A few weeks ago a high school counselor tried our free college data tool and asked a fair question: engineering at UC San Diego has a very different acceptance rate than sociology — so why does your site show one number for the whole campus?
They were right. It did.
Most admissions tools treat a university as one door with one admit rate. Ours did too. But for many applicants the major changes the odds more than anything else on the application. UC San Diego admitted engineering applicants at 19 percent last cycle against a 28 percent campus rate. UC is careful to say it admits students to the campus, not the major, at most programs — but the spread still tells you where the crowding is. At the CSUs it’s more direct: at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, your student competes only against the other applicants to their major.
So we built it. Every UC and CSU profile on High School Reach now shows admit rates by discipline and major — the same data the campuses publish, gathered in one place and readable in one sitting.
The lesson we keep relearning: the people who use the tool every day — counselors, parents, students — ask better questions than we think of on our own. If you find something our data can’t answer, tell us. Some of the best pages on the site started as someone’s complaint.
Look up any campus at highschoolreach.com.