number of UCs, including (from memory) UCB, UCLA, UCI, UCSD, and UCSC.
She ended up with 14 rejections, no admittances, and a few waitlists. Her test scores were no longer considered that year for California colleges, so that didn’t help her at all. Fortunately the University of Oregon decided to reach out and offer her admission, even though she had not applied, perhaps because of National Merit. And she eventually got off the waitlist at UCSC, which she is attending.
This is the type of of “collateral damage” that is a natural part of an obscure college decision process, particularly for state universities. While those who spend a lot of time on CC could have pointed out the mistake of applying to only high reaches outside of CA, they didn’t expect an initial shutout from all the UCs they applied to.
For state universities at least, we need a better way.