Admitted California · How this is built

Methodology & Sources

Every number on this site comes from a file a government agency published. Here is which file, how it is combined, and — more usefully — every place the arithmetic is uncertain.

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The claim this site makes is checkable, which is the only kind worth making. Nothing below is proprietary. Anyone with a spreadsheet and an afternoon can download the same files and get the same answers — and if they get different ones, we want to hear about it.

The sources

Source	What it provides
CAASPP Smarter Balanced research file California Department of Education, 2024–25 (`sb_ca2025_all_ascii_v1`)	Grade 11 results, "All Students" group, at school level. We use "Exceeded Standard" — the highest of the four achievement levels — only. Percentages are of students tested with valid scores. Schools with fewer than 11 tested students are suppressed by the state and are excluded here.
Admissions by Source School University of California Information Center, Fall 2025	Freshman applicants, admits and enrollees for each California high school, universitywide and by campus. Universitywide counts are unduplicated. Campus counts are not: a student admitted to three campuses appears three times, which is why campus figures do not sum to the universitywide one.
Applications and admissions by high school California State University, Fall 2022, 2023 and 2024	Applications, admits and enrollees per campus per high school, summed across three years to get past the suppression floor.
Free and Reduced-Price Meals California Department of Education, 2024–25	The low-income share of each school, which is the poverty measure used throughout.
IPEDS and the College Scorecard U.S. Department of Education	College-level spending, staffing, completion, earnings, debt and net price — used in the college comparisons rather than the high school analysis.

Schools are joined across sources on the 14-digit CDS code, not on name. Two schools in California share a name more often than you would guess.

The Admitted California Ratio

The site's central measure asks one question: does a school get the number of selective-campus offers its own students' measured achievement would predict?

Count the students at that school who exceeded both the English and mathematics standards — the state's own bar, and the one common yardstick every public-school junior in California sits.
Count the school's selective-campus offers: UCLA, Berkeley, San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbara and Irvine. A student counts once at each campus that admitted them.
Divide, then compare that rate to the statewide rate of selective offers per top scorer.

Above 1.1× means the campuses made more offers than the school's measured achievement accounts for; below 0.9×, fewer; in between is parity. The measure is about a school, and it is not a judgment of any individual admit. Everyone admitted to a UC met the University's own published requirements.

Where "exceeded both" comes from

This is the site's one real estimate, and it deserves the paragraph. The state publishes each test separately and does not publish how many students cleared both. The true count has to lie between two bounds: at most the smaller of the two counts, and at least their sum minus the number tested. We use the upper bound — that is, we assume students who exceeded in mathematics also exceeded in English.

That assumption is defensible: across California schools the two rates correlate at r = 0.83, and mathematics is the harder bar at 83% of them. It is also, deliberately, the assumption that is least favourable to this site's argument. Taking the upper bound inflates the denominator, which pushes every parity ratio down and makes over-admission harder to demonstrate, not easier.

What the data cannot tell you

The cohorts are adjacent, not identical. Students admitted for Fall 2025 were juniors in 2023–24; the test results shown are the 2024–25 junior class. They are the same school one year apart, not the same students. Each source is at its most recent published year, and using a stale year to force alignment would be the worse trade.
Masked counts are not zero. UC withholds any count under three; CSU withholds any group under ten, and does it separately in each of the three years, so a campus admitting nine a year loses all of them. Every CSU figure here is therefore a floor, and the true count is higher. Where admits were reportable in only some years, we also print the rate over the matching years, so the width of the uncertainty is visible instead of averaged away.
Rates are per application, not per student. A student who applies to four CSU campuses is four applications.
Private schools have no SBAC. They do not sit California's test, so no parity ratio exists for them. Their card shows selective offers per applicant instead, which is a different measure and is labelled as one.
None of it is linked at the student level. No file used here follows an individual, and no analysis on this site pretends otherwise.

Found an error?

Tell us which number, and we will show you the filing it came from or correct it — and say publicly that we did. That offer is the whole basis on which anything here is worth reading.

jim@admittedca.com

© 2026 Stewart Digital Affairs · 5055 Canyon Crest Drive, Riverside, CA 92507 · Admitted California is an independent research project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the University of California, the California State University, the California Department of Education, or any high school named on this site. Every figure is drawn from public filings, each named on the methodology page.