UC Santa Barbara acceptance rate and your odds of getting in

With an acceptance rate near 33%, UC Santa Barbara 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 UC Santa Barbara 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 1430, a useful checkpoint for where your scores sit, though it is a reference range and not a cutoff.

What are my chances at UC Santa Barbara with a 3.7 GPA and a 1370 SAT?

About 50% (Likely), by CollegeCalcAI's deterministic model, for an applicant with a 3.7 unweighted GPA and a 1370 SAT, the middle of UC Santa Barbara's admitted range, applying Regular Decision without a hook. A 3.9 GPA with a 1430 SAT comes out near 63%. 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/uc-santa-barbara.

Here is how to get into UC Santa Barbara, built from what its admitted class actually looks like and what the school says it weighs.

For the fall 2023 entering class, UC Santa Barbara received 110,871 applications and admitted 30,804, an acceptance rate of 27.8%. 5,043 enrolled. Only about 16% 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. UC Santa Barbara enrolls about 23,113 undergraduates in total, 58% of them women, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 17 to 1.

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

UC Santa Barbara 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, UC Santa Barbara 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 UC Santa Barbara's reported Common Data Set, so the full chart below reflects what the school itself says it values, not a generic guess.

The full sticker price at UC Santa Barbara (tuition, fees, housing, food, books) is about $41,573 a year. Tuition and fees are $16,414 for CA residents and $50,614 for out-of-state students, a $34,200 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 $16,109 a year, and it ranges from $9,231 for families earning under $30,000 to $31,863 for families earning over $110,000. 28% 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.

Median earnings for UC Santa Barbara students ten years after entry are $74,915 ($56,852 at the six-year mark). 83% of first-time, full-time students graduate within six years, and 93% return for a second year. Among graduates who borrowed, median federal debt at graduation is $13,993; 18% 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, UC Santa Barbara ranks #11 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 UC Santa Barbara with peers at a comparable selectivity, such as William & Mary, Southern University, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. 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.