Blog · UC admissions · September 14, 2026
The high school that sends the most students to UCLA is not in Los Angeles
The high school that sends the most students to UCLA is not in Los Angeles.
It is Canyon Crest Academy, in San Diego, with 44 admits this year.
I expected this to be an LA list. It is not. Second is Dougherty Valley in San Ramon, and you have to reach third — Arcadia — before a Los Angeles County school appears at all. Count the whole board and ten of the 25 are Bay Area schools against seven from Los Angeles County.
UCLA pulls from the whole state, not just its own county. That is obvious once you see it and almost nobody says it out loud.
The raw count rewards big schools, so we ran admits per 100 seniors alongside it. OC School of the Arts leads that column at 9.7 from a class of 393, and it is fifth on the raw count as well, so it leads both ways. Canyon Crest is second in that column at 8.1.
Here is the part that should reset an assumption. Twenty-four of the 25 are public schools. The single private school on the board is Valley Christian in San Jose, at 6.5 admits per 100 seniors — the third-highest share on the list.
The honest caveat, the same one I put on the Berkeley board: these are admits, not enrollees. A student admitted to UCLA may go elsewhere. But the admit is the door opening.
The rest of the per-campus series is at highschoolreach.com/rankings.
