This may be of interest to International applicants to UC colleges...

[dudgeonmaster]

I applied from the UK to Berkeley for a Classics Ph.D. and was rejected with a standard e-mail. However, a few days ago the Chair of Classics admissions sent me this message, and it may be of some use to other International students who are thinking of applying:

You will soon be receiving (or may already have received) a form email bearing my name, but I did want to write to you directly to say how sorry I am that we were not able to admit you to our program in Classics. As we are painfully reminded every year, the number of qualified applicants always far exceeds the number of offers of admission we can afford to make. In your case, there was an external factor that weighed heavily against your application from the outset. Because UC Berkeley is a public, state-funded institution, we operate with a restricted budget and a peculiar fee-structure. International students are much, much more expensive for us to support than students with US citizenship, because they can never establish "California residency" (thus qualifying for radically reduced fees). We can't afford to have more than a very small number of such students in our program at any given time. As a result, we often find ourselves in the position of rejecting applicants that we would otherwise be eagerly competing to recruit.


With all best wishes,

xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx

Associate Professor, Graduate Advisor & Chair of Graduate Admissions

[Erin]

Weird. I don't know how the UC system funding works, but I do know that admissions do greatly depend on residence. It's possible that the California government pays money to the UC system for every California resident enrolled in their programs.

Sorry about your bad luck.