In Reply to: Thanks for the feedback! Great info as I hv decisions to make posted by BruinLove42 on April 05, 2024 at 11:48:47
What the data has shown, is that if you are not poor, students who have the same GPA/SAT do the same professionally regardless of which college they go to unless they are in the top 5% of an elite college.
For almost everyone else, the rank of a college is nullified by the amount of attention/opportunity you get for being a better talent in the distribution of students.
If you go to a higher ranked school and you are in the bottom 1/3, you will most likely change majors which means the bottom 1/3 of engineers at Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, UCB, UCLA, etc won't be engineers where they likely would have been if they went to UCSD, UCSB, UCD, etc.
My main goal in high school for my kid was to make sure he didn't cheat in school and found something that he enjoyed.
I let it be known that I honored an honest C over a dishonest A. He did get one C in computers which knocked him out of the running for engineering in UCLA and UCB but I let him know I was proud of his honesty.
Luckily he found a robotics team that he loved so he's going to UCSC as a robotics major. He should be okay with his lesser GPA competing against some kids who had to cheat to get that same GPA. That was my goal in high school.
I wanted to find the right school for him where he didn't have the pressure to cheat or feel as if he couldn't compete against his peers. Luckily since UCSC has a robotics undergraduate, he can work in robotics with a BS where as if he wanted to UCB or UCLA he would have to get a master's to break into the robotics field since they only have mechanical engineering majors.
I really didn't care about college rank.
The last President of my college went to CSUN. The President of Pierce College went to CSUN. My very talented VP went to CSUN. You can be very successful going to a CSU and working hard also.