Yep! UCLA slammed me with snail mail and I got in with a scholarship (from NY).
Interesting. Maybe my friends tales are exaggerations, misrememberences, or just poor safety planning on their part from back then.
I’m in my 50s, grew up in California, and went to a well-known private high school, which you could have considered a feeder to both, especially UCLA. UCLA and Berkeley were hard admits, even then. We sent a fair number of kids to those schools, but almost all were in the top 15-20% of the class, give or take. I didn’t apply – I wanted to go away and didn’t consider any school in California – but I’m not sure I would have gotten in (and I ended up at a pretty selective school, but that’s the difference between holistic and almost entirely stats-driven admissions). I seem to recall that if you were in the top 10% of your class you had a guaranteed admission to a UC school, but not necessarily the one of your choice. If you were ranked lower than that, you still had a decent chance, but it would be a long shot for the top tier. The admit rates were not what they are today, but that’s true across the board. 70%, though? I have a hard time believing that.
The next tier down was UCSD/UCSB, both of which had reputations as party schools with good academics. Farther down were Davis, Santa Cruz, Riverside, and Irvine, all of which we considered safeties. Oh, how things have changed.
Hm, a girl from my high school went to UCLA, must have been fall 1986, from our country on the other side of the world and I remember her saying it had something like a 70% ish admit rate then. I don’t know what the criteria for admit were. (Back home it was 100% stats based and I don’t think any of us even thought about any other criteria. )
Edit: from google AI:
In the 1980s, the UCLA acceptance rate was significantly higher than it is today, gradually decreasing throughout the decade. In 1980, the acceptance rate was around 74%, according to College Transitions. By the end of the 1980s, it had dropped to approximately 40-42% according to College Transitions.
1 Like
There are a bunch of schools that used to be " much easier to get into" around Boston that are now very selective admits.
Boston College
Boston U
Northeastern
Tufts
U of Florida and UT Austin are another couple.
7 Likes
I think USC falls into that category as well.
3 Likes
I remember when Northeastern was a commuter school that was more competitive with UMass-Boston than UMass-Amherst.
7 Likes
My reference point is from the late 1980s, around the time I was applying to school, and my memory is that UCLA was a considerably easier admit than Berkeley but still tougher than all other UCs. But every school was an easier admit back then. UPenn was also in the low 40s, as I recall, and it makes sense me that UCLA would have been around the same. GPAs and test scores were all lower then across the board, and there weren’t as many APs or similar opportunities, so more top students probably felt they had a shot. But everything’s relative – the declining admissions rate over the course of the 1980s seemed precipitous to those of use who witnessed it first-hand (I don’t remember knowing the specific numbers – just that we were warned not to take UCLA and Berkeley for granted).
I also recall that far more OOS students got into the UCs than is the case today (California loved their OOS tuition!), and that might have skewed the numbers for in-state students, but I’m really not sure by how much.
1 Like
The 70%+ number I mentioned for UCLA was from Professor Scott Galloway who is in his 60s not 50s. My reference to people on their fifties is to folks I know who said that to me, I don’t know the details of how or why. I found a a YouTube clip of Galloway talking about being part of the 24% that didn’t get into UCLA (in other words the other 76% did), but don’t know how to link it from my phone.
I think the 70% number was from the beginning of the decade – cut nearly in half by the end.
1 Like
Guess I am older than most of you!
My sister and I both attended a college prep HS in the Bay Area. She was a mostly B student (boyfriends were her EC 
) who graduated HS in 1979. Back then, UCSC was under enrolled and she went to UCSC for two years with a guaranteed transfer to UCB. So she graduated from Berkeley.
I was a good student, athlete and musician and graduated HS in 1980. I only applied to UCB and UCD. Accepted to both. I chose Davis so I could move away from a very rough home environment.
I feel like most of our class was accepted to one of the UCs. No idea of the acceptance rates back then. And oh the good old days! I paid my own way through Davis by working full time in the summers.
4 Likes
I’m in my early 60s. When I applied, the UC application wasn’t sent to each individual campus. Students would rank the UC campuses on the application which was evaluated by a UC admissions committee.
I remember driving to the post office after the last mail pick up on Oct 31 to put my application in the mail box to get the earliest Nov 1 postmark. My mom’s thought was that earlier applications received their first choice of campus and first choice of housing. My siblings an I all got into our 1st choice campus.
3 Likes
The only admit rate I remember from the 1980s was Stanford’s transfer admit rate which was 14% in 1985ish (a bit lower than the freshman admit rate which I think was in the 20s).
(I only remember this because I transferred there, due to wanting to do a major not offered at the college where I started.)
I went to grad school at USC in the late '80s, so the admission criteria were a little different than for undergrads. But we would joke that if the check cleared, you were admitted.
Almost everyone I worked with who graduated from Cal in the '70s and first half of the '80s went to community college first for two years, then transferred into Cal.
2 Likes
And lots of people still do this!
4 Likes
What I’m seeing is about 32% of recent Cal graduates went to community college first. I wonder what it was back around 1980? I only did a quick search but can’t find anything that answers the latter.
Yeah, and those of us who made it into a UC used to mock USC about that as well. 
The UCs were jealous of USC’s football team.
1 Like
I was a shoo in for SC with my 2.8, 1070, and 41st percentile ranking.
How fast they’ve climbed.
But did your check clear? That is the question.
2 Likes