[quote=carli]BG, when you wrote, “I can clearly see here you’re looking for a ‘scapegoat’ because you all fear your own kids might not be admitted to UC one day,” it made me chuckle. Too late for scapegoats and fear. I’ve already got one kid there. He’s at UCLA, but not for long. He’ll graduate June 10th after making it through in 4 years (woot woot).
And I don’t have fear that my other kids won’t go to UCs. I have a fair degree of confidence each kid will find his/her way regardless of which school they graduate from (or maybe don’t graduate from)!
You are parroting a tired old stereotype of the uber-driven tiger mom who is pushing her kids in to a UC or the most competitive college they can get into. Sure, they’re out there, but most parents I know these days are doing their best to avoid (or at least minimize) the stress fest that is the college admissions process.[/quote]Congrats to your kid, carli, and I mean that sincerely. Your kid had to be savvy and on top of things (as well as have a good GPA) to be able to get all their needed classes in a timely manner to graduate in four years from this “flagship” school with the largest student body in the state!
I wasn’t really referring to “tiger parents” per se, but so many on this board who, in the past, posted here that they were essentially prostrating themselves for their kids in the name of eventual admission to a top university. A good example of this is paying $200K++ more for a home (which they could have gotten for $200K++ LESS elsewhere) which is located in a particular public school attendance area. Also, over-scheduling a young kid and paying for numerous private “enrichment” programs (to compete with Asian foreign university applicants?) Whatever happened to swinging on an old tire hung from their big backyard tree after their homework was done?? (Oh, I forgot, these parents are living in homes with postage-stamp lots with no trees … by choice :=0)
In my mind, all of this furious pre-planning of your kid’s life is for naught, for all the reasons outlined in the state auditor’s report re: UC (admitting non-residents with lower admission criteria than they expect of in-state residents in order to get their tuition premium) and the fact that at least half the CSU campuses (located in urban areas) actually honor their commitments they made to local school districts to ease up a little on their preferred admission criteria (admit a HS graduate with a 3.1 GPA instead of the 3.6 GPA they would prefer to admit). This is done so these students who grew up within a ~38 mile radius of the campus have the opportunity to commute from their family homes to classes instead of lease pricey on-campus or off-campus housing. As it stands, the traffic is so bad in LA County that many of these freshmen who grew up 15+ miles from campus end up staying on campus their first year, anyway, and renting nearby off-campus housing after that.
The biggest complaint today about college being inaccessible to the masses, IMO, is that it is too expensive. If you take the room and board expense out of that equation, it becomes exponentially more affordable to many, many more families.
CA needs to endeavor to do that for its resident students … to place them a top admission priority. Whatever slots are leftover after qualified residents accept their admission offers could be offered to non-residents. This is how it is in other states (many of whom only have 1-3 public university campuses) and this is how it should be in highly populous CA with a multitude of its public university campuses located in highly desirable areas.
A HS senior from Indiana with a family that has enough $$ to send them to an OOS university isn’t going to choose to apply as a freshman to campuses in Merced, Fresno, Chico or Bakersfield. What’s the point? They have plenty of schools to choose from in their home state. They’re going to apply to coveted UCSB, UCI, UCLA, CSULB, UCSD and SDSU for very obvious reasons to us all. Hence, SDSU’s 80-90K freshman apps they now receive by the end of every single November. The deserving and qualified HS graduate who grew up 0-15 miles from SDSU (and who may have been “promised” admission by them in writing) is turned down for admission while SDSU admits non-resident students in droves. It’s not the fault of SD local freshman applicants that a kid from MO wants to apply to their local university and expects to get accepted by virtue of the higher tuition they will pay. If these flyover-country applicants were so dead-set on attending university near a CA beach, then their parents should have thought about that when their kid was in 7th grade and moved here and got situated so their kid could be a “resident” and “local-area applicant.” Of course, they didn’t. They kept their $680 mo PITI on their $110K home and saved up for college, instead, while the parents in SD County made great and even onerous sacrifices to raise their kids in coastal CA, most paying $4K and up annual property taxes or now exorbitant rent as well feeding the bloodsucking FTB beast.
I will not apologize for my opinion that CA public university systems owe non-resident freshman and junior applicants nothing. Eff ’em as far a I am concerned. If they want to go to college OOS/OOC, they have many choices to apply for admission in states which don’t have enough qualified resident population to fill their public colleges and universities. CA is well past overflowing with qualified resident applicants for theirs, thank you.
