92,000 applicants were for the freshmen class.
For those of you on the east coast, it is kind of hard to get into UCLA. 
I was talking to a parent of a junior in high school. She was telling me stories about very smart kids having trouble getting into top schools.
It is tough out there.
Dstark, once you get beyond the sensational part of the applications at UCLA, a clearer picture is provided by looking at the unduplicated numbers for the UC entire system. The real question to answer is … How hard is it for a CA student to be admitted at a UC school? The answer is still … not very hard! 61 percent of CA applicants get admitted by the UC system. For OOS, it is around 50 percent. 57 percent of internationals are admitted.
Add the backdoor entries at Cal via the dynamic Junior College transfers, and a different image emerges. It requires a bit more than a pulse and a wallet like it was a couple of decades ago, but there is hardly an apocalypse in California. It is simply a factor that it is easy to apply to many UC at once and that many submit You Never Know applications.
Xiggi, I went to CCSF and then Berkeley.
Thanks. I did have a pulse.
It is hard to get into UCLA. There are students with high gpas and test scores that aren’t getting into the school. I heard stories.it is not Stanford hard.
My clients have had a tough time at OOS public schools this year. UCLA, Michigan, and Wisconsin all turned down some of my students who got into strong private universities.
I still believe that UCLA is the most unpredictable UC of them all. Maybe majority of California students ends up in UC system, but the best UCs like UCLA and UCB are very difficult to get into.
@xiggi, umm . . . OK.
It’s also not very hard for TX students to get in to a University of Texas school.
But just as UT-Brownsville, UT-PanAm, and UTEP aren’t UT-Austin, UC-Merced isn’t Cal or UCLA.
Not spoken with a lot of knowledge about Texas or California, PT.
There are several problems with your misguided analogy. There is a world of difference between Brownsville or El Paso UT schools and the likes of UCSB, UCSD, Davis, et al. Care to check the reputation of the various UC schools -or rankings- and compare them to an academic wasteland like UTEP that accepts 95 percent of its “have a pulse” applicants?
Is it hard to gain admission at a Texas flagship? A 7-10 percent rank or a 25 percent with a 1300 SAT does not seem such a high bar! Take away 3-4 competitive schools, and the CAP schools and lower are incredibly easy to enroll at.
The UC system has been heralded as the pinnacle of state education on a worldwide basis. Throw in the CSU system and the booming CC such as DeAnza, Foothill, and their siblings, and the “hard” to get into a competitive school in California becomes quite a quacking canard.
Competent students are piling up at Berkeley. If the bar is place higher for OOS and intls, it remains that getting the nod at the top public schools in CA is extremely difficult. Lower your sight to the SC, the Riverside, or Irvine, and it becomes entirely pedestrian. And again, where do those schools show up in Bob Morse popularity contest?
Sixty percent admission at the UC is a FACT. Inconvenient truthful perhaps, but a fact nonetheless.
PS Merced accounts for a small fraction of admissions. About 50 percent of all applicants toss an application at LA, SB, SD, SC, R, and I. Merced gets barely 15 percent of them.
OK . . . . and what’s your point, @xiggi? That some UC’s aren’t as difficult to get in to as Cal and UCLA? Again, are you trying to say that UC-Merced (or even UCR or even UCI) are the same as UCLA? If not, I’m not sure why your point that 60% of CA applicants can get in to a UC has much relevance when discussing UCLA.
Oh, and I know plenty of the public systems of CA and TX. I can’t say that your supposition that I don’t or your seeming failure to grasp why my comparison of the UT system and UC system as fairly apt (as you pointed out, the lower parts of the UT system don’t compare to the lower parts of the UC system, but UT-Austin is also easier to get in to for in-state kids than the UC flagship) says much positive about that LAC education.
To use another analogy, if I said “Northwestern has a 13% admit rate” and someone else replied “80% of Midwestern applicants get in to a Big10 school” and “How hard is it for Midwestern kids to get in to a Big10 school? Not very hard! It’s hardly an apocalypse in the Midwest.”, I think most people on here would be wondering how that second person managed to score highly on the SAT CR section.
The UC program on the whole may be highly regarded, but individual UCs have their own reputations. UCMerced, UCSC and UCRiverside are not viewed the same way as UCBerkeley and UCLA. Xiggi, just because a high amount of people get into a UC school, does not take away from UCLA’s difficulty. The UCs arent just the same schools with different locations, so they shouldn’t be “package-dealed” as such.
OK . . . . and what's your point, @xiggi? That some UC's aren't as difficult to get in to as Cal and UCLA? Again, are you trying to say that UC-Merced (or even UCR or even UCI) are the same as UCLA? If not, I'm not sure why your point that 60% of CA applicants can get in to a UC has much relevance when discussing UCLA.
