Berkeley's 11% Admit Rate Is a Fiction — and It's Getting More Fictional Every Year
When parents see "UC Berkeley: 11% admit rate," they assume that's their student's odds. It's not. We pulled seven years of UC admissions data — every campus, every major, 2019 through 2025 — and the "Berkeley number" gets more useless with each passing cycle. In 2019, Berkeley Computer Science admitted 25% of applicants. By 2022, it admitted 4%. Meanwhile Berkeley Humanities moved the
opposite direction: 13% in 2019, 25% in 2025.
Same campus. Same headline number. Wildly different realities underneath.
We get these questions all the time at StrivePath: What's my kid's chance at Berkeley? At UCLA? At Davis? Parents want a single number. Counselors give them the campus-wide admit rate. That number has always been misleading. It's now dangerously so — because the gap between the headline and the reality has widened every year since 2019.
Here's the 7-year picture.
The headline vs. the majors — 2025 snapshot
For the Fall 2025 class (the 2024–25 admissions cycle),
UC Berkeley admitted 14,360 freshmen out of 126,830 applicants
| UC Berkeley — Fall 2025 | Applicants | Admits | Admit Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haas (Business) | 7,102 | 323 | **5%** |
| Computer Science | 9,750 | 629 | **6%** |
| Engineering | 25,025 | 1,788 | **7%** |
| Social Sciences | 20,627 | 1,758 | **9%** |
| Undeclared | 10,920 | 1,329 | **12%** |
| Life Sciences | 19,316 | 3,114 | **16%** |
| Physical Sci/Math | 12,109 | 1,993 | **16%** |
| **Arts & Humanities** | 8,925 | 2,256 | **25%** |
A kid applying to Berkeley Haas has a 5% shot. A kid applying to Berkeley Humanities has a 25% shot. Same campus, same year, five-times-different odds.
The trend is worse
Here's what's changed since 2019. Berkeley Computer Science, year by year:
| Year | Applicants | Admits | Admit Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 4,195 | 1,030 | **25%** |
| 2020 | 6,442 | 1,178 | 18% |
| 2021 | 6,178 | 842 | 14% |
| 2022 | 9,018 | 320 | *4%** |
| 2023 | 7,695 | 375 | 4% |
| 2024 | 13,437 | 515 | 4% |
| 2025 | 9,750 | 629 | **6%** |
Applicants more than doubled. Admits fell. The admit rate collapsed from 25% to 4% in three years, and hasn't meaningfully recovered.
Berkeley Arts & Humanities went the opposite direction:
| Year | Applicants | Admits | Admit Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 5,913 | 781 | **13%** |
| 2020 | 6,125 | 1,075 | 18% |
| 2021 | 7,293 | | 1,337 | 18% |
| 2022 | 8,892 | 1,999 | 22% |
| 2023 | 9,523 | 2,140 | 22% |
| 2024 | 8,917 | 2,052 | 23% |
| 2025 | 8,917 | 2,256 | **25%** |
Applicant volume climbed 50%, but admits nearly tripled. The admit rate almost doubled.
So between 2019 and 2025, the gap between the hardest door and the easiest door at Berkeley widened from **12 percentage points (13% vs 25%) to 20+ percentage points (4–5% vs 25%. If you're a 2026 applicant, the "which door" decision matters more than it did for the class that came before you, and significantly more than for the class before that.
UCLA flips the assumption
Most Bay Area families assume UCLA is "easier than Berkeley." For some majors, true. For others, the data flips:
UCLA Computer Science has been harder than Berkeley CS for most of the last 7 years:
- 2023 UCLA CS: 3% (368 admits from 11,938 apps)
- 2023 Berkeley CS: 4%
- 2025 UCLA CS: 7% | Berkeley CS: 6%
UCLA Humanities has stayed brutally selective while UCB's opened up:
- 2025 UCLA Humanities: 9%
- 2025 Berkeley Humanities: 25%
A student who wants to study Humanities has nearly three times better odds at Berkeley than at UCLA. The brand ranking most families anchor on doesn't survive contact with the major-level data.
