UC Admissions Secrets! What Admissions Officers Won’t Tell You!

Are you looking at going to a school within the University of California system and wondering if there are UC admissions secrets? What can you do to learn more about how these schools work, so that you have a better shot at getting in?

My name is Brooke. I am a California-based consultant that typically works with students applying to top-20 schools. I also am a test prep expert, and I have built an online course and curriculum for both the SAT and the ACT. (You can check those out at supertutortv.com.)

Application Readers Are Not Paid A Lot

Let’s start off with my first secret. Application readers are shockingly paid a tiny, tiny amount of money. Your application costs $80. UC San Diego pays its readers $3. UCLA pays its readers $2.50 per application; if you do the math. These people are making—and I calculated it out with average reading speeds if they are reading fast—maybe $20 an hour, but they don’t only have to read. They then have to do a write-up of you. And you can imagine that if the first essay you write is terrible, how much time they are going to give to the other essays when they’re getting paid by the application? The other thing about readers for UCs is they are not tenured staff. They are random seasonal employees that are vastly underpaid. They are paid less than your high school English teacher is paid at school.

Influx of Academically Underprepared Students

Number two, it’s not a secret that UCs have gone test-blind in the last several years, meaning that they are blind to SAT and ACT scores. But what many people don’t realize is that has resulted in an influx of vastly academically underprepared students across the UC system. Most recently, that was highlighted at UC San Diego, where one in eight students were identified as needing remedial math because they couldn’t do basic high school math. So understand that if you do attend a UC, you may have students there, like if you go to UCLA, the top quarter of students there are on par with everybody who got into Harvard. They’re amazing. They’re geniuses. But the bottom quarter is a head shake. There is a lot of variety of academic preparedness at these schools, and test-blind has only made that problem worse.

In Context Admissions For In-State

Which brings me to number three. Now, caveat, this point is for in-state applicants primarily, not for out-of-state. UCs play by wildly different rules in-state versus out of state. And we will get to out-of-state, but right now, we’re going to talk about in-state admissions goals. UCs do not care if you are in-state, if you are smarter, better, more capable, or able to thrive on their campus. Because their goal is not to admit the most capable students. Their goal is not to create a meritocracy. Their goal is to admit the best in context. And “best in context” means they are shaving off the top students from every California high school. This strategy plays out slightly differently at different campuses. Some campuses push back on this more than others.

UCLA, for example, is more even with its distribution of that shave. Meaning there are feeder schools at UCLA. And we’re going to talk about that in a little bit. The feeder schools aren’t what you think, by the way, but there are some feeder schools. But for the most part, UCLA’s admission rate is consistent across a lot of schools. It’s not like the schools where they’re pumping out really amazing jaw-dropping, next-level students get in way more often than the kids who go to the CrapTastic School where they don’t know algebra. Hence the UCSD situation, right? That’s happening at UCLA too. They just haven’t hit a headline yet.

Berkeley pushes back on this a little bit more. And you can see this in the statistics. One of the things that I thought might be happening at UCs is that I thought maybe some of the top-ranked public schools in California get more students into UCLA and UC Berkeley than average schools. That would be a reasonable assumption, right? The best high schools are pumping more kids into the UC program. And when UCs were test-considered, there was a program to get into UCs, into the top UCs, by being in the top 9% overall in the state. There were different admissions pathways. Now that test scores no longer exist in this process, that pathway has disintegrated in a lot of ways. And we don’t see students from these top high schools.

For Henry M. Gunn HS, the average SAT score is the highest in the country, and the average ACT score is 35. Kids at Gunn are more academically prepared for college, 10X than your average high school in California. Amazing high school, amazing students, but admitted at a rate of 9.85%. And you can look down the list and see that there are a couple outliers; Carlsbad High School is doing pretty well. But of these elite public high schools, they don’t vary very much from our average. And some of them are even lower, like Lowell High School, one of the best public high schools and one of the most famous public high schools in San Francisco. But it’s at a 7.16% admit rate, which is lower than average. And the students are more qualified than average. It’s mind-blowing.

