So, it’s no secret now that the amount of applicants in the pool increased since the 2016-2017 academic year. It’s also no secret that UCs have a specific threshold or ceiling of admits they can make. I was wondering, though, since UCLA, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara received the most applications out of all of the schools, will their acceptance rates drop due to the increase of applications. Excuse my lack of proper of terminology, but when UCs admit students, they accept on a basis of a projection of how many students will their SIRs for the fall, will this change as some of the UCs received more applications than the previous year? For example, UCSB’s application total for Fall 2017 was around 80,000, and their acceptance rate was roughly 33%, and this year for Fall 2018, they received about 92,000 applications. Does this mean that the acceptance rate will decrease? I guess that’s what I’m trying to question. Thanks in advance for your guys’ input!
Most likely yes the acceptance rate will decrease. Schools can only accept a number of students for admission as they have limited resources, but honestly, you never know. Also consider that each year it’s been getting harder to get into UCs.
But on the other hand, I also heard the UC system is giving extra funding to the schools that take in more students?
If applications rise, then the acceptance rate normally falls.
However, there can be exceptions, especially if a school is prepared to grow. In that case, the school can increase admissions along with the increase in applications. If the growth in admissions matches (or exceeds) the growth in applications, then acceptance rate will remain stable (or even rise).
In fact, this happened just a couple years ago at UCSB. For Fall 2015, there were 70,568 applications; for Fall 2016, there were 77,114 applications. Typically the acceptance rate would fall in that situation. But the exact opposite happened: the acceptance rate actually rose, from 33.9% in Fall 2015 to 35.9% in Fall 2016. How is that possible? Because UCSB was prepared to grow; they increased admissions from 23,074 in Fall 2015 to 27,648 in Fall 2016.
http://ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/_files/factsheets/2017/fall-2017-admissions-table2.pdf
My guess, though, is that UCSB is not currently in a position to grow like that. So I would expect the Fall 2018 acceptance rate to drop.
Of course they do. My guess is that the three inland UCs – Davis, Riverside, and Merced – will grow significantly more than the coastal UCs over the next 5-10 years, and will claim increasingly large shares of the UC enrollment and the UC budget.
For example, it may be just a matter of time before Davis surpasses Berkeley as the largest UC campus in northern California. The Davis campus is surrounded by literally thousands of acres of flat, developable, UC-owned farmland, plus the UC administration wants a Davis satellite campus in downtown Sacramento, under the noses of state legislators. It’s not too hard to envision another 5,000 - 10,000 students at Davis. It would be a lot harder to add that kind of capacity at Berkeley, which is already overcrowded and hemmed in by some of the most expensive real estate in the country.