Cal State and Cal Poly acceptance rates for every California high school

Most Cal State campuses admit most applicants, and a few are far harder

Over fall 2021 to 2025, the hardest campus for California high school applicants was Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which admitted 28.1% of 288,445 applications, followed by San Diego State at 31.2% and Cal State Long Beach at 44.8%. The middle campus of the 23 admitted 90.9%, and the easiest, Fresno State, admitted 96.3%.

The high school matters at the selective campuses. Among schools that sent Cal Poly San Luis Obispo 100 or more applicants, the admit rate ran from 3.7% at La Mirada High to 79.4% at Preuss School UCSD. The campus reads each application against the school it came from, so the same grades can land differently from two schools a few miles apart.

Every high school that applies to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Pick a campus and find your high school. Each dot is a school, placed by how many of its seniors applied over five years and what share got in.

Your high school at every CSU

Search for a school above, or tap a dot, to see its fall 2025 numbers and its five-year totals at every campus.

The schools that send Cal Poly San Luis Obispo the most applicants

fall 2021 to 2025 combined, schools with 25 or more applicants. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo received 288,445 freshman applications from 2,164 California high schools in those years and admitted 28.1%.

What CSU publishes, and what it does not

CSU’s public High School Success tool gives two kinds of numbers for each school. For the five campuses where most of the school’s graduates enroll, it gives every year from 2020 to 2025. For every campus, it gives one total for fall 2021 to 2025. It does not give one year at every campus, so this page never adds single years across campuses, and the campus chart uses the five-year totals.

CSU also publishes admissions by major and discipline at each campus, and fall 2025 applicants by high school for every campus, in dashboards on its Tableau server. That server answers automated downloads with a human check, so we could not download those tables and have not approximated them. That is why there is no CSU acceptance rate by major on this page.

Counts are first-time freshman applicants from California high schools, public and private, as CSU reports them. A school with no applicants in these years is not listed. We downloaded 2,992 schools from CSU’s list, four requests at a time and within the limit the service states.