What's actually going on
Three forces are driving the divergence:
- UC went test-blind in 2021. No SAT, no ACT, no test scores at all. Applicants flooded in — especially to name-brand campuses and selective majors. The
UC systemwide press release confirms systemwide freshman applications hit record highs multiple years in a row.
- Tech-major gravity. CS and Engineering at UCB/UCLA/UCSD absorbed the surge disproportionately. Same admission slots, 2–3× the applicant pool.
- UC made space in Humanities and broader majors. Not because those programs got less competitive academically — but because the applicant pool for them didn't grow nearly as fast, and UC expanded capacity where it could.
Net result: the 11% campus average is now the weighted mean of a handful of single-digit-admit majors and a handful of 20%+ majors, with very little in between. The average is a fiction in the true statistical sense — it describes no actual applicant's experience.
What this actually means for your student
- Your "reach / target / safety" spreadsheet is probably wrong. If you're categorizing Berkeley as a reach because the overall rate is 11%, but your student wants CS, the real rate at that door is 6%. That's not a reach — it's a long shot. Meanwhile, if the same student is genuinely open to Humanities, 25% is a genuine target.
- Yield data tells you where students actually want to be. Students admitted to both Berkeley CS and UCLA CS overwhelmingly pick Berkeley — UCB CS yield is 63% vs UCLA CS at 28%. The brand-level difference between UCLA and Berkeley isn't real at the campus level; it
is real at the major level, and only for some majors.
- "Undeclared" at Berkeley was 12% in 2025 — a door. Two percentage points easier than the headline rate. Every year we see students who could have gotten in through a broader path chase a 5–7% major instead.
The guardrail — and we mean this
Let's be crystal clear: this is not a "game the system" argument. Do not apply to Berkeley Humanities planning to transfer into Haas or CS. UC internal transfers between colleges are harder than external admissions in most cases — Haas internal transfer acceptance typically runs below 10%, and the CS major in Letters & Sciences is similarly gated. UC has documented how the internal transfer process works, and for selective majors it is not a back door.
What this data is for: helping your student pick a major that reflects who they actually are, and understanding the real competitive landscape they're entering.
Explore the data yourself
We built an interactive dashboard with every UC campus, every major, 2019 through 2025. Two views: the current-year snapshot, and the multi-year trend. Pull up your student's target combinations and see where the lines are headed, not just where they are:
UC admit rates by campus , major , and year
The headline "Berkeley admit rate" hides seven years of wildly uneven odds inside each UC. Pick a campus and major to see the snapshot — or track how that major's admit rate has moved since 2019.
How this major compares across UCs
Admit rate for the selected discipline, at each UC campus.
Admit rates for every selected discipline, plotted from 2019 to 2025.
Admit rate, 2019–2025
Year-by-year data
Admit rate is recomputed from admits ÷ applicants; UC rounds its public numbers to the nearest whole percent, so small differences may appear.
A note on picking majors: Don't choose a major you're not genuinely interested in just to game the admit rate. Internal UC transfers between schools (e.g., into Berkeley's Haas or L&S Computer Science) often have admit rates below 10%, and major-switching at most UCs is restricted or competitive. Pick based on fit first.
Data source: University of California Information Center — Freshman admission by discipline. Each year label refers to the fall entering class (e.g., "2025" = students entering Fall 2025 from the 2024–25 admissions cycle). Admit rate = admits ÷ applicants. Yield rate = enrolled ÷ admits. Some programs with fewer than 5 applicants are suppressed by UC. This tool is for informational purposes only and is not a prediction of individual outcomes.
What to do next
If you're a parent of a rising senior, three actions this week:
- Run your student's top 3 major/campus combinations through the dashboard — look at both the current year AND the trend. If a major's admit rate has fallen 5+ points in 3 years, treat it as a harder reach than the number implies.
- Separate "dream major" from "dream campus." The data is telling you they're different decisions.
- If you're chasing a 5–7% major, build a parallel list of 15–25% admit-rate programs at the same tier of campus. That's risk management, not settling.
The Fall 2026 cycle is opening now for rising seniors. We'll publish the companion dashboard — UC admit rates broken out by high school — next week, and an analysis of SAT/ACT submission rates the week after. Sign up for our newsletter if you want them delivered.
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