That’s 108,178 admitted freshman out of a pool of 176,695 applicants across the system’s nine undergraduate campuses.
Another 28,752 transfer students — including a record 26,700 from the California Community Colleges system — were offered spots at UC campuses, out of 41,282 applicants.
“Yet another year of record-setting admissions underscores the tremendous interest in the world-class education at UC,” Janet Napolitano, the university’s president, said in a statement.
The data was released as UC, one of the world’s most vaunted public institutions, grapples with questions about how to best serve the full spectrum of young Californians amid widening economic inequality and debates about the value of a college education.
On top of that, this year, the University of California was swept up in the college admissions scandal, which laid bare just how elite the system’s most competitive campuses have become.
Last month, I talked with Napolitano about changes to admissions processes meant to head off any admissions fraud in the future.
She described the university as a kind of public trust. And as such, Napolitano said, its administrators must implement policies that both “mitigate against the undue effect of privilege,” as well as work to put a UC education within reach of as many residents of the state as possible. The university has faced criticism for admitting too many students from out of state in the past.
This week, officials announced an increase in the freshman admission rate for Californians (by 3 percentage points, to 62%) and highlighted what was by at least one measure the most diverse class ever: 40% of admitted freshmen were from historically underrepresented groups, meaning they are African-American, Chicano or Latino, or American Indian.
Asian-American students were the largest ethnic group among freshman admissions, representing 35% of the class, followed by 34% Chicano or Latino, 22% white, 5% African-American and 0.5% American Indian.
About 44% of the freshman admissions from California would be first-generation college students, and 40% are low income.
But that’s all across a huge system, and the stats aren’t reflected at the most competitive campuses. For example, just 26% of freshman admissions to UC Berkeley were from underrepresented groups.
As my colleague Jennifer Medina reported last year, the bulk of the fast-growing Latino population — particularly first-generation college students — is headed to less academically lauded campuses, like UC Merced.
That raises as many questions about how to make UCLA and Cal more like UC Merced as it does about how Merced can become more like its older siblings.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.