Where can your student actually get into civil engineering?

At a glance · California

• 24 colleges in California report a bachelor's civil engineering program in federal outcome data or a civil engineering admit rate in the UC/CSU data.
• Hardest reported gate: University of California-Los Angeles — Civil Engineering, Fall 2025: 2,717 applied, 207 admitted (8%).
• Highest reported admit rate into the program: University of California-Merced — 97% (1,294 applied, 1,258 admitted, Fall 2025).
• Highest median earnings four years after the degree: University of California-Berkeley, $108,548.
• Lowest average net price with aid: California State University-Los Angeles, $3,967 per year.

A college on this page with no first-year row is not reporting admission by major, which is a gap in the reporting rather than an open door. Where a rate is reported, it counts the students who named civil engineering on the application — at the CSU campuses that is admission to the major itself, and at the UCs the campus does the admitting, not the department. Admits are not enrollees. At most UC programs students are admitted to the campus, not the major. This page as JSON → · Show all 235 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/civil-engineering, then open each college profile it links to. Build a reach / match / likely list for a civil 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 list for this major needs campuses from both ends of the spread, because civil engineering is the same major where the reported rate is 8% and where it is 97%. Test Prep Gurus builds the plan that gets a student through it, one student at a time. prepgurus.com · 949.229.5359