Blog · Orange County · League table · August 18, 2026

Orange County's top 25 high schools for UC admits

We've been publishing a county-by-county look at where California high school graduates get admitted to the University of California. San Diego came first, then the Bay Area. This week it's Orange County — where our office is, where most of our students are, and the list I most wanted to get right.

We usually publish ten. This one goes to 25, because ten was hiding most of the county.

1. Sage Hill School, Newport Coast — 150.7
2. Fairmont Preparatory Academy, Anaheim — 101.3
3. Orange County School of the Arts, Santa Ana — 96.2
4. Crean Lutheran High School, Irvine — 94.4
5. Oxford Academy, Cypress — 84.1
6. St. Margaret's Episcopal School, San Juan Capistrano — 72.5
7. Troy High School, Fullerton — 71.6
8. Northwood High School, Irvine — 70.8
9. Portola High School, Irvine — 67.5
10. University High School, Irvine — 67.3
11. Arnold O. Beckman High School, Irvine (Tustin Unified) — 65.9
12. Sunny Hills High School, Fullerton — 53.3
13. Corona del Mar High School, Newport Beach — 47.8
14. Laguna Beach High School, Laguna Beach — 46.9
15. Woodbridge High School, Irvine — 45.9
16. Irvine High School, Irvine — 43.0
17. Samueli Academy, Santa Ana — 40.4
18. La Quinta High School, Westminster — 40.2
19. Yorba Linda High School, Yorba Linda — 38.6
20. Santa Margarita Catholic High School, Rancho Santa Margarita — 37.1
21. Orange Lutheran High School, Orange — 36.7
22. Mater Dei High School, Santa Ana — 36.4
23. Legacy College Prep, Santa Ana — 35.7
24. Capistrano Valley High School, Mission Viejo — 35.5
25. Aliso Niguel High School, Aliso Viejo — 34.4

The UC Reach Score is admits to the six most selective UC campuses — Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Irvine and Davis — per 100 seniors. A student admitted to three of those campuses counts three times, which is why a strong school can score above 100. It measures the admissions a class produced. It is not a percentage of anything.

Sage Hill's 151 comes from 223 admits out of a senior class of 148 — the highest score in California, not just in Orange County.

The result I keep going back to is third place. Orange County School of the Arts scored 96 with a senior class of 393. Fairmont Prep scored 101 with 156. Both are excellent and they are not the same achievement. A small class can be shaped and counselled in ways a large one cannot. Holding that rate across 393 students is a much harder problem, and a public arts school in Santa Ana solving it deserves more attention than it gets.

The other thing that shows up once you go 25 deep is how tight it gets. Spots 20 through 25 sit inside three points of each other. At that spacing, treating one rank as meaningfully better than the next is reading noise. The honest summary is that all 25 are producing.

Roughly half this list is private and half is public, which is what the data gave us with no thumb on the scale. They are doing different jobs under different constraints, and reading one column as a verdict on either would be a mistake.

Every California high school has its own page, and the methodology page explains how the score is built.

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