What do the UCs want from applicants?

Over the past decade, the CSUs went from mostly campus impacted to mostly not campus impacted, and few majors at non-impacted campuses are impacted now. “Impacted” means that the campus or major capacity is smaller than the number of students applying to it, so admission is competitive (mostly by CSU recalculated GPA plus campus-specific bonus points like for local area) rather than automatic at the CSU baseline (2.5 CSU recalculated GPA in complete a-g course pattern for California residents).

However, the trend toward more students wanting the “top” schools means that the most selective UCs tend to get more selective, even when there is plenty of space in the less selective UCs and CSUs.

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