My kid is five. I’m not sure I want my kid to go to the UC system as it is today.
It’s not because I don’t value education or appreciate how incredibly good the UC schools really are.
It’s because of how insanely competitive admission has become.
And back to my main point, if you don’t want admission to UC and particularly UCLA and Berkeley to be insanely rare, they’re massively too small.
I know first hand, many parents who have wrapped their whole family life for years around college admission prep. Kumon, check. SAT boot camp, starting in 7th grade, check. Summer academic, camps, check. College placement parent courses, check. Volunteer international internship program, check.
Some of these kids are very accomplished. Some have great resumes. Most, IMHO, are drones baking the college admissions recipe book, chained to the grindstone of putting in hours. Some like it. But they’re just grinding out the recipe, IMO.
I for one believe the reports that the admissions to the Ivy’s and neo-Ivy’s like Stanford have gotten out of hand, that they basically boil down to a lottery and a likability interviewers/admission officer going to bat for you.
The student in your prior linked article, while accomplished is a pretty ho-hum run of the mill story in California. Top 9% of her class? Whoopie-do. Don’t get me wrong, that’s good, but if the top 9% of the class deserve admission to the UC flagship schools, then Berkley’s budget pretty much needs to be increased 20X.
This year 500,000 kids will graduated. Near 4.0 and over 4.0 GPAs are frankly run of the mill in our better high schools that have AP/honors and College Prep courses.
Student body president, yawn. That’s not me, that’s the college admission officers. Homeless shelter volunteer, yawn. Accomplished instrument player, yawn.
Just following recipe.
We’ve gone further now, because now, you need to be an concert worthy musician having performed in international venues. (Not sure if that’s marketing spin on Band Camp performed at Oktoberfest in Drunkensberg, Duetschland or an actual noteworthy international performer). I do know that Harvard admitted a clandestine serial farter You get the picture, although I’m guessing they catch most of the resume fluffers, if they care.
Yes, I as the parent don’t want to run that rat race.
But back to my point, we will be graduating 500,000 kids a year from high school. We’re expecting 60%+ of them to go to college. Berkley’s Undergrad freshman class is about 4000 Californians. UCLA is about the same. It’s notable that both admitted roughly 10,000 Californians out of nearly 60,000 California applicants. I’d hazard that most of the 10,000 Berkeley admits are also UCLA admits.
In the 1990s, we were graduating 250,000 from high school. Last year it was 425,000. And going forward, the classes are getting larger.
Berkeley and UCLA have room for 1%.
Nationwide, we will have roughly 3.3 million graduates this year. Harvard has room for 1660. Stanford has room for 1700. Berkeley 5000. UCLA 5000.
