It is that time of year when high school seniors finally get their college decision letters in the mail. Many of these seniors from California applied to UC’s such as Irvine, Riverside, Los Angeles, Davis, etc. But what makes Irvine so special? Why does their acceptance rate get lower and lower every year? There are many factors that contribute to this, but I’ve narrowed it down to three–location, applicants, and COVID-19.
Since we live in California, it is harder to get accepted as a first year since these colleges have to consider students from other states and countries as well. If you’re thinking of staying close to home and want to go to an academically rigorous school, UCI is usually a top choice. However, due to every Californian senior having that mindset, it can be overwhelming for admission officers to go through all Californian applicants when they only have so many slots.
Secondly, the amount of students that apply every year makes the acceptance rate go lower and lower. If not many students are applying to a certain school, their acceptance rate is going to look high. However, for schools like UCI, when numerous students apply to your school, you can’t accept all of them; hence, the acceptance rate being low. This year, almost 148,000 students applied to UCI, which includes freshmen and transfers.
Finally, we have COVID-19 as one of the leading factors. Before the pandemic, UCI’s acceptance rate was almost 40% (2019). After Covid first began, the fall 2020 acceptance rate dropped to 27.8%. Due to this massive change in our world, UC colleges started being test blind which attracted students that did not take the SAT/ACT or ones that didn’t score high on those standardized tests. This inflation of applicants caused the acceptance rate to be lower. Also, UCI probably did not want to hold the capacity of a normal college while social distancing was a major requirement in public places such as schools.
In the end, there are multiple reasons and opinions whether to have colleges make the acceptance rate higher or lower. From the standpoint of a high school senior, Janvi Kheni (12) states, “I think the acceptance rate is reasonable because a school can only take in so many students, but ideally a higher acceptance rate would be really nice. Especially this year with so many more applicants than past years, there was a way higher chance of being waitlisted/rejected.”
