Undergraduates at every UC, Cal State and private four-year college in California by race and ethnicity and Pell Grant share, fall 2024, with how the most selective colleges compare.
Photo: Spatms, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
California’s four-year colleges, by who is in the room
In fall 2024, 797,020 undergraduates were working toward a degree at the 115 public and private nonprofit four-year colleges here. 39.2% were Hispanic or Latino, 22.1% white, 20.2% Asian and 4.2% Black.
The 10 colleges that admit fewer than one applicant in four hold 12.6% of those undergraduates but only 6.9% of the Hispanic ones. Pell Grants, which go to students from lower-income families, reach 51% of undergraduates across the Cal State campuses, 37% across the UCs and 31% across the private colleges.
One college at a time
Undergraduates, fall 2024
33,068
With a Pell Grant, 2024-25
32%
Admit rate, fall 2024
11%
UC Berkeley undergraduates by race and ethnicity
Shares of degree-seeking undergraduates as the college reported them to the federal IPEDS survey. International students are counted on their own, not by race.
UC Berkeley students’ parents, by US income fifth
Opportunity Insights, students born 1980 to 1982, about 4,624 students a year. 4.7% had parents in the top 1%. This is the newest public release and it is two decades old, so read it as history, not as today’s class.
Every college on one measure
UCCal StatePrivate nonprofit
Each dot is a California four-year college; tap one to open it above. Race, ethnicity and Pell shares are for fall 2024 and 2024-25. The two parent-income measures are Opportunity Insights’ figures for students born 1980 to 1982 and cover only the 70 colleges they could match.
The most selective colleges
College
Admit rate
Hispanic
Black
Pell Grant
Undergraduates
Caltech
2.6%
17.4%
4.7%
22.8%
987
Minerva University
3.0%
0.3%
0.0%
0.0%
637
Stanford
3.6%
17.1%
7.4%
21.9%
7,554
Pomona College
7.1%
17.2%
9.2%
22.8%
1,666
UCLA
9.0%
24.2%
3.4%
31.9%
33,475
Claremont McKenna College
9.6%
14.8%
4.1%
18.3%
1,388
USC
9.8%
20.0%
7.1%
26.6%
20,443
UC Berkeley
11.0%
22.1%
2.1%
31.9%
33,068
Harvey Mudd College
12.7%
22.0%
5.2%
20.0%
921
Northeastern University Oakland
16.7%
6.5%
6.9%
28.0%
464
All 115 colleges
39.2%
4.2%
797,020
Admit rate and enrollment are for fall 2024, Pell Grant share for 2024-25, all from College Scorecard’s October 15, 2026 release. Shares count degree-seeking undergraduates; international students are counted on their own.
What these numbers cover
The colleges are every California public and private nonprofit college that grants mostly bachelor’s degrees, is operating and is not online-only. Community colleges and for-profit colleges are not included. Each college reports its own students’ race and ethnicity to the federal IPEDS survey from what students say about themselves.
The parent-income figures come from Opportunity Insights, a research group at Harvard, which linked college records to tax returns for students born 1980 to 1982. Its college-by-college table of parents’ incomes has not been updated since, so a college’s figure describes its students of about twenty years ago.
We downloaded these files ourselves and computed every figure on this page from them. Where a publisher left a value blank for privacy, we left it blank too.
