California public high schools ranked by UC admissions

Two ways to rank a school

The plain way is to count UC admits for every 100 seniors. By that count the top school here is Dr. Richard A. Vladovic Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy in Wilmington, with 75.7 students admitted to at least one UC campus for every 100 seniors over fall 2023 to 2025. That count mostly tracks family income: schools in wealthier neighborhoods send more students to UC whatever the school does.

So we also compare each school with schools like it, meaning schools with the same share of low-income students, and show how far above or below that line it sits. By that measure the top school is Dr. Richard A. Vladovic Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy in Wilmington: 75.7 admits per 100 seniors, where schools like it get 20.6. Of the 845 traditional public schools we could compare, 255 sit above the line. Charter and magnet schools are ranked on their own page against the same line.

Find your school

Choose a campus, narrow to your county, or type a school’s name. Sort by any column.

Each dot is a school, placed by what schools like it get (across) and what it actually got (up), in admits per 100 seniors over fall 2023 to 2025. Dots above the diagonal beat schools like them. Search for a school to pick it out. Only schools with 50 or more seniors in 2024-25 are ranked.

How we decide what “schools like it” get

What the numbers are

Admits are UC’s count of a school’s students admitted as first-years for that fall, from UC’s Admissions by source school tables. “Any UC” counts a student once however many campuses admitted them; Berkeley and UCLA count their own admits. Seniors are the school’s 12th graders on Census Day the October before (2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25), from the state’s enrollment files. The multi-year figure adds up three falls of admits and three years of seniors before dividing, so a big class one year weighs more than a small one.

UC leaves a count blank when it is under 3. Where that happened in any of the three falls, we show a dash instead of guessing, which is common for Berkeley and UCLA at smaller schools. A school missing from a campus’s table for a fall sent it no applicants, and counts as zero.

How we matched UC’s schools to the state’s

UC names a school by its College Board code and the state by its own code, and no public list links the two. We matched a UC school to a state school automatically when the name (with spelling differences such as “High School” and “High” set aside) and the city found exactly one school. UC also shortens and truncates names (“California Academy Math & Science”), so we then checked by hand, one pair at a time, every looser candidate and every remaining school with 40 or more fall 2025 applicants, and accepted 256 pairs. Together that matched 1,365 of UC’s 1,653 public schools, including 1,239 of the 1,382 that sent UC an applicant for fall 2025, and 97.4% of those applicants. Where UC lists one school under two codes, we kept the code that sent applicants and dropped the other 9. The list of every pair we checked, with the reason for each, is published with the build.

What we left out

Some rankings of this kind predict each school’s admits from a statistical model that also weighs race and ethnicity, students with disabilities and the city the school is in. Those predictions have not been published, so we do not copy or approximate them. Ours uses at most two inputs, family income and the share of English learners, and prints every coefficient above, so you can check any school’s expected figure yourself. UC also does not publish how many students from a school were admitted to Berkeley or UCLA and any other campus without counting them twice, so we show the campuses separately.