I meant to bring up UCLA in my earlier post. It’s probably a mix of the romanticized image people have of LA, SoCal weather, and UCLA’s reputation for having a better academic/social life balance than Berkeley or UCSD. It doesn’t surprise me that UCLA made both lists, but it does signal that most parents and kids aren’t that familiar with what these schools are like on a day-to-day basis.
There’s no doubt that UCLA is an academic powerhouse, but it’s a little TOO popular. The university is growing by the day with an increasingly cramped campus (largest UC by enrollment, smallest by campus size). UCLA has been continuously renovating classrooms over the past couple of years to add more seats to match rising enrollment, and I’ve had lecture classes where a few students wound up sitting on the floor/auditorium steps. There’s also been a problem with finding enough TAs for popular fields like biology and CS; some departments are admitting more graduate students (more than they should, arguably) to meet teaching needs, while others are reaching out to related departments to recruit TAs.