Graduation, retention, time to degree, degrees conferred, earnings and debt for University of California undergraduates, plotted across entering cohorts — split by the populations the public data can distinguish. Pick a comparison, then add or remove groups. The purple tag on each chart states exactly what kind of quantity is plotted; the amber tag states what the x-axis means. Every point carries its definition and, where published, its cohort size.
Measures are grouped in the picker by what they mean, and every chart carries a purple tag: % of entering cohort — the share of everyone who started (the usual "graduation rate"); % of graduates — a split among those who finished, saying nothing about how many finished; average of graduates — a mean (time to degree, final GPA) among those who finished; count — raw degrees conferred, not a rate; composition — who is enrolled or receiving aid, an input rather than an outcome; dollars — median earnings or debt. Where a true cohort share is not published, the page derives a transparent estimate and labels it "(est.)" with its denominator stated under the chart, rather than silently switching meanings.
| Universe | Who is counted | Group definitions | Used in |
|---|---|---|---|
| UC data UC Information Center | All new UC undergraduates (freshman or transfer entrants), by entering cohort year. By-school tables count enrollees from that source school. | UC's ethnicity categories; Pell status in the entering year; first-generation = no parent with a four-year degree. | Systemwide groups, high schools, community colleges, GPA bands |
| Federal data IPEDS / College Scorecard | Completion (C150): first-time, full-time bachelor's-seeking fall cohorts, completing at the same campus within 150% of expected time (six years). Scorecard earnings/debt: students receiving federal Title IV aid only. IPEDS completions: degrees conferred, not rates. | Federal race/ethnicity (includes two-or-more); Pell in entry year; Scorecard first-generation = no parent with any postsecondary schooling (broader than UC's definition); family-income terciles at entry. | Campuses, majors, earnings & debt, first-generation (federal) |
| UC San Diego data UCSD Institutional Research | UCSD's own first-year and transfer entering cohorts (2013–2024), broken out by the school or division of the student's major. Cells under the dashboard's reporting threshold are suppressed at source. | UCSD's categories: ethnicity keeps Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Unknown/decline separate; first-generation and Pell as flagged by UCSD. | UC San Diego deep dive |
| UC Berkeley data UCB Office of Planning & Analysis | Berkeley's own freshman and transfer entering cohorts (2010–2023 for graduation; retention through 2023), from the campus "Disaggregated Grad Rates" dashboard and Our Berkeley downloads. | Berkeley's categories: disaggregated Asian (Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Vietnamese…) and Latinx subgroups, gender incl. nonbinary, first-generation, and the campus's EOP-eligibility markers. Retention splits use coarser groups and entry college. | UC Berkeley deep dive |
Federal C150 rates are keyed here to the Scorecard data year in which they were published. Each value reflects a cohort that entered roughly six years earlier; comparisons across campuses or groups within a year are unaffected, but do not read the x-axis as entering-cohort year. The amber x-axis tag restates this.
Bands are terciles of the systemwide enrollee GPA distribution for each cohort and entry type (weighted-capped high-school GPA for freshman entrants, transfer GPA for transfer entrants) — verified: the published band boundaries are identical across campus selections. Boundaries move year to year and are printed under the chart; each point's tooltip shows its cohort's band range. The lowest band always reaches down to that cohort's minimum recorded GPA (for the 2021 test-blind cohort this minimum is 0.00), so the chart reports only the informative inner boundaries. Because the bands are systemwide, campuses draw very unevenly from them: transfer sheets, which publish band rates alongside counts, imply that Berkeley's 2015 transfer entrants split roughly 200 / 520 / 1,450 across the three bands while Merced's split 73 / 12 / 10.
True band rates. The page now draws these views from a summary-API extraction of the same dashboard, which exposes the underlying full-precision band rates and their denominators (numerator ÷ rate; the harvest's internal consistency check agrees to ~10−12) for every campus × group × band × cohort cell, including per-campus and subgroup × band rates that the crosstab export left unidentified. Denominators are the dashboard's own universe — students with a usable GPA (systemwide ≈96% of the published entering cohort at 2019). Later windows are published as increments sharing the band denominator, so cumulative rates are exact sums. Rates for cohorts whose 5th/6th- year (transfer: 3rd/4th-year) windows haven't closed appear as real zeros in the source; those cohorts are omitted from the affected measures rather than plotted.
Maturity. A cohort's 5th/6th-year completions only exist once those years have passed. Freshman timing shares and six-year estimates are therefore shown only for cohorts old enough for the full window (through 2019 in the current data); later cohorts are omitted rather than plotted as artificial spikes. Transfer windows (2/3/4 years) are closed for all published cohorts.
School-level cells are shown by the source only when the entering cohort has at least 10 students, as integer percents. GPA-band timing shares are hidden here when fewer than 25 graduates underlie them. Systemwide lines carry the published cohort sizes in tooltips; small groups (for example American Indian entrants) are noisy — read them with their Ns.
Entering cohorts 2020–2021 experienced pandemic disruption, and 2021 was the first test-blind cohort; 2020–21 high-school records also carry grade inflation. Charts shade these cohorts.
Individual students' grades, major switching, or reasons for leaving; anything about students below the published masking thresholds; and for Scorecard measures, anyone outside the federal-aid universe.
Tidy CSVs behind this page: systemwide rates · by high school · by community college · GPA band rates · GPA band counts · GPA cutpoints · UC San Diego deep dive · UC Berkeley deep dive · federal campus panel · majors · earnings & debt · first-generation curves. Build scripts live in build/.