Berkeley Early Admission Notification (Freshman Applicants)
Sounds like UC Berkeley made acceptance offers to a batch of freshman applicants today (Friday, February 8, 2019). In previous years this group came out to about 2,000 students; it’s unclear to me right now how big the group is this year. The offers targeted high achieving students; I believe all of them were also also invited to interview for the Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholarship. If you did not receive an acceptance offer, DO NOT WORRY, regular decisions will be released on March 28, 2019.
If you received an offer, you will have the option to choose a “First-Year Pathway.” The “First-Year Pathways” include programs Berkeley implemented in order to take the maximum number of students possible while alleviating classroom crowding. Here are the choices offered: Traditional Pathway (starting in the fall); Global Edge (summer in Berkeley, fall in UC London Center, spring in Berkeley); or Fall Program for Freshman (FPF). Keep in mind that Global Edge has an age restriction (you must be 18 years old by August 16, 2019) and students in FPF take classes that are separated from the main campus classes (might take more effort for you to fully integrate into campus/extracurricular activities – something to consider if you are really interested in things like being in a sorority or fraternity).
Congratulations to those of you who were admitted! Those of you who haven’t heard, hang in there!
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Which UCs send out some early acceptances other than Berkeley?
UCSB sends out invitations to the Chancellor’s Reception, an equivalent of early notification of admission offer (see here for more information). UCI and UCR have sent out admission offers early in the past (sometimes as early as January or February), but that varied from year to year.
Just curious why UC Berkeley want to notice early with two different group ? Also, how do you know it ? thanks
Regents’ Scholarship requires an interview so those students get early notification to allow enough time for the scholarship selection process to complete before students commit to enroll (“Statement of Intent to Register” deadline is May 1). Generally, UCs make early admission offers to highly qualified students in an effort to entice them to enroll (this is common practice among all colleges, such as Early Decision or Early Action). For Berkeley, this would include the MET students (the program takes about 50 students and it sounds like they all received early notification) and other highly qualified students (I think last year’s early notification group came out to be the top 15% of the entire admit pool; I would guess this year’s group is probably about the same).
I know when the early notification went out because two of my students were admitted; there were also discussions of the early notification on College Confidential. The information for last year was either posted on College Confidential or sent out by Berkeley in an email to counselors; I don’t quite remember. Other pieces of information were accumulated from various sources over the last decade or so that I’ve been doing this (for example, Berkeley used to invite Regents’ Scholarship students for interview in January before the whole “early notification” thing was implemented, maybe couple of years ago).
Thanks – make sense for those who can apply scholarship to commit with effort.