Cal Poly San Luis Obispo acceptance rate and your odds of getting in

With an acceptance rate near 31%, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is a selective public university in California. Because it admits a minority of applicants, admission turns on the strength of your whole profile rather than any one number.

Use this page to see what Cal Poly San Luis Obispo weighs, where it ranks among California schools, and how a profile like yours is likely to land. Admitted students post a 75th-percentile SAT around 1420, a useful checkpoint for where your scores sit, though it is a reference range and not a cutoff.

What are my chances at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a 3.7 GPA and a 1360 SAT?

About 47% (Likely), by CollegeCalcAI's deterministic model, for an applicant with a 3.7 unweighted GPA and a 1360 SAT, the middle of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's admitted range, applying Regular Decision without a hook. A 3.9 GPA with a 1420 SAT comes out near 59%. Courses, activities, essays and the application round move the number; the free calculator includes them.

Estimates, not guarantees. Get yours with your real courses and activities. Assistants and developers can fetch this table from the free API: /api/v1/colleges/cal-poly-san-luis-obispo.

Source: Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Common Data Set 2025-26. Read from the document twice independently; only matching figures are shown. See how early rounds compare across colleges in the Early Decision rankings.

Here is how to get into Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, built from what its admitted class actually looks like and what the school says it weighs.

For the fall 2023 entering class, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo received 63,736 applications and admitted 18,964, an acceptance rate of 29.8%. 5,278 enrolled. Only about 28% of admitted students enrolled, so the school admits several students for every seat it expects to fill, which is why its acceptance rate reads higher than its selectivity feels. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo enrolls about 21,996 undergraduates in total, 51% of them women, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 19 to 1.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, IPEDS 2023 admissions and enrollment.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo reports that it neither requires nor recommends test scores, so admission turns on your transcript, rigor, and the rest of the file.

Source: College Scorecard (U.S. Department of Education), release 2026-06-10.

In its review, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo leans most on rigor of secondary school record, academic GPA, and standardized test scores. Solid grades in a challenging schedule do most of the work here, with the rest of the application providing context. These ratings come from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's reported Common Data Set, so the full chart below reflects what the school itself says it values, not a generic guess.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's published cost of attendance, before any aid, is roughly $32,265 per year. Tuition and fees are $13,596 for CA residents and $34,665 for out-of-state students, a $21,069 gap that makes residency the single biggest lever on cost. What families actually pay is different: the average net price after grants and scholarships is $16,665 a year, and it ranges from $7,529 for families earning under $30,000 to $27,772 for families earning over $110,000. 19% of undergraduates receive a federal Pell Grant.

Source: College Scorecard (U.S. Department of Education), release 2026-06-10. Net price is what students receiving aid paid after grants, by family income.

Ten years after enrolling, the median Cal Poly San Luis Obispo student who received federal aid earns $90,768 a year, up from $72,358 at six years. 86% of first-time, full-time students graduate within six years, and 96% return for a second year. Among graduates who borrowed, median federal debt at graduation is $18,500; 25% of undergraduates take federal loans.

Source: College Scorecard (U.S. Department of Education), release 2026-06-10. Earnings cover students who received federal aid.

Among the 61 California schools we track, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo ranks #10 most selective by acceptance rate. Schools like California Institute of Technology (3%) and Stanford University (4%) sit nearby, which makes California a useful frame for calibrating a balanced list. As a public university, residency matters: in-state applicants generally see meaningfully better odds than the headline rate suggests.

Build around Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with peers at a comparable selectivity, such as UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and William & Mary. Running the same profile against each one in the free calculator is the fastest way to see where you are a reach, a match, or a likely.

Acceptance rate, application counts, admitted test ranges, cost, and outcomes reflect publicly reported federal data (U.S. Department of Education: IPEDS 2023 and the College Scorecard) and each school's Common Data Set; figures are rounded and lag the current cycle by one to two years, so confirm deadlines and policies on the school's own site. The typical-admit GPA and SAT are CollegeCalcAI's modeled estimates. Estimates from CollegeCalcAI are a planning tool computed by a fixed, transparent model, not a guarantee of any admission decision.