Blog · UC admissions · September 18, 2026
UC Irvine is Orange County's local school. Its top two feeders are in San Diego.
In Orange County, UC Irvine is the local school. Parents talk about it that way, and so do I.
Then I pulled the campus's own feeder board.
The high school that sends the most students to Irvine is not in Orange County at all. It is Del Norte, in San Diego, with 174 admits in Fall 2025. Second is Westview, also San Diego. Then Lowell in San Francisco, Eleanor Roosevelt in Eastvale, and Berkeley High.
Four Irvine schools do make the 25 — Beckman, Northwood, Portola and University High — and none of them cracks the top five.
Two things I did not expect.
All 25 schools on the board are public. Not most. All of them.
And the admits-per-100-seniors column, which usually rearranges the whole order and is the reason we print both, barely touches this one. Westview leads it at 29.5 per 100 seniors and is second in raw admits as well. When the two columns agree that closely, the ranking is telling you something unusually clean.
The honest caveat, same as the Berkeley board: these are admits, not enrollees. A student admitted to Irvine may go elsewhere.
The rest of the per-campus series is at highschoolreach.com/rankings.
