At nearly every public flagship in the country, the out-of-state applicant faces the longer odds. At UC San Diego, the reverse is true. For the Fall 2025 entering class, Californians were admitted at about 25 percent while applicants from other states were admitted at nearly 40 percent. International applicants, usually the most disadvantaged group at a state university, were admitted at 31 percent.
That inversion is not generosity toward outsiders. It is arithmetic. UC San Diego admitted 39,054 students to fill roughly 7,800 seats, which means four of every five admitted students went somewhere else. Its yield, the share of admitted students who enroll, sits near 20 percent, among the lowest at any highly ranked university in the country, and it falls to under 10 percent for out-of-state admits. La Jolla is the campus that thousands of strong applicants list, get into, and then decline in favor of Berkeley, UCLA, or a private university closer to home. The admissions office compensates by making far more offers than it needs, and the high nonresident admit rate is the visible edge of that strategy.
This report covers five entering classes, Fall 2021 through Fall 2025, drawn from UC San Diego’s Common Data Set filings and its Office of Institutional Research. It walks through the application volume and the admit rate that has been rising rather than falling, the residency puzzle and the waiting list that absorbs its uncertainty, the file the university reads and the two things it refuses to read, the demographic record that California’s Proposition 209 has produced, the competition among majors, and the cost and aid picture. It closes with what the record suggests for applicants.
Application volume and selectivity
UC San Diego received 136,750 first-year applications for Fall 2025, up from 118,410 four years earlier. The more interesting movement is in the admit rate, which fell sharply after the pandemic year and has climbed steadily back since.
| Metric | 2021-22 | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | 2025-26 |
| Applications | 118,410 | 131,254 | 130,845 | 134,455 | 136,750 |
| Admits | 40,629 | 31,274 | 32,403 | 35,989 | 39,054 |
| Admit rate | 34.3% | 23.8% | 24.8% | 26.8% | 28.6% |
| Enrolled | 7,544 | 6,546 | 7,007 | 7,330 | 7,801 |
| Yield | 18.6% | 20.9% | 21.6% | 20.4% | 20.0% |
Source: University of California, San Diego 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 San Diego Common Data Sets, Section C1.
Most selective universities in this period reported the opposite pattern, with rates grinding downward year after year. UC San Diego cut its offers hard in Fall 2022, from 40,629 to 31,274, and has been rebuilding them ever since, back to 39,054 for Fall 2025. The entering class grew alongside, from 6,546 to 7,801, a 19 percent expansion in three years that makes San Diego one of the few campuses in the University of California system adding undergraduate capacity at scale.
Yield explains the offer volume. At roughly 20 percent, UC San Diego converts one admitted student in five. A university with that conversion rate has to admit five students for every seat, which is why a class of 7,800 requires nearly 40,000 offers. The number to watch in this table is not the admit rate; it is the gap between admits and enrollments.
The residency puzzle
California is a public university’s first obligation, and UC San Diego enrolls Californians in bulk. Yet its published admit rates run in the opposite direction from what that suggests.
| Admit rate by residency | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | 2025-26 |
| California residents | 24.5% | 26.0% | 24.7% |
| Domestic out-of-state | 31.9% | 33.5% | 39.7% |
| International | 17.9% | 22.4% | 30.9% |
Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Section C1 residency detail, Fall 2023 through Fall 2025.
Admit rate by residency, Fall 2023 to Fall 2025. Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Section C1.
Out-of-state applicants have been admitted at a higher rate than Californians in every year the university has published the breakdown, and the gap widened sharply for Fall 2025. International admit rates nearly doubled across three years. Both moves are yield management rather than preference. Once enrollment is examined alongside admission, the logic becomes plain.
Admit rate and yield by residency, Fall 2025. Source: UC San Diego Common Data Set, Section C1.
For Fall 2025, California residents admitted at 24.7 percent enrolled at 25.1 percent. Out-of-state admits, offered places at 39.7 percent, enrolled at 9.7 percent. International admits enrolled at 18.8 percent. A campus that wants a given number of nonresidents on move-in day has to extend roughly two and a half offers for every Californian offer to land the same student. The higher nonresident rate reflects how rarely those offers are accepted, not a thumb on the scale.
The composition of the enrolled class shows where that strategy has landed. Californians made up 78 percent of the Fall 2023 class and 70 percent of the Fall 2025 class, while international students rose from under 10 percent to 18 percent. Domestic out-of-state enrollment stayed near 12 percent throughout. Nonresidents pay a large tuition supplement, and the campus has leaned into international recruitment as state funding has tightened.
