Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Remind me that this is why we skipped...

It's kind of a joke.

The kind of joke that isn't very funny.

Perhaps it is correct to say that "Davis accepts more merely good or average students than Berkeley accepts." But this is to ignore the reality of the UC system as a whole. Berkeley doesn't produce "top notch" graduates in every discipline that the UC system offers a degree in. It doesn't even produce spectacular graduates in every discipline offered at Berkeley.

One thing which your lack of familiarity probably contributes toward is a lack of understanding that admission to the institution is far from admission to the program of the student's choice. The elite programs at Davis (a land-grant institution, so like a school such as Washington State or Iowa, ag and engineering programs abound, which tend to draw students from less stellar academic pedigrees than the hard-science disciplines which a campus like Berkeley is known for) are in Vet Med and a few other areas. I know that to be admitted into the programs that feed Davis' Vet Med school is at least as difficult as admission to Berkeley. Another major, perhaps not so selective. True. But if your aim is to gain admission to Davis as a Vet student, you're well-advised to go to Davis as a pre-vet student.

Program rarity contributes to some odd bedfellows. An Ivy pedigree won't get you into most VetMed schools, and relatively few Pharmacy programs care about it, either. Oh, they care where you did undergrad. But the "elite" there isn't what most people think of when they think "elite college."

And yes, I know this was trolling. I'm not biting, but explaining just in case other parents don't know some of the particulars here. Graduate/professional programs are a different world than Ivy/Law school admissions in terms of what matters. "Prestige" is highly field-specific. In spite of what Harvard might like to think, they don't turn out the "best" graduates in every field that they offer a diploma in. It's not a school which is particularly well-respected for it's chemistry graduates, for example.

I'd guess that's highly district-dependent. Our district recommends kids on the AP track for math have at least a B in the previous class; for science APs, the recommendation is for at least a C in the previous class. But anyone is allowed to enroll. (The stick is that they only let you drop a level at the semester break, and the grade you get is the grade you get.)

I personally face planted in 7th grade math, and it had absolutely no impact on my life beyond that, including not keeping me out of 8th grade Honors Algebra I.

I think my law school roomate got about zero value out of his random Harvard masters degree in some environmental/policy thingy.

Each career track/field has their own entry points and value for degrees.

As an example, one of my other law school roommates had a brother who went to Stanford undergrad. His parents were quite willing to pay for him to go to med school. However, they weren't willing to pay for a more "highly ranked" private med school when they knew that the local state med school would do just fine. They were well aware of the difference in prestige in terms of ability to succeed in a profession with respect to med school and law school. They were fine paying for Stanford undergrad.

They had plenty of money, but they weren't interested in wasting it, so it was a cost-benefit analysis.

Yes, UC Berkeley is considered the best of our UC schools. However, the other ones are still very good. My point was how difficult it is to get into a UC that isn't even berkeley.

I'm not sure what "top-notch" means. I suppose that if you judge in the context of industrial metrics and expensive extracurricular activities chosen for admissions appeal, UCB and Ivy League students are "top notch." By industrial metrics, I mean results on standardized multiple choice tests and inflated grade-point averages.

But I don't think that these metrics are necessarily indicators of what I'd define as a top-notch student. To me, they mostly describe top-prepped students or top-groomed students.

Personally, I see top-notch as meaning that the student is thoughtful and thinks critically about what he reads/hears/sees, can find creative solutions to problems, has a history of being able to follow through on dull stuff as well as interesting stuff, and is very intelligent. Obviously, I'm only talking about undergraduate university admissions here. The definition would be different for different disciplines.

Before 20 or 25 years ago, one of the strengths of the US college admissions system was that colleges looked at these kinds of attributes much more than I suspect they'd admit to now. Yeah, I know there are more people now, but Harvard still got way over 10,000 applications for its freshman class in the early 80s. Today we have an arms race, and the industrial metrics plus extracurricular activityitis have taken over. The result is that we're creating lots of hyper-prepped students who'll suffer (or already have suffered) the way that JonLaw describes.

Sigh. I have a family member who did not get into UC Berkeley (I'm thinking it was probably close, but her HS likely has MANY very strong applicants) and is at Davis instead. She's not over it. In the grand scheme of things, I really wonder how much it matters. But she's convinced she's a failure.

I had never HEARD of Berkeley until I got to Harvard Med, that's how green I was! I think the UC schools are still very good but they are also really overcrowded. We had a babysitter at one who was also pre-med, and she could not get into basic classes like Organic Chem! She would sit on the overflowing lecture hall floor for 2 weeks auditing the class and then not get in.
Berkeley is not cheap either, nor are the other UC schools. They run about $35,000 a year with room, board, and tuition. Stanford/Harvard, etc. are about $50,000 year. More expensive, but if you can't get your classes and get out of UC in 4 years, it's not alot cheaper.

I remember being wait-listed at Princeton years ago.

That didn't convince me that I was a failure, rather it just made me feel a great deal of anger toward Princeton.

I was pretty green, too-- I had only the haziest notion of how one attained a high-profile research career when I entered college. I didn't really understand what graduate school was, nor what a PhD entailed (no, really). I knew that physicians went for more schooling after a bachelor's but nothing more than that, really. I was extremely fortunate to have an undergraduate advisor who recognized those deficits (having lived them herself, growing up where everyone she knew graduated from high school and went to work processing pineapple) and got me thinking about graduate school.

Clearly "elite college" wasn't much on my radar. Luckily a few of them were recruiting me, or I would never have applied in the first place. I got in everywhere that I applied. But times were different then, and there seemed to be less of a fixation on the Ivies, at least out here in the West. Even much-vaunted Stanford and UCB weren't necessarily viewed with the same cachet that they seem to have acquired in the intervening three decades.