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Oh, and I know plenty of the public systems of CA and TX. I can’t say that your supposition that I don’t or your seeming failure to grasp why my comparison of the UT system and UC system as fairly apt (as you pointed out, the lower parts of the UT system don’t compare to the lower parts of the UC system, but UT-Austin is also easier to get in to for in-state kids than the UC flagship) says much positive about that LAC education.<<<
Sorry, PT, I read your posts about Texas and California and draw my conclusions. Would it suffice to say that I know a LOT more about both than you … do?
The fact that you do not seem to understand the dynamics of the admissions in both state is pretty evident, including the slotting process.
My point about 60,000 CA freshman gaining a spot at a UC is simple. And the number is 50,000 out of 100,000, if you remove Merced from the equation. It means that half the students who apply at the HIGHEST system in their state are ADMITTED. So much for Chicken Little! And again, if that does not work, the JUCO transfer back doors swing open nicely.
Again, pay closer attention to the rankings of the various UC schools before comparing them to the schools in Texas. Have you not quoted the rankings of ARWU enough to know how many UC schools are in listed in that top 100 WW list. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/9-uc-campuses-ranked-among-world’s-best-universities
UC Berkeley, fourth
UCLA, 12th
UC San Diego, 14th
UC San Francisco, 18th
UC Santa Barbara, 41st
UC Irvine, 47th
UC Davis, 55th
UC Santa Cruz, 93rd
UC Riverside, 101-150th grouping
If that fails, how about the 25 top public universities according to USNews? Still want to compare UT Brownsville to schools ranked above Wisconsin?
Lastly, the UC system is not a football conference. That analogy is ridiculous. And so are the comments about Merced.
Why should anyone be surprised by the number of applications to UCLA? The state of California has a greater population than all of Canada.
GMTplus7, you worry me. 
There are only 400,000+ public high school graduates a year in Calif.
http://www.dof.ca.gov/research/demographic/reports/projections/k-12/
My H is a professor at a UCB. For the record, his CC transfers are excellent students–in many ways better than some of those admitted as freshment. To say that now “it requires a bit more than a pulse and a wallet” to get into a UCB from CC is, I think underestimating the difficulty. It requires a lot more than that. The UCs are hard to get into. Even for CA kids and even for transfers.
I’m not sure if your point is that 112k is remarkable in ABSOLUTE terms or in RELATIVE terms. I was thinking in relative terms compared to other universities in the US.
There may “only” be 400+k public HS grads in CA, but it’s hundreds of thousands more public school grads than other states have. UCLA has a huge default pool of potential applicants who are eligible for reduced in-state tuition rates. Why is is surprising that Best Buy has a line of customers circling the block on Black Friday when it is selling coveted big screen TVs at a deep discount?
I am more impressed by the large number of applications to schools which do NOT have default reduced rate tuition.
Then don’t be impressed.
qialah, I like your post.
My H is a professor at a UCB. For the record, his CC transfers are excellent students--in many ways better than some of those admitted as freshment. To say that now "it requires a bit more than a pulse and a wallet" to get into a UCB from CC is, I think underestimating the difficulty. It requires a lot more than that. The UCs are hard to get into. Even for CA kids and even for transfers.<<<
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Happened to miss the “as it was a couple of decades ago”? Nobody wrote those words with NOW. The UCs are as hard to get into as their admission rates indicate. And that number is what it is at above 50 percent in average. That is why I wrote it was hardly apocalyptic.
The fact that students transfer from a JUCO to become the better students also happens to speak volumes about UCB and its regularly admitted students.
Hmmmm. Sounds like someone has an ax to grind regarding Cal. Nice dig on the quality of the students who attend right out of high school.
Comparing the difficulty of getting in to UCLA vs UCR or even UCD is silly. What does a 4.5 GPA, NMF student care that the GENERALZED (over the entire UC system) acceptance rate is 50 plus percent? If they didn’t get in (along with tens of thousands of other top students) that little factoid means diddly.
That is a real strawman question, when the thread is about how hard it is to be admitted to UCLA, assuming possession of a pulse.
^^ not quite. Read the OP again. UCLA was mentioned and DS opined it was hard for East Coast folks. The second part was about how tough it was to get into … top schools. Unless one considers only UCB and UCLA to be top schools, it is germane to look at the reality of admissions at the entire flagship system.
The pendulum here swings between reaches and safeties without much attention to the great supply of matches. Is the situation in California really more difficult than in MI or MA? What are the options for a top 7 %, 2000 SAT, with a weighted 4.0 graduate in Marin or La Jolla? Or from Compton or Cupertino?
It is obvious that when 20 percent of your entire state applies to one specific school that the odds will be low when a school admits purportedly close to 100 percent from a pool of highly ranked students.
On CC, the value of fit is heralded with the angle of having a balanced list of targets. Why would we think that UCLA should be easy to be admitted. Or as easy as it is to apply with a common application?