Admitted vs. denied — GPA and volume by school, campus and year
UC publishes, for every California high school × campus × year, the number of
applicants and admits and the mean GPA of each. That is enough to recover the two populations an
admission decision separates: the students a campus took and the students it turned away.
Admitted is always blue, denied is always orange.
The page opens on all California public high schools pooled; type a school name to narrow every
view to that one school. Denied counts and denied mean GPA are derived — exactly, from the
published figures; the derivation and eight caveats are at the foot of the
page.
Campus applies to the timeline and the scatter; the grid always shows all campuses.
Admitted and denied GPA by year
Each year is one vertical bar running from the denied mean GPA up to the admitted mean
GPA. Dot area is the number of students on each side, so a single mark reads: how high the GPA,
how wide the gap, how many taken, how many turned away. Hover for exact values.
Table — underlying numbers for this selection
GPA by campus and year
Rows are campuses (systemwide first), each split into an admitted and a
denied strip; columns are the 32 years. Cell color is mean GPA, on a scale fitted to the values
actually on screen. Hatched cells are data — suppressed or masked, never zero. The right margin
totals 2015–2025 volumes.
Color
Every school in one year
Every California public high school applying to the selected campus in a year —
admitted mean GPA against denied mean GPA, dot area = applicants, schools with fewer than 10 denials
not shown. The diagonal is “admitted = denied”; height above it is the school’s
GPA gap. Both axes carry the same GPA scale and open fitted to where the schools actually are.
Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, double-click to reset — the three years move together.
Click any dot to select that school.
Years
How “denied” is derived, and eight caveats
Derivation. Denied volume = applicants − admits. Denied mean GPA is recovered by
moment arithmetic: (Napp·GPAapp − Nadm·GPAadm) / Ndenied.
UC publishes the applicant and admit means, so the denied mean is exact given those two.
Suppression. UC blanks small cells. Blank ≠ zero: missing years show as gaps, never as 0.
Small denominators. When fewer than 10 students were denied, the derived denied GPA is
noise-dominated and is masked (shown as a gap) everywhere on this page. Derived values outside
(0, 5) — a handful of tiny-denominator artifacts — are likewise blanked. The mask is
applied when the dataset is built, not in the browser.
The pooled “all high schools” figures. With the school box empty, each campus-year
shows one weighted average over every California public high school whose applicant and admit GPA
UC published that year: admitted mean = Σ(Nadm·GPAadm) / ΣNadm,
and the denied mean is the same moment identity applied to the pooled totals. Because it is applied
to totals, the pooled denied mean is not affected by the small-denominator mask — schools
masked individually still contribute. The pooled counts are the counts of those contributing schools
(shown on hover), not UC’s campus grand total, since a school-year whose GPA is suppressed
cannot enter a GPA-weighted mean.
GPA coverage. Published means cover students with a UC-computable GPA; the derivation
assumes similar coverage among admitted and denied.
Campus-label repair. The source GPA tab lists Universitywide first, so its raw campus labels
are shifted one position; this page uses the corrected assignment (verified: the corrected systemwide
GPA matches the unrepaired “Berkeley” column in 29,131 of 29,131 school-years, and
post-repair admit-GPA coverage tracks campus selectivity).
Universe. 1,607 California public high schools — the same school list and naming as the
rest of the site. Community-college and unidentifiable source codes that ride along in the counts
extract are excluded (they carry 69 of 129,823 displayable denied-GPA school-years).
Where the counts come from. Applicant and admit counts for the nine campuses are taken
from UC’s by-campus file, which covers the full school universe. An earlier build of this
page drew them from a derived table assembled for another study, which covered only 1,181 schools
and so left 355 schools with a published GPA and no volume at all — and therefore no denied
series. Repaired 2026-07-31; the two sources agree exactly where both carry a value (244,944
cells, no disagreements), and the repair moved every pooled mean on this page by less than
0.005 GPA.
Codes that changed. A school reissued a new CEEB code — usually at a charter
conversion — appears once per code, each covering its own era; six pairs share a name and
city. For four of them the systemwide row is filed under the later code for the whole span while
the campus rows follow the code each year was reported under, because the systemwide and
by-campus figures come from different UC files that resolve the change differently. It affects 39
school-years.
Data vintage
Admissions
UC Information Center, freshman admissions by source high school (California public HS),
admission years fall 1994–2025 — counts from the by-year counts tabs; GPA from the
by-year GPA tab with the one-position campus-label offset corrected. The admissions series is
continuous through 2020–21.
Denied series
Derived from the above at build time (2026-07-31) by
scripts/make_denied_data.py, which also computes the pooled all-school marginal for each
campus and year; the underlying dataset is
data/school_campus_year_admitted_denied.csv.
Last updated 31 July 2026. Revision history is in
docs/CHANGELOG.md.