University of California, Berkeley: Inside the Numbers

Picture a high school senior with a 1580 SAT, a stack of fives on her AP exams, and her heart set on studying computer science at Berkeley. At almost any other top university, that score anchors her application. At Berkeley, no one will ever see it. The university has not looked at an SAT or ACT score since 2021, and the program she wants, electrical engineering and computer science, admits fewer than one applicant in twenty on the strength of everything except a test.

That scene captures what makes Berkeley one of the most distinctive admissions cases in the country. It is test-free, meaning standardized scores play no part in the decision at all. It has been race-neutral since 1998, when California’s Proposition 209 barred public universities from considering race, so the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that upended admissions elsewhere changed nothing on this campus. And it admits students to a specific college and major, which means the acceptance rate a student actually faces depends far more on what they want to study than on the 11 percent figure in the headlines.

This report covers five entering classes, Fall 2021 through Fall 2025, drawn from Berkeley’s Common Data Set filings and its Office of Planning and Analysis, along with the state law and system policy that shape the outcome. It walks through the extraordinary application volume, the file Berkeley reads and the two things it refuses to read, the demographic record that three decades of Proposition 209 have produced, the California-first residency rules, the sharp differences in difficulty by major, and the cost and aid picture. It closes with what the record suggests for applicants.

Application volume and selectivity

Berkeley receives more first-year applications than almost any university on earth, and the number has hovered near 125,000 for the entire window. Admits have stayed compressed in a narrow band, so the acceptance rate settled around 11 percent after a higher pandemic-year figure in Fall 2021.

Source: University of California, Berkeley Common Data Sets, Section C1, Fall 2021 through Fall 2025. Admit rate = admits divided by applications. Yield = enrolled divided by admits.

Applications and overall admit rate, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: UC Berkeley Common Data Sets, Section C1.

Two features stand out. Applications jumped from about 113,000 for Fall 2021 to roughly 128,000 for Fall 2022, the first full year after the University of California went test-free, and have held near that level since. Admits, meanwhile, barely moved, staying between 13,700 and 16,400, so the rate compressed and settled near 11 percent. Yield is remarkably high for a public university, close to 46 percent, because a large majority of admitted students treat Berkeley as a first choice. There is no early decision or early action to inflate that number; every applicant files a single University of California application by November 30 and waits.

What Berkeley reads, and what it ignores

Berkeley’s admission factors look conventional until two absences come into focus. The Common Data Set rates rigor of the secondary school record, academic grade point average, and the application essay as very important. Extracurricular activities and personal qualities are important. Recommendations, talent, first-generation status, and state residency are considered. Two factors are explicitly not considered: class rank and, notably, alumni relation. Berkeley gives no legacy preference, a stance California wrote into law for private colleges in 2024 and that the university never practiced.

The first absence is the test. The University of California stopped using the SAT and ACT in admissions after its regents voted in 2020 to drop the requirement, and Berkeley reports no test-score profile for its enrolled classes because it collects none for admission purposes. The rationale was tied directly to Proposition 209: because California readers cannot consider race as context when weighing a score, and because the tests correlate heavily with family income, the university concluded that race-neutral review implied test-free review. In place of scores, the four Personal Insight Questions carry real weight, and there are no admissions interviews and, for most applicants, no recommendation letters.

The second absence is race, and it has been gone far longer. Berkeley has run race-neutral admissions since 1998, nearly three decades, which is why the national reckoning over the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision passed the campus by. Whatever tools Berkeley uses to build a class, the plus factor for underrepresented students that many universities lost in 2023 was never available here in the first place.

Who enrolls: three decades of Proposition 209

The demographic record is the most consequential number in Berkeley’s file, and it has barely moved. The entering class is a large Asian plurality, a substantial and growing Hispanic share, and a Black population that has sat near 2 percent for the entire five years.

Source: UC Berkeley Common Data Sets, Section B2, first-time first-year cohort. Under federal guidelines, Hispanic, multiracial, and international students are reported separately.

Asian, Hispanic, White, and Black share of the first-year class, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: UC Berkeley Common Data Sets, Section B2.

The Black share is the figure that draws the most attention, and for good reason. Before Proposition 209, Black students made up close to 7 percent of Berkeley undergraduates; the ban cut that figure sharply, and it has never recovered, hovering near 2 percent of the entering class across all five years in this report. Hispanic enrollment has climbed into the low 20s but still falls well short of the Hispanic share of California’s high school graduates, which is above half. The university has said openly, including in a brief to the Supreme Court, that race-neutral methods have not restored the diversity the state’s most selective campuses lost after 1996. For applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, the practical reality is that Berkeley’s file rewards academic record, rigor, and the personal essays, and that the campus runs extensive outreach and support programs, but the aggregate numbers have proven stubborn.

California first: residency and the nonresident cap

Berkeley is a state institution, and its admissions tilt heavily toward Californians. The overall rate splits sharply by residency, and a system policy caps how many nonresidents the campus can enroll.

Admit rate by residency, Fall 2023, the year Berkeley reported the residency breakdown. Source: UC Berkeley Common Data Set, Section C1.

For Fall 2023, the one year in this window in which Berkeley published a residency breakdown, California residents were admitted at about 15 percent, domestic out-of-state applicants at about 8 percent, and international applicants at under 6 percent. The enrolled class runs roughly 71 percent Californian, 17 percent domestic out-of-state, and 11 percent international. Two forces pull against each other here. Nonresidents pay far more, which the university values, but the UC system caps nonresident undergraduate enrollment, and a state budget agreement has pushed Berkeley, UCLA, and San Diego to trim their nonresident shares and enroll more Californians. For an out-of-state or international applicant, the takeaway is blunt: the effective admit rate is roughly half the headline, and the number of seats is limited by policy rather than by the strength of any single file.