The waiting list does the rest
No admissions office can predict yield perfectly at this scale, and UC San Diego’s waiting list absorbs the error. The numbers are enormous by any standard.
| Waiting list | 2021-22 | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | 2025-26 |
| Offered a place | 25,419 | 51,350 | 29,087 | 27,521 | 36,709 |
| Accepted a place | 8,835 | 36,113 | 19,373 | 19,156 | 25,411 |
| Admitted from list | 0 | 2,400 | 2,616 | 4,539 | 5,284 |
Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Section C2, Fall 2021 through Fall 2025.
Students admitted from the waiting list, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Section C2.
In Fall 2021 the university admitted nobody from the list. By Fall 2025 it admitted 5,284, a figure larger than the entire entering class at many selective private universities. Roughly two-thirds of admitted students that year came through the regular round and the rest through the list. For an applicant, the practical meaning is that a waiting-list letter from UC San Diego carries real weight; the odds of conversion have run near one in five in recent cycles, far better than the token lists many universities maintain. It also means decisions can arrive late, which complicates planning for families weighing deposits elsewhere.
What the file contains, and what it leaves out
Section C7 records what the university weighs. Rigor of the secondary school record, academic grade point average, and the application essay are rated very important. Extracurricular activities, talent, personal qualities, volunteer work, and state residency are important. First-generation status, geographic residence, work experience, and class rank are considered. Four factors are not considered at all: interviews, alumni relation, religious affiliation, and level of applicant’s interest. Recommendations are not considered either, which surprises applicants coming from a private-school counseling tradition built around them.
The largest absence is the test. Section C8 records that UC San Diego does not use SAT or ACT scores in admission decisions, and its enrolled-class score profile has been blank for every year in this window. The University of California regents voted in 2020 to drop the requirement and the system has been test-free since, meaning scores are not considered even when submitted. What remains is the transcript, the rigor behind it, and four Personal Insight Questions. There is no early decision or early action plan, no interview, and no tracking of demonstrated interest, so campus visits and contact with the office cannot move a decision. Every applicant files one University of California application by November 30 and waits for a decision that begins arriving in mid-March.
The second absence is race, and it predates the national debate by a quarter century. California’s Proposition 209 barred public universities from considering race in 1996, taking effect in 1998, so the 2023 Supreme Court decision that reshaped admissions elsewhere changed nothing in La Jolla.
Who enrolls
UC San Diego’s entering class is majority students of color, with a large Asian plurality and a Hispanic share that rose and then receded. The Black share is the number that stands out, and not favorably.
| First-year share | Fall 2021 | Fall 2022 | Fall 2023 | Fall 2024 | Fall 2025 |
| Asian | 38.3% | 39.7% | 33.1% | 35.4% | 34.5% |
| Hispanic/Latino | 21.6% | 29.9% | 31.3% | 28.8% | 23.9% |
| White | 19.3% | 14.8% | 15.2% | 13.9% | 13.4% |
| International | 14.6% | 9.1% | 9.8% | 11.0% | 18.1% |
| Black/African American | 2.9% | 3.9% | 2.1% | 1.3% | 1.2% |
Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Section B2, first-time first-year cohort. Under federal guidelines, Hispanic, multiracial, and international students are reported separately.
Asian, Hispanic, White, international, and Black share of the first-year class, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Section B2.
Black students made up 3.9 percent of the Fall 2022 entering class and 1.2 percent of the Fall 2025 class, 97 students out of 7,801. That is among the lowest figures at any major American research university, and it comes from a campus operating under race-neutral rules for its entire modern history rather than from any recent policy change. Hispanic enrollment tells a more complicated story: it climbed to 31.3 percent in Fall 2023, close to a level that would put UC San Diego on solid footing as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, then fell back to 23.9 percent as international enrollment expanded. The two movements are related. Seats added for nonresidents are seats not available to Californians, and California’s public high school graduates are majority Hispanic.
Where the competition lives
UC San Diego admits students to a specific major, and it does so through a structure no other campus shares. Undergraduates also belong to one of the university’s residential colleges, each with its own general-education requirements and its own character, and applicants rank the colleges in preference order. That choice shapes the experience but not the odds; the major does the sorting.
Share of bachelor’s degrees by field, 2024-25. Source: UC San Diego Common Data Set, Section J.
Biology and the life sciences remain the largest field at 19.6 percent of degrees, feeding one of the strongest pre-health pipelines in the West and drawing on the medical school, the Skaggs pharmacy school, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Interdisciplinary studies follows at 16.6 percent, a category that at UC San Diego carries the fast-growing data science and cognitive science programs rather than a scattering of small majors. Engineering, housed in the Jacobs School, accounts for 11.5 percent, and computer science 7.2 percent.
