The Problem with UC Schools
Sending your kids off to college is an increasingly costly, competitive, and stressful undertaking anywhere in the country. But it is especially so in California.
For decades, it has been more or less standard practice for California high school seniors with a GPA of 3.5 or better to apply to a handful of University of California (aka UC) schools, especially the highly popular coastal campuses (UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley). Not long ago, chances were that qualified students would be admitted at least to one or two of the less selective coastal UC campuses (UCSD, UCI, UCSB).
In recent years, however, this strategy has become a risky proposition, even for highly qualified applicants. With the number of UC applicants steadily rising year over year, the bar for admission sits a bit higher each fall. Just take a look at the trend of acceptance rates for the top seven UC campuses:
Unbelievably, the acceptance rates for UCLA and UC Berkeley are now (as of 2022) not much higher than for Harvard University (4.3%), Princeton University (5.5%), or Yale University (6.3%)! Though the bar for admission to other UC schools sits lower, the odds of being admitted to any of the most popular coastal campuses, UCSD, UCI, and UCSB, are still heavily stacked against applicants. Only at UC Santa Cruz did the odds of admission substantially improve for applicants. It remains to be seen whether the higher 2023 acceptance rate is the new normal at US Santa Cruz or turns out to be an outlier.
On the ground, this dramatic shift in numbers has already had life-changing consequences for students and their families. In the past five years, I have heard almost the exact same story from different college students: They had been strong to excellent high school students with high SAT/ACT scores (one had a 35 ACT score (99th percentile!)) and outstanding extracurriculars, in two cases including multiple top-notch internship experiences in their fields of interest. Yet, they were rejected by all of the UC schools to which they had applied. As a result, they all ended up attending colleges they had never seriously thought about, much less visited, before.
Apart from being extremely disappointing, failure to gain admission to any of the UC schools can also have dire financial consequences. One of the students who shared their stories with me was accepted only at the University of New Hampshire, where as a California resident he had to pay expensive out-of-state tuition. This meant that both he and his parents were forced to take out (student) loans well beyond the amounts they had envisioned - and prepared for. It had simply never occurred to them that their son might not get into any of the UC schools on his list.
Needless to say, these are suboptimal results all around. They are disappointing for students and parents alike, can saddle students and their families with unexpected debt, and, most importantly, prevent students from receiving the best college education available to them.
The good news is that it does not have to be that way. As I will explain in future blog posts, with a different, less conventional college application strategy, an excellent, affordable undergraduate education is still well within reach, and not only for straight-A students.