Where the competition really is

Berkeley admits to a specific college and, in several cases, a specific major, and the differences in difficulty are enormous. The single largest field is computer science, which alone accounts for nearly a fifth of all bachelor’s degrees, followed by the social sciences and engineering.

Share of bachelor’s degrees by field, 2024-25. Source: UC Berkeley Common Data Set, Section J.

In the most recent year, computer science accounted for about 18.7 percent of bachelor’s degrees, the social sciences 16.4 percent, engineering 10.3 percent, and the biological sciences 9.2 percent, with mathematics and statistics, psychology, and business each near 4 percent. The concentration in computing and engineering is unusual even among elite research universities, and it reflects both student demand and the pipeline into the Bay Area technology economy.

That degree mix understates how the front door works. Electrical engineering and computer science, housed in the College of Engineering as a direct-admit major, admits under 5 percent of applicants, a rate in the same range as MIT and Carnegie Mellon’s flagship computing programs. Students who want computer science but not that gauntlet often apply through the College of Letters and Science, a broader entry point where the CS major is separately capped by a grade threshold and now sits inside a new College of Computing, Data Science, and Society that Berkeley launched in 2023 to house its fast-growing data-science and statistics programs. The Haas School of Business, one of the top undergraduate business programs in the country, largely does not admit freshmen at all; most students apply as sophomores or juniors already on campus, or transfer in, through a selective internal review, and the small number of first-year business admits arrive through joint programs such as Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology. The lesson is that the college and major chosen on the application matter more at Berkeley than almost anywhere else, and a student drawn to computing should weigh the engineering, letters-and-science, and data-science paths deliberately.

Cost, aid, and the Blue and Gold floor

Berkeley’s price splits by residency as sharply as its admit rate does, and the Bay Area drives the total well above tuition. In-state tuition and required fees run about $18,464 for 2025-26, while nonresident tuition and fees reach roughly $57,734. Food and housing add about $26,028 on top, one of the highest such figures at any public university.

In-state and out-of-state cost of attendance, 2025-26. Source: UC Berkeley Common Data Set, Section G1.

Aid narrows the gap sharply for Californians and barely at all for everyone else. Through the systemwide Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan, California families with incomes under $80,000 who qualify for aid pay no tuition or fees, and a Middle-Class Scholarship extends partial help further up the income scale. For the most recent class, the average need-based grant for first-year students was about $36,226 and the average aid package about $39,656, though Berkeley meets only about 88 percent of demonstrated need on average rather than the full-need commitment some private peers make, a gap widened by the region’s living costs. About 45 percent of first-year students receive need-based aid. Nonresidents, by contrast, receive little institutional aid and should treat the roughly $84,000 sticker as close to their real cost.

Retention and graduation

Berkeley’s completion numbers are excellent and steady. First-year retention was about 97 percent for the most recent reported cohort, and the six-year graduation rate reached 93.7 percent for the 2019 entering cohort, with Pell recipients at 89.8 percent, a gap of under four points that is small by national standards. The four-year rate is about 80 percent, and the student-faculty ratio is 18 to 1.

First-year retention and graduation rates, most recent reporting. Source: UC Berkeley Common Data Set and U.S. News.

Those outcomes, paired with the in-state price and the Blue and Gold floor, are what put Berkeley at the top of the value and social-mobility rankings. The university admits a large, academically strong class and moves nearly all of it to a degree, and it does so while enrolling a substantial share of lower-income and first-generation students.

Beyond the numbers

Three developments outside the standard table frame the five-year record. The first is the sheer and still-growing demand: applications have roughly doubled over a decade while the number of seats has held flat, which is the engine behind the falling rate and the widening gap between a general admission and a spot in a capped major.

The second is a live threat to the test-free policy. In early 2025 the federal government signaled that facially race-neutral policies adopted to promote diversity, including dropping standardized tests, could violate the law, and the Department of Justice opened compliance reviews at Berkeley and two other UC campuses. Whether the university keeps its test-free approach, or is pushed to reconsider it, is an open question that could reshape the file within a few cycles.

The third is standing. In the 2026 U.S. News rankings Berkeley placed No. 15 among national universities and No. 1 among public universities, a position it has held for years, and it ranks near the top of the world in fields from computer science to economics. That reputation, a low in-state price, and a booming home region keep applications climbing faster than the campus can grow.

What the five-year record means for applicants

The most important move an applicant can make is to understand that Berkeley reads a different file than most of its peers. There is no score to submit, no early round to signal interest, no legacy edge, and for most applicants no recommendation letter. What remains is the transcript, the rigor behind it, and four short essays, and those pieces carry the full weight of the decision. A California resident with a strong record and demanding coursework has a realistic shot at the university, though not necessarily at the major of first choice.

Residency and major are the two levers that move the odds most. Out-of-state and international applicants face rates roughly half the headline, set by a policy that is actively shrinking nonresident enrollment, and should treat Berkeley as a reach and its sticker price as real. Every applicant, in-state or not, should choose the college and major with care, because electrical engineering and computer science is a single-digit admit and Haas is largely closed to freshmen, while other paths into the same fields are more open. The five-year record describes a university drawing extraordinary demand, holding its Californian and race-neutral character by law, and asking applicants to make their case on the record and the writing alone.