UC acceptance rates by major at every campus

The major on the application changes the odds

A UC campus does not admit everyone at the same rate. In fall 2025 the hardest door with at least 500 applicants was Nursing at UCLA: 31 admitted out of 5,668, or 0.55%. Computer science ran from 6.5% at UC Berkeley to 81.1% at UC Riverside. Berkeley as a whole admitted 11.3% of first-year applicants.

Some campuses admit to the major and some admit to a college and let students choose later, so the same discipline means different things in different places. A family choosing a major for the application should look at the campus they care about, not the UC average.

Admit rate by discipline, fall 2025

Pick a campus to see what share of applicants each broad discipline admitted, and the middle half of the GPAs it admitted. Tap a column heading to sort.

Counts include every applicant: California residents, students from other states and international students. UC leaves a discipline out when fewer than five applied or fewer than three were admitted. GPA is UC’s weighted, capped GPA from 10th and 11th grade, which limits the extra points honors courses can add, so at the most selective campuses the ranges bunch up close to the top.

How the rate has moved since 2012

The admit rate for one discipline at UCLA, every fall from 2012 to 2025, against the campus as a whole.

A gap in a line is a year UC did not publish that discipline at that campus. Disciplines are UC’s broad groups of majors, so “Engineering” adds together every engineering major on the campus.

UCLA by major, fall 2025

UCLA is the one campus that publishes its first-year numbers major by major for the schools that admit by major. In UCLA’s College, which holds most majors, the major is not considered in review, so UCLA reports only its four divisions there.

Applicants, admit rate and GPA exactly as UCLA prints them; UCLA rounds its rates. UCLA’s GPA is its own fully weighted GPA, which counts every honors course and can reach 5.00, so it runs higher than UC’s capped GPA in the table above and the two should not be compared. UCLA counts every residency.

Nursing is the hardest major to get into at UC

In UC’s table only two campuses report first-year nursing admits, UCLA and UC Irvine. Together they admitted 118 of 11,776 applicants in fall 2023, or 1.0%. In fall 2025 applicants rose to 12,747 and admits fell to 88, or 0.69%.

From UC’s discipline table, every residency. UCLA's own page lists Nursing Prelicensure at 5,669 applicants and a 0.5% admit rate for fall 2025, which agrees. Cal State nursing numbers by campus sit in a CSU dashboard that refuses automated downloads, so they are not on this page.

For a student set on nursing, we suggest applying to nursing at both campuses, choosing a related major such as public health or biology elsewhere on the UC application, and looking closely at Cal State and private nursing programs as well.