UCLA by the numbers
For the cohort of fall 2024, UCLA received 173,651 applications, comprising 146,276 first-year applications and 27,177 transfer applications – the most of any university in the nation. The school admitted 13,114, or 9%, of its first-year applicants and 6,177, or 23%, of its transfer applicants. UCLA, along with several other UC campuses, uses a holistic admissions process. According to UCLA Undergraduate Admission, the review process encompasses many aspects of a student’s journey to college, ranging from academic performance, community service and extracurricular achievements to personal qualities and challenges faced. To explore the variation in UCLA admits across California’s 58 counties, the Stack analyzed the UCLA admission rate for public schools and community colleges in each county in relation to its income to uncover any financial disparities.
Where Bruins call home
During the fall 2024 term, 76.6% of total undergraduates were from a California county. In 2022, Governor Newsom signed Assembly Bill 178, which included $51.5 million to increase resident enrollment across the UC by 4,700 above 2021-2022 levels by 2023-2024. In 2024, UC campuses admitted 4.3% more first-year California residents and 7.8% more transfers from California community colleges than in the previous year under pressure from state lawmakers to increase the total proportion of California residents enrolled.
The color of each county indicates the percentage of the fall 2024 class that came from: public schools (left) or California community colleges (right) in that county, ranging from yellow to red as the percentage increases.
Notably on the graph to the left, the Shasta Cascades, North Coast, Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada regions of California have significant patches of white, indicating zero students from public high schools in the corresponding counties enrolled in UCLA. Most counties – especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast and Southern California – are a shade of yellow or pale orange, indicating roughly 8% or less of UCLA enrollees came from public schools in those regions. Los Angeles County – the most populous county in California and in the United States – stands out in bright red on the map, with Los Angeles County public school students constituting 22.71% of last year’s freshmen.
The graph on the right indicates a similar pattern for transfer students, with many counties within the Shasta Cascades and Sierra Nevada regions in white, indicating that zero transfer students from California community colleges there enrolled in UCLA. Once again, the highest number of transfer students that enrolled in UCLA – 45.73% of the transfer class – came from community colleges within LA County. It is important to note that counties in the regions that are predominantly colored white have some of the lowest county populations in California, while Los Angeles County and other surrounding regions colored predominantly in brighter orange are much more densely populated.
Income, access and admissions
A report by the Brookings Institution found that college enrollment varies based on socioeconomic status. Using county income as a proxy for socioeconomic status, the Stack’s analysis found a statistically-significant positive correlation between a county’s average household income and its average acceptance rate to UCLA. This means that counties with higher average income tend to see higher acceptance rates in public high schools. But the relationship is weak, as household income as a factor explains only 18% of the variation in acceptance rate (when controlled for one extreme outlier). This indicates that while income is a significant factor, it is far from being the only predictor of acceptance.
For transfers, the conclusion is slightly different. A county’s average income only explains around 0.9% of the variation in acceptance rate to UCLA, indicating that income is not as important of a factor in determining transfer acceptance rates. As context, community college education in California has become cheaper, or in some cases entirely free, due to the California Promise Program Grant, which allows students who meet criteria in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to pay no tuition. All 116 community colleges in California provide some tuition assistance, and many of them have expanded free tuition to all students regardless of income eligibility. Therefore, the income of a transfer student is less of a barrier to acceptance than the income of a first-year student, where income plays a larger role through the neighborhood they live in and the public high school they are zoned to.
Conclusion
With the country’s highest number of applicants, the data highlights the competitiveness of admission to UCLA. Like academic performance, economic status is just one part of a larger picture; UCLA’s stated goal is to take a comprehensive view of applicants in the context of their personal and academic backgrounds.
About the Data
The Stack used the University of California’s Admission by Source School tables, filtered by Fall term 2024, for the UCLA campus. High school data was further filtered by public schools only. Data was last updated April 1, 2025.
