> The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent. For top Californian students targeting Eng/CS these

> The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent. For top Californian students targeting Eng/CS these programs are very visible. The good CSU programs (Eng/Business @ SJSU, SDSU, and CalPoly SLO) tend to overprotect their yield rate. Personally, I and a significant proportion of my HS friend group would have preferred attending CalPoly SLO (it's a fun campus, great hiking, great beach, great academics, great job placements), but we all got rejected because our scores (SAT/GPA) were way higher than the median, yet we ended up at Ivy Tier programs (EECS@MIT/Berkeley/Stanford/etc). Same thing happened to my sibling as well. This has been an issue for almost 2 decades now because high demand programs in Californian public universities (STEM, Business) haven't increased the amount of faculty or seats per department yet the number of students trying to apply to these programs has skyrocketed