Top Public Schools in California- UCLA Admit Rates 2025

My point to you is these UCs are cutting off a layer of the top in context by going to a more competitive high school. And this is the lesson. In general, it is going to lower your odds of getting into UC Berkeley or UCLA. So if that is your end goal, if your parents say they can only pay in-state tuition, but you want to go to a top-20 university and you don’t qualify for aid, you are better off at a less-competitive school.

And I actually was consulting with a family a few years back; they were in San Diego and said they were thinking of trying to go to Torrey Pines High School because it’s a really good high school, but their eventual goal was to go to UCLA, UC Berkeley, or maybe UCSD. And I told them to not go to Torrey Pines because you’re putting yourself in a super competitive pool, and when you do that, you are lowering your odds of getting in.

Because the problem with this is with the 250 kids at Torrey Pines, I would say 50 of them are probably 100% qualified to go to UCLA or UC Berkeley, if not 90 of them. And I know that’s wild and I know that’s crazy, but they will not let 90 of them in or even 50 of them in. And so what’s going to happen is if that kid goes to Torrey Pines, her chances are going to go down.

Does this happen in private schools too? My answer is yes. We can look at the most competitive private schools in California. The admit rates range anywhere from 6.3% to 18%. Of course, there are other private schools that can have rates that are higher or lower than that. From my chart of the top private schools, 11.4% is the average admission rate. We can compare this to the overall average for all in state private schools of 9.47%, so it is a little bit higher.

But here’s the real story. I tutor kids from Harvard-Westlake, and they are jaw-droppingly overprepared for college. I had one of my Harvard-Westlake students get into Northwestern, and he was so bored because it was too easy, and he wasn’t even ranked in the top 10 at his school. And I’m sure all the top 10 are applying here. Even these 15 kids that get in from Harvard-Westlake, they’re all going to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or Yale, and maybe one or two of them will matriculate into Berkeley or UCLA or wherever they got in. But my point to you guys is this does not represent the capability of the kids in that 178, right? They’re skimming off the top. And that skimming off the top can hurt you if you’re in a hyper-competitive environment.

Top Private Schools in California- UCLA Admit Rates 2025*

*UC does not publish the numbers for schools that have less than 3 students accepted. For schools with blank admits, it means 0, 1, or 2 students were accepted.

UC Feeder Schools

But there’s some bright news at the end of the tunnel, which is secret number four. There are some feeder schools to UCs. And there are some schools that fare better in UC admission. And how do you hit that sweet spot? There are some schools where we see 20%, 30%, or even 40% admit rates. One, they generally have less competition. They generally do not have 156 kids applying. They might have seven, and they get four in. But sometimes that happens year after year after year. Not always, but sometimes.

So here’s a rundown of schools with the best admit rates at UCLA in the last year. And you can see for the highest one, they had a 60% admit rate, but caveat: only five kids applied, but three out of five got in. Farmersville, three out of seven got in. For Colfax, five out of twelve got in. For Orcutt, 26 applied, and 10 got in. But you’re not gonna get a 38.5% admit rate when you have 150 kids applying. You might get it if you’ve got 26 kids applying.

So that means you’re either going to a smaller school or you’re going to a school where there’s less competition coming in. You are compared to the students at your high school. So be aware of that. And you can see through some of these that there also is some preference. They love charter high schools, Berkeley and UCLA. Los Angeles County High School for the Arts is up there, so some of the arts kids might get in. They might have a little bit of an art feeder there.

Best UCLA Admit Rates 2025- Public California Schools

Privates can also be feeders. So you can see that these are very small sample sets. Again, Shalhevet, I work with students there, and I’ve had some students from there get into UCLA in the last few years. And you can see their admit rate of 36.4%; it’s super healthy. But I do know that I’ve seen more of my students from there get in than my students from Harvard-Westlake. And I have had students from Harvard-Westlake get into Berkeley, but they also got into Yale or Stanford or somewhere else where they ended up going.

Best UCLA Admit Rates 2025- Private California Schools

Moving on, let’s talk about out-of-state. Now, this is what’s crazy: the game completely changes when you are an applicant from out-of-state. Suddenly, they’re not skimming off the top anymore. They’re not just taking the top 2% to 10% of every high school in America. No, they actually care about rigor again.

I’m going to talk about UCLA and UC Berkeley today, and I have a list of feeder schools for both UCLA and Berkeley across the nation.

