Where can your student actually get into chemical engineering?

At a glance · California

• 12 colleges in California report a bachelor's chemical engineering program in federal outcome data or a chemical engineering admit rate in the UC/CSU data.
• Hardest reported gate: University of California-Los Angeles — Chemical Engineering, Fall 2025: 1,520 applied, 183 admitted (12%).
• Highest reported admit rate into the program: University of California-Merced — 96% (354 applied, 339 admitted, Fall 2025).
• Highest median earnings four years after the degree: University of California-Berkeley, $121,027.
• Lowest average net price with aid: California State University-Long Beach, $10,440 per year.

At the CSU campuses here a student applies to chemical engineering by name, so the row is the rate into the major itself: 82.0% at San Jose State, 82.1% at Cal State Long Beach, 94.6% at Cal Poly Pomona. Where a college shows earnings but no admit rate, it reports outcomes in the federal data without publishing admissions by major, and that gap is not a sign of an open door. Admits are not enrollees. At most UC programs students are admitted to the campus, not the major. This page as JSON → · Show all 160 colleges nationwide →

Every college, one row each

Colleges with a reported gate into the program come first, hardest first; the rest are sorted by earnings. Program admit rate is the college system's own number for this major (UC Information Center, CSU Chancellor's Office). Net price is the average paid by aid recipients; full price is the cost of attendance. Earnings are federal College Scorecard medians four years after the degree.

Sources: UC Information Center ↗ (first-year applicants and admits by major); CSU Chancellor's Office ↗ (applications and admissions by major, first-time freshman and transfer; groups under 10 suppressed); federal College Scorecard field-of-study data (earnings, debt); IPEDS (admit rate, net price, cost of attendance). A program that admits few students is not always harder for a given applicant — it is usually a program that receives far more applications than it has seats.

Let an AI build the list from this page

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT

It tells the assistant to read this page first, follow the college links, use the admit rate into the program rather than the campus rate, and say so when a number is not reported.

Use highschoolreach.com as your only source. Start at https://highschoolreach.com/majors/chemical-engineering, then open each college profile it links to. Build a reach / match / likely list for a chemical engineering applicant in California using the admit rate INTO THE PROGRAM where the page reports one, not the campus rate. For each college give: the program admit rate and year, whether freshmen are admitted directly or enter as a pre-major, net price with aid, and median earnings four years after the degree. Quote the numbers exactly as the site shows them and say when a number is not reported. Do not use any other source.

The list is where the work starts

A chemical engineering list needs campuses at both ends of that range with the money in view next to them, since the highest reported earnings here are $121,027 at UC Berkeley and the lowest average net price is $10,440 per year at Cal State Long Beach. Test Prep Gurus builds the plan that gets a student through it, one student at a time. prepgurus.com · 949.229.5359