Two shifts inside that table deserve attention. Business and marketing rose from 1.3 percent of degrees in 2020-21 to 6.5 percent in 2024-25, a fivefold increase that reflects the Rady School’s young undergraduate program moving through to graduation. Computing and data science have been reorganized and expanded, with data analytics ranked eighth nationally and computer science twelfth in the 2026 U.S. News program rankings. Both fields admit selectively, and switching into them after enrollment is difficult, so the major named on the application carries more weight than the overall admit rate implies. An applicant drawn to computing should compare the direct path through engineering with the data science route, and one drawn to biology should understand that the largest major on campus is also one of the most crowded.
Cost and aid
UC San Diego’s price splits sharply by residency, and the split has widened. Resident tuition and fees run about $17,991 for 2026-27, while nonresidents pay roughly $57,261, a supplement of nearly $40,000 a year. Food and housing add about $20,443, up from $15,356 five years earlier, which is the fastest-moving line in the budget.
Tuition and required fees, resident and nonresident, 2022-23 to 2026-27. Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Section G1.
The resident line moves unevenly because UC San Diego operates a Tuition Stability Plan that freezes an entering cohort’s tuition for six years, so the published first-year figure reflects the newest cohort rather than a single schedule applied to everyone. The nonresident line rises without interruption, from $41,196 in tuition for 2022-23 to $53,472 for 2026-27.
Aid narrows the gap for Californians and barely touches it for everyone else. Through the systemwide Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan, California families below an income threshold have systemwide tuition and fees covered by grant and scholarship money. For the most recent class, the average need-based grant for first-year students was about $28,634 and the average aid package about $32,474, though the university met roughly 84 percent of demonstrated need on average rather than making a full-need commitment. About 31 percent of the most recent graduating class borrowed, at an average of $19,032. Institutional aid for nonresidents exists but is thin, averaging near $10,290 for the few hundred who receive it, so an out-of-state or international family should treat the sticker as close to the real number.
Retention and graduation
Persistence is strong and steady. First-year retention has held between 93 and 95 percent across the window, at 94.7 percent for the most recent cohort. The six-year graduation rate for the 2019 entering cohort was 86 percent, with Pell recipients at 81 percent and non-recipients at 89 percent, and four-year completion for the same cohort was about 74 percent.
First-year retention and graduation rates, most recent reporting. Source: UC San Diego Common Data Sets, Sections B4-B22.
Those figures have drifted down a few points from the 89 percent six-year rate recorded for the 2015 cohort, a period during which the university expanded enrollment substantially. The student-faculty ratio sits at 19.6 to 1, and large lectures are common: nearly 300 undergraduate class sections enrolled 100 or more students in Fall 2025. A campus growing this fast asks more of students in finding their footing, which is part of what the residential colleges exist to provide.
Beyond the numbers
Three developments frame the five-year record. The first is growth. UC San Diego enrolled 33,343 undergraduates in Fall 2021 and 35,442 in Fall 2025, and its entering classes have expanded even as several peer campuses held flat. That expansion is the reason the admit rate has risen while applications climbed, an unusual combination that makes the campus more accessible on paper than it was three years ago.
The second is standing. In the 2026 U.S. News rankings UC San Diego placed No. 29 among national universities and No. 6 among public universities, with psychology at No. 11, computer science at No. 12, engineering at No. 17, and economics at No. 18. Its research profile, anchored by Scripps, the medical enterprise, and a large engineering school, keeps it near the top of national research spending.
The third is the pressure on the University of California’s test-free policy. In early 2025 the federal government signaled that facially race-neutral policies adopted to promote diversity, including dropping standardized tests, could run afoul of civil rights law, and opened compliance reviews at several California campuses. Any systemwide reversal would land on UC San Diego along with the rest, and would change the file applicants prepare.
What the five-year record means for applicants
The number to ignore is the overall admit rate. Approaching 29 percent, it describes a university that makes offers on a scale almost no peer matches, and it tells an individual applicant very little. The numbers that carry information are the residency split, the major, and the waiting list.
A Californian with a demanding transcript and strong grades has a realistic shot at admission, though not necessarily at a capped major. An out-of-state or international applicant will find the published rate friendlier than at Berkeley or UCLA, and should understand why: San Diego expects most of its nonresident admits to enroll elsewhere and prices its offers accordingly. That is useful information rather than discouraging information, since it makes UC San Diego one of the more reachable highly ranked public universities for a nonresident who actually wants to attend, provided the family can absorb a cost near $80,000 a year with little institutional aid.
Every applicant should treat the major as the real decision and the waiting list as a live possibility rather than a formality. With no test scores, no interview, no recommendations, and no early round, the transcript and four short essays carry the entire case. The five-year record shows a university adding seats, admitting more students than nearly anyone else, and still filling its class with Californians who came for the biology labs, the engineering school, and the ocean at the end of the road.
