I’ve been looking at the UC systems application and enrollment numbers.
UC has 10 universities and had 220k unique applications in 2018.
50k are transfer students from CA state colleges and OOS. That leaves 170k unique freshmen applications for 50k new freshmen slots for all 10 universities.
Typical yield rate is 40%. So they would have 125k offers enrollment across all 10 universities to fill these 50k slots.
Roughly 15% are OOS so ~100k offers are to CA students for 40k CA slots.
120k freshmen applicants are CA students.
40/120 is 33% overall admit rate for CA students which is the low end. On the high end you have 100(offers)/120 which is 83%.
So if you are in the top 3rd of applicants, you’ll get an offer to at least one of the campuses. On average you’ll get 2.5 acceptances.
@Greymeer, and the top 9% of CA HS grads (by the way the UC system calculates GPA) are guaranteed a UC. However, many kids who are in that group don’t have an interest in UCR or UCM. I find the lack of interest in UCR to be very unjustified.
i don’t know about berkeley’s acceptance rate, and i’m not sure if this has already been stated, but i heard from a girl who is participating in NSA training at UCLA that the acceptance rate this year was 14%.
Over the past few years, the UC systemwide admit rate (i.e. admission to at least one campus) for California residents has been at least 60%.
Fall 2015: 103,117 unique applicants; 61,834 admitted somewhere in the system; 60.0% admit rate
Fall 2016: 105,459 unique applicants, 71,178 admitted somewhere in the system; 67.5% admit rate
Fall 2017: 111,856 unique applicants; 69,972 admitted somewhere in the system; 62.6% admit rate
For Fall 2018, there were 119,626 unique applications from California residents, which is higher than last year. However, I don’t think there have been any major increases in capacity, so they will probably admit around 70,000 unique applicants, as they did over the past two years. In that case, the systemwide admit rate will be around 58.5%.
That would be a drop from the past few years. Even so, you don’t have to be in the top third of applicants to get an offer to at least one campus. More than 50% of California residents who apply will get an offer somewhere, and it will probably be closer to 60%.
UC has released the number of applications, but not the number of admits. So officially, the acceptance rate is unknown.
But we know that UCLA got 113,409 freshman applications (the most in the country) for Fall 2018. We also know that for Fall 2017, they admitted 16,494 applicants. Let’s assume that their capacity hasn’t changed much over the past year. In that case, the acceptance rate should be about 16494 / 113409, which would be 14.5%.
You could project the acceptance rate at any UC campus using this approach. For example, Berkeley got 89,294 applications for Fall 2018. They admitted 15,567 for Fall 2017. If the admit number is about the same this year, then the acceptance rate will be about 17.4%. Obviously this approach might not work if the number of admits is growing (as it could be at UCM), but it is likely to be close at campuses that are pretty much at full capacity (like UCB or UCLA).
With respect, what good is it to get an offer to “at least one of the campuses” if it’s a) not one you can afford (ie. one that’s out of your area) or b) one that doesn’t have your major?
As with all statistics, this “equation” oversimplifies a real problem. A student gets rejected from all UCs except for Merced, and gets admitted undeclared. Merced is unaffordable; Merced doesn’t have the student’s intended major.
If the reason a student goes to community college instead of a UC is they can’t afford to get housing in Merced and only were interested in UC’s in close proximity to their family home, why wouldn’t they consider a CSU? There are usually CSU’s within reasonable proximity of most of the UC’s. And the CSU’s are likely to have at least as good a range of majors as their community college. Unless going to community college is with the intent to transfer to a UC 2 years later, in which case, a great way to save money.
CSUs were actually more expensive for us than UCs. CSUs have less money, UCs have Blue Gold, at least they did for us. Further, some of the CSUs are as selective as the UCs. My local CSU, SDSU, is as selective as the local UC, UCSD. And transferring in two years is simply not as easy as you say. Google “transfer maze awaits California community college students”.
I wasn’t suggesting it was easy, though that article is interesting so thanks for the suggestion. In my day at UCLA I knew quite a few students who transferred from Santa Monica Community College. Many were not locals to LA but had moved there specifically to go to SMCC with the intent to transfer to UCLA eventually. That community college had a well developed transfer plan specific to UCLA. Not sure if it still exists or if there are similar relationships between other UC’s and their nearest CC’s. Same in reverse – I saved money by taking summer classes at SMCC (and, after my freshman hear, at the nearest CC to my hometown) instead of UCLA to fulfill some non-major requirements and UCLA accepted the transfer units. It was a bit of an administrative pain but manageable.
The article doesn’t distinguish between the rates affected by students who are having trouble because each school and major have different unit requirements and which are due to students who start/stop their studies, change majors, go only part-time, etc. I knew quite a few CC students in the day who did it part-time and without a focused concentration to complete in two years with a specific transfer goal in mind. That’s not to say it isn’t a real issue – it clearly is because there’s not a unified set of requirements to transfer even within the state. That should be fixed, but I’m not holding my breath…
As imperfect as the CA system is, it’s superior to NJ. I was shocked when we moved here from CA and realized that a state with over 9 million people had only one mid-ranked UC-equivalent (Rutgers) and nearly no CSU equivalents. I looked it up a while back and collectively NJ provides 4-year (BA+) public college opportunities for only a fraction of the rate of its population as CA does for it’s population.
Rice: ~2272 accepted, 20,898 applicants. Publicly announced acceptance rate of 11%. Goal is class size of 930, slightly smaller than usual (last year’s class was overenrolled by 100 due to strong yield). Source: attended an admitted student event last week, director of admissions spoke.
If you want a state university that is intended to serve the needs of local students who commute, then you should be looking at CSUs, not UCs. CSUs have local service areas and local admissions preferences. UCs were designed as statewide institutions, which is why their only admissions preference is for state residents.
No it isn’t. The raw acceptance rates may be numerically similar, but that’s meaningless given the differences in the applicant pools. If you have a 30 ACT, for example, your chances of admission are pretty good at SDSU (25-75% ACT range 23-28) and pretty bad at UCSD (25%-75% ACT range 31-35). The UCSD pool is way more competitive.
In fairness, I would agree that SDSU is getting too selective to adequately fulfill its mission as a CSU. But that’s why there is now a second CSU campus (San Marcos) in San Diego County.
For a more recent perspective, Google: “UC President Napolitano calls for guaranteed admission of all qualified community college students”.
@Corbett UCLA and Berkeley have released estimates on applicants and acceptances, and from those it looks as though UCLA is at 14% and Berkeley is at 16%.
Use or don’t use, but you will find those are accurate in a few months when it is officially released.
Those numbers seem reasonable – I guessed 14.5% for UCLA and 17.4% for Berkeley, based on Fall 2017 admissions numbers. My guess for Berkeley was slightly higher than 16%, but the admit numbers obviously do fluctuate from year to year, so 16% is possible. For example, if I had based my guess on Berkeley’s Fall 2016 admit number (instead of the Fall 2017 admit number), the result would have been 16.2%.
Could anyone kindly repost the most updated/comprehensive list showing the ED (and regular decision if possible) acceptance rates based on the prior threads? TIA!!!
@sbjdorlo I don’t know acceptance rates. but my son (fr SF Bay area) got into SDSU Weber Honors College but was waitlisted UCSD. Maybe that was an unusual situation?
@MomofKZ, not necessarily unusual; it really would depend on major. UCSD is more selective than SDSU, particularly for STEM majors, but it’s also harder for kids outside the SDSU area to get in, so congratulations to your son on both the admissions and the honors college! Well done!