Top Out of State Feeder Schools- UCLA & UC Berkeley Admit Rates 2025

Now, some of these have small sample sets. Some of these only have 6 kids, 10 kids, or 12 kids applying. So this is not like huge amounts of students applying. But you can see here, we’ve got a couple of BASIS schools that have really high admit rates at both UCLA and Berkeley. We also have magnet schools: Biotechnology High School in New Jersey, Baton Rouge Magnet High School, and Orlando Science. They love magnets, if that’s your jam and you’re really into science.

Top Out of State Feeder Schools- UCLA Admit Rates 2025

Well, the other thing is when you’re out-of-state, the science kids tend to yield because Berkeley and UCLA just have a really strong science department. But some of this is a low, small sample size and a bit bizarre. For Blue Valley West, why Blue Valley West? Why not Blue Valley North? Why not Blue Valley Northwest? Blue Valley West is not the best Blue Valley. You can see some heavy feeders, but now here’s where it gets interesting.

Berkeley has a penchant for boarding schools, and this is the complication of boarding schools. When boarding schools are entered into the data for UCs, they get entered as out-of-state schools. But some of the candidates who attend these schools are actually in-state students because their parents live and work in California. So, they are qualified for in-state tuition. Some of these kids, and this is kind of a wild idea here, some of these kids at these top boarding schools may actually be California residents. So if you’re a California resident and you’re wondering if you should send your kid to Taft or to Harvard-Westlake, choose the boarding school. Some of this also comes from the fact that the boarding schools have fewer applicants to UCs, so there’s less competition again.

Top Out of State Feeder Schools- UC Berkeley Admit Rates 2025

Top Out of State Feeder Schools- UC Irvine Admit Rates 2025

Top Out of State Feeder Schools- UCSD Admit Rates 2025

The Boarding School data for UCLA and UC Berkeley is really weird. First of all, there’s a few schools that look like they get blacklisted by UCLA, Berkeley, or both. When looking at The Taft School, for example, we can see that less than 3 were accepted to UCLA, but there’s a significant increase in their Berkeley acceptance rate. We can also see students at The Hotchkiss School have a great acceptance rate for both UCLA and UC Berkeley. However, I’d say Hotchkiss students are just as great as my Harvard-Westlake students. Yet the Hotchkiss students have much higher admit rates to both UCLA and UC Berkeley. UCLA and UC Berkeley also seem to love Groton. So there’s certain boarding schools they really like.

Top Boarding School Admit Rates for UCLA and UC Berkeley*

*UC does not publish the numbers for schools that have less than 3 students accepted. For schools with blank admits, it means 0, 1, or 2 students were accepted.

Proposed Majors Have a Big Impact

My next UC secret is that your proposed major can impact your admissions in a very significant way. UCLA publishes admission rates by major. Now, here’s something interesting. They say for the college, which is your general humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences, the applicant’s major is not considered during the review process, which means you probably have a lot of latitude to jump around freshman year between majors.

That being said, you can see there’s a vast difference that our humanities majors are getting in at a lower clip than our physical sciences majors. That being said, our physical sciences majors have higher GPAs. The 25th percentile is a 4.5 GPA. The 75th is a 4.8; GPAs are off the hook at UCLA. GPA matters so much because they don’t have your SAT score. It’s the only way they’re keeping track of anything. That being said, what you tell them you’re going to major in does matter. They say they’re not considering your major, but they do get repetition fatigue. If you’re saying something that everybody else is saying, it’s not going to be as interesting. The more interesting, specific, and original you are, usually the better off you are.

Now, when it comes to arts, dance, engineering, all of these kinds of things, you can see that there are real differences in admission rates. This has motivated some of my students. I have one student who applied for materials engineering because he looked at all the engineering rates and was not sure he had the GPA and the wherewithal to succeed at mechanical engineering. What’s wild is the materials engineering GPAs are higher, but their admit rate is a lot higher too.

You’ve got to look at all the data. Simple engineering has a lower admit rate, but it’s also got a lower GPA range. Somehow between the GPA range and the admit rate range, you can be a little bit strategic. If you’re between two ideas, you can let admit rate and GPA range help dictate. Maybe if you’re not sure which one, you can let that help you decide. Then once you get there, there’s probably some room for mobility as you try to answer that question for yourself and what you’re interested in. Be smart about your majors.

