Geographic Bias in UC Admissions

Why do Bay Area applicants get accepted less often at many campuses?

Talent is not distributed evenly and the Bay Area students have more of it.

There are multiple ways to measure college preparedness. The more stringent the requirement, the more Bay Area students will be found in the group that meets it.. Students from the six county Bay Area (i.e. Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara) make up only about 14% of the cohort that graduated high school in 2024. But they made up 16% of those who met the A-G requirements, which are the minimum standard for UC or CSU admission; and 20% of those who were proficient in both English and Math on the SBAC; and 24% of those who passed two or more AP exams.

It doesn’t stop there. AP exams are scored on a 1-5 scale with 5 being the highest. 31% of all scores of 5 were obtained by students from the Bay Area¹.

The three big South Coast counties (i.e. Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego) maintain or increase their share as educational standards rise. In the rest of the state, representation falls as standards rise.

This talent imbalance has a major effect on UC admissions.

Applicants’ Geographic Preferences

Few students apply to all the UCs. They pick and choose which to apply to. Their choices are partly based on reputation and selectivity. Stronger students might think that Riverside and Merced are beneath them; weaker students might think they have no chance of getting into UCLA or Berkeley. But geography also plays a big part in where students apply. Students are much more inclined to apply to campuses near their homes.

South Coast applicants are much more likely to apply to Los Angeles, Irvine, and San Diego than they are to Berkeley, Davis, or Santa Cruz. Only 56% of them can even be bothered to apply to UC Santa Barbara.

SoCal applicants exhibit the same preferences as their South Coast neighbors but a smaller percentage of them apply to each campus bar Riverside. UCLA received applications from 74% of South Coast applicants, but only 62% of SoCal applicants. Berkeley received applications from 49% of South Coast applicants but only 38% of SoCal applicants.

Bay Area students don’t have such strong geographic preferences. 70% of them (plus or minus a few percentage points) apply to each campus bar Riverside and Merced. Riverside and Merced are exceptional cases. Their acceptance rates are so high that each functions as a safety school for a different part of the state. Riverside is the safety school for South Coast and SoCal applicants and Merced is the safety school for Bay Area and NorCal applicants.

Composition of the Applicant Pool

Bay Area students apply to more UC campuses than students from other regions. The average UC applicant from the Bay Area applies to 5.5 campuses whereas the average applicant from the other regions applies to between 4.0 and 4.4. On the face of it, this is a bit counterintuitive. The strongest applicants should be the ones with the greatest chance of admission so why are they applying to more campuses?

Each campus’s applicant pool varies due to these geographic preferences. The systemwide in-state applicant pool is 46% South Coast and 23% Bay Area but, since Bay Area students apply to more campuses, they constitute more than 23% of every applicant pool. At UCLA the in-state applicant pool is 50% South Coast and 25% Bay Area, while at UC Davis it is 35% South Coast and 35% Bay Area.

Admissions Rates

We know that applicant quality varies from campus to campus. Applicants to UC Santa Barbara are on average weaker than applicants to UCLA and stronger than applicants to UC Riverside. We don’t know (because there is no public data) whether the geographic preferences affect the comparative strength of the applicants. Are the students from the South Coast who apply to UCLA but not Berkeley stronger, weaker, or the same strength as those who apply to both UCLA and Berkeley? Are the students from the Bay Area who apply to Davis but not Santa Barbara stronger or weaker than those who apply to both? In the absence of data either way, the discussion that follows is going to assume that admission rates are unaffected by the particular mix of students who apply from a region.

If admissions were being done randomly, the acceptance rate of applicants from each region of the state would be the same. If admissions were done purely on the basis of academic strength, you would expect Bay Area applicants to be accepted at a higher rate. In fact, the opposite is often the case.

The UC campuses vary widely in their selectivity. For in-state applicants, the admission rate varies from 9.5% at UCLA to 93% at UC Merced, but there is considerable variation depending on where the applicant is from.

At UCLA, 8.7% of Bay Area applicants are accepted compared with 10% of those from the South Coast. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference, and it’s almost impossible to see on the chart, but it translates into a 15% greater chance of admission for South Coast applicants. Here is the same data as the previous chart but reformatted to show, not the absolute admission rate, but how much the campus admission rate for each region differs from the campus’s average admission rate. At UCLA, Bay Area students are accepted at 92% of the UCLA average and South Coast applicants are accepted at 105% of the UCLA average.

Recall that South Coast students applied at a particularly high rate to UCLA. Since UCLA is the most selective campus, we can assume it attracts the strongest students but the more applications there are from the region, the lower the average quality must be. This should lead to a lower admission rate, not a higher one. UCLA seems to have a preference for local applicants.

At Berkeley, the admission rates are essentially the same regardless of what part of the state the applicant is from. Bay Area and South Coast applicants are accepted at identical rates. While NorCal and SoCal acceptance rates are slightly higher and lower respectively, there’s no real evidence of any geographic bias.

The next four campuses (Irvine, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Davis) are where geographic bias really shows up. Bay Area applicants are accepted at dramatically lower rates than applicants from elsewhere. UC San Diego is particularly egregious. Bay Area applicants are accepted at only 71% of the UCSD average rate but SoCal applicants are accepted at 121% of the UCSD average rate. (In absolute terms, the acceptance rate for Bay Area applicants is 18.6% whereas applicants from other regions are accepted at rates of between 26% and 32%. And those are averages across the regions. Only 16% of applicants from Santa Clara, the strongest county in the state, are accepted compared to 34% of applicants from Riverside.)

Interestingly, the only places where Bay Area applicants are comparatively favored are the two least selective campuses, Riverside and Merced.

The systemwide rate measures the percentage who were admitted to at least one UC campus. Systemwide counts are unduplicated: a student who applies to five campuses and is admitted to three counts as one admission. Bay Area applicants do have a slightly higher systemwide acceptance rate than other regions, despite their lower admission rates at so many campuses. That may be partly due to the higher rates at Riverside and Merced but a bigger factor is surely that Bay Area applicants applied to more places. If you buy more lottery tickets, you have a better chance of winning.

1. I had to go back to 2019 data for this factoid because the CDE no longer publishes such detailed information. All the Bay Area counties are strong but Santa Clara is the star. It has 4.4% of the high school cohort but 9% of those to pass two or more AP exams and its students score nearly 15% of all ‘5’ grades in California. In fact, Santa Clara students score twice as many ‘5’ grades as all the students in Riverside and San Bernardino combined even though the latter pair have three times as many students.