In the Spring of 1964, I assumed that, if I did apply for admission to Columbia College during my senior year in the Fall of 1964, it was unlikely that such a selective college would admit me. But NYU-Uptown's undergraduate college (which then had more dormitories on its campus than did NYU-Downtown's Washington Square campus did) had a reputation for being an undergraduate college for "dumb rich students," whose high school grade averages were too low to gain admittance to the then-more slective undergraduate CUNY commuter schools like CCNY or an Ivy League undergraduate college like Columbia College.
So I assumed, in the Spring of 1964, that even if I applied and was rejected for admission to Columbia College in the Fall of 1964, I would still have the option of attending NYU-Uptown's undergraduate college, if I didn't want to just attend Indiana University. Because NYU-Uptown was likely to consider me "less dumb" than the usual type of high school seniors who applied to or attended NYU-Uptown's undergarudate college in the early 1960's.
In retrospect, if I had realized in the Spring of 1964 that, despite Barnard College being across the street from Columbia University's campus, the undergraduate classes at Columbia College were generally much more "males-only" and less co-educational than the academic classes in the public schools I had always attended or the academic classes at NYU-Uptown, I probably would have just only had my PSAT exam score results just sent to NYU--even though Columbia College's catalog of course offerings looked more intellectually interesting than NYU's.
Realistically, though, if my family hadn't ended up moving back to New York City by the Summer of 1964, I likely would have just ended up enrolling at Indiana University in the Fall of 1965 (despite my desire to go to college in NYC), because my father's income would not have been high enough in the Fall of 1965 for me to be able to afford, even with the aid fo student loans, the cost of tuition, dormitory housing and travel to New York City from Indianapolis during my freshman year at either Columbia or NYU, given the lack of the $500/year New York State Regents cholarship that I only became qualified to receive by living in New York State rather than in Indiana.
In the Spring of 1964, the only particular thing I associated with the University of California-Berkeley was that its college football team generally lost more NCAA Pacific Coast League college football games than it won. So, prior to the Fall 1964 student revolt in Berkeley, the though ot possibly applying to University of California-Berkeley never even crossed my mind, despite my mother's chidless older sister and her husband then living near Berkeley.
Yet if I then had not been mainly focused on living in New York City near the world of theater during my college undergraduate years if possible, I might have been able to figure out a way to gain eligibility for California's in-state tuition to UC-Berkeley that residents of California enjoyed. By, perhaps, utilizing my aunt and uncle's California residential address when applying to the University of California-Berkeley.