The other thing you can look at just to see what is going to be oversaturated in these applications is the transfer data, which is widely available. UCLA publishes all admission rates by transfer. I can tell you that directly correlates to how much space is there in that program. If there’s a lot of space in a program, if they need to fill a program, there’s going to be some communication with the admissions office that we need more kids that do that program. That could be taken into consideration, even if they say they don’t consider your major. Like I said, that boredom effect of “I’ve seen a billion kids who want to do psych; I’m so bored.”

The more unique you are, the more undersubscribed and less popular the thing that you’re interested in could potentially be that could help you. I’m not telling you to lie. I’m not telling you to jump through hoops that you don’t want to jump through. When I was 17 years old, I applied to multiple colleges, and I changed my major up at almost every school I was applying to because there were different programs that I was interested in. I wasn’t lying. There were like four different majors I was interested in. If I went to this school, I would do business. But if I went to this school, I would do an electrical engineering and music double major. And if I go to another one, I’ll figure it out when I get there.

So figure out your major; be smart about it. Of course, you need to have stories to back up your interest in the areas that you propose. But sometimes they have students in their split between ideas, and they don’t know which to choose. And sometimes understanding your admissions odds are tied to what you propose can help you in that process.

Transferring is the Easiest Way to Get Into a UC

Next secret. Transferring is the easiest way to get into a UC, except maybe in film and theater. You can look up transfer rates. Let’s just look at UCLA really quickly. At the college, you go from 10.8% to 27%. In art and architecture, you go from 5% to 6.8%. Engineering, 6.77% to 11%. Nursing, 0.5% to 6.6%. This is massive. Now to top that off, the most competitive candidates tend to apply as freshman applicants because all the kids that were dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s and on top of it, and goody two shoes and the best students, they go straight into the four-year college. They don’t have to slum it in community college for two years.

So you’re also getting a more competitive pool when you have those lower admin rates. My point to you is it is way easier to get into top UCs if you apply as a transfer. If you don’t get in the first time, know that transferring into a UC is always a great option. And this pattern holds basically at every UC. There are even some majors that have 50% and 70% admit rates, even at UCLA, the most popular campus.

The one thing about transferring is one, you have to know exactly what you’re going to major in, and you can’t whiff and waffle, and you can’t change majors after you get there. You have to apply for the program that you want to do. And two, the admin rates for those individual programs vary widely. Computer science is miniscule, American studies is generous, ethnomusicology is not bad, and Spanish literature is probably pretty easy. And you can get a lot of admit rates that are 50%, 60%, even 70% at UCLA and Berkeley if you’re in some of these obscure majors. So, just something to keep in mind.

Normal Kids Can Get Into Top UCs

My next secret is that normal kids can get into top UCs. The top 20 admissions are crazy, and I kind of love UCs because they are the one blip on the radar among top 20 schools where a normal kid who’s a good kid who’s just a normal high school student that did a good job and got really good grades can get in. You don’t have to have a 1580 SAT or 36 ACT score. For APs, you don’t have to have fives on all your APs (though it will help at Berkeley). You do have to have a strong GPA. GPAs are king there because they have nothing else to go off of.

You can see the GPA ranges at UCLA for admission; they’re crazy. But even if you’re not student council president of everything and a jaw-dropping athlete who’s going to be recruited, you still have a shot at these schools. If you write personal insight questions that show you’re a good person, you’re building toward making your community a better place, you’re collaborating with people, and you’re a good human. If you have a good story and you get it across, there is a place for you at UCLA or UC Berkeley, which I kind of love.

And the other thing that I kind of love is there are these places where there’s so much opportunity research-wise that if you kind of dilly-dallyed and you didn’t quite get it and it didn’t all click in high school, but you’re a good kid and got good grades, if you can get in, you can level up and take advantage of so much that they have there. So that’s the other thing I’m going to say: you do not have to have a jaw-dropping wow factor to get into a UC. As long as you are in a context that is not too competitive, you’ve got a shot.

I hope you guys liked this blog and that it was helpful!