Research · UC admissions · Fall 2025
UC admits a lot of out-of-state students. Outside Berkeley and UCLA, almost none of them come.
Every admissions story starts with who got in. This one is about who showed up — the gap between the students a campus admits and the students who actually enroll. It is wide, it runs in one direction, and it changes what UC's admit numbers mean.
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The findings, in plain English
An admitted class and an enrolled class are not the same class. UC Davis admitted 44% of its first-year offers to students from outside California in Fall 2025 — but Californians make up 80% of the students who actually enrolled. Nonresidents are admitted in volume and mostly decline.
The exception is the two flagships. Berkeley and UCLA convert roughly 29% of their out-of-state offers into enrolled students. Davis converts 4.8%, Riverside 2.8%. If you are asking who converts a nonresident offer, that is Berkeley and UCLA. If you are asking where nonresidents actually sit, the ranking is different — San Diego first, then Berkeley and UCLA — and it is set out below.
Why this is not published anywhere. UC reports yield for the system as a whole and reports admits by campus, but does not divide one by the other. The ingredients are its own; the arithmetic is ours, and it is shown below so you can check it.
First-year yield by campus and residency, Fall 2025
Yield is the share of admitted students who enrolled. Each cell divides UC's own enrolled count by its own admit count for that campus and residency group.
| Campus | Californians | Out-of-state (US) | International | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| enrolled | yield | enrolled | yield | enrolled | yield | |
| UCLA | 4,967 | 57.8% | 1,017 | 28.7% | 567 | 37.2% |
| UC Berkeley | 4,997 | 50.7% | 926 | 29.7% | 765 | 55.0% |
| UC San Diego | 5,418 | 25.2% | 948 | 9.7% | 1,435 | 20.1% |
| UC Irvine | 4,873 | 25.8% | 454 | 5.8% | 1,096 | 12.1% |
| UC Davis | 5,455 | 21.3% | 398 | 4.8% | 952 | 8.1% |
| UC Santa Barbara | 3,767 | 15.7% | 676 | 7.3% | 638 | 7.2% |
| UC Riverside | 6,387 | 12.0% | 78 | 2.8% | 217 | 4.1% |
| UC Santa Cruz | 4,182 | 11.2% | 242 | 4.1% | 173 | 3.6% |
| UC Merced | 1,945 | 4.7% | 14 | 1.1% | 23 | 0.6% |
| Systemwide | 41,990 | 41.8% | 4,753 | 18.2% | 5,866 | 26.8% |
Why every campus is below the systemwide number. Californians yield 41.8% system-wide but only 21.3% at Davis. That is not a contradiction: UC applicants apply to several campuses and are often admitted to several, then enrol at one. Each campus counts all of its own admits, so campus yield is structurally lower than the system's. The comparison that means something is between campuses, not against the systemwide row.
Who is admitted vs who enrolls
California's share of a campus's admitted students, against its share of the students who actually turned up. Every campus shifts in the same direction.
| Campus | CA share of admits | CA share of enrolled class | Shift |
|---|---|---|---|
| UC Davis | 56.1% | 80.2% | +24.0 pts |
| UC Irvine | 52.9% | 75.9% | +22.9 pts |
| UC Santa Barbara | 56.9% | 74.1% | +17.2 pts |
| UC San Diego | 56.0% | 69.5% | +13.4 pts |
| UC Santa Cruz | 77.6% | 91.0% | +13.4 pts |
| UCLA | 62.9% | 75.8% | +12.9 pts |
| UC Merced | 89.0% | 98.1% | +9.1 pts |
| UC Riverside | 86.9% | 95.6% | +8.7 pts |
| UC Berkeley | 68.6% | 74.7% | +6.1 pts |
Where nonresidents actually take seats
Admit mix is the wrong denominator for the displacement question, because most nonresident offers are declined. This ranks campuses by the share of the entering class nonresidents actually occupy — and splits that share into international students and out-of-state Americans, which the debate tends to treat as one group.
| Campus | Nonresident share of admits | Nonresident share of class | Of those seats, international |
|---|---|---|---|
| UC San Diego | 44.0% | 30.5% | 60% |
| UC Santa Barbara | 43.1% | 25.9% | 49% |
| UC Berkeley | 31.4% | 25.3% | 45% |
| UCLA | 37.1% | 24.2% | 36% |
| UC Irvine | 47.1% | 24.1% | 71% |
| UC Davis | 43.9% | 19.8% | 71% |
| UC Santa Cruz | 22.4% | 9.0% | 42% |
| UC Riverside | 13.1% | 4.4% | 74% |
| UC Merced | 11.0% | 1.9% | 62% |
The campuses that admit the most nonresidents are not the campuses where nonresidents end up. Irvine and Davis make close to half their offers to nonresidents and still enroll classes that are roughly three-quarters Californian, while San Diego seats the largest nonresident share in the system — and most of those seats are international students rather than out-of-state Americans.
What happened when the state stopped paying campuses to swap nonresidents out: California paid $276 million to swap out nonresident students. The swap is unwinding.
Get the data
Every campus, every residency group, applicants through enrollees, for all 9 years we hold (2017–2025).
Download the full table (CSV)Method and limits
- Source. The University of California's own freshman fall admissions summary, which publishes applicants, admits and enrollees by campus and residency: UC Information Center. We divide enrollees by admits; we do not adjust either number.
- Residency means residency for tuition purposes — UC's own classification, the same one its admit counts use. It is not the same as the state a student grew up in, and it does not match the federal residence surveys, which ask a different question.
- Yield needs a class that has enrolled, so this table trails the annual admissions release by one cycle. Fall 2025 is the most recent complete year.
- "Out-of-state" means domestic non-Californians. International students are a separate column, not folded in.
- Campus figures reconcile to UC's systemwide row to within a handful of students in each year; a small residual is UC's own. Where UC leaves a cell blank for a very small group, we show a dash rather than an estimate.
Related: the Fall 2026 campus table · The Berkeley Exception · all research