UC Santa Cruz acceptance rate and your odds of getting in

UC Santa Cruz is a public university in California that admits most qualified applicants (around 66%), which puts it in the moderately selective range. A rate like this means it admits more applicants than it rejects; the bar is less about clearing a single cutoff and more about how your full profile compares to admitted students.

Use this page to see what UC Santa Cruz 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 1180, 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 Cruz with a 3.1 GPA and a 1120 SAT?

About 81% (Safety), by CollegeCalcAI's deterministic model, for an applicant with a 3.1 unweighted GPA and a 1120 SAT, the middle of UC Santa Cruz's admitted range, applying Regular Decision without a hook. A 3.4 GPA with a 1180 SAT comes out near 95%. 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-cruz.

Getting into UC Santa Cruz comes down to four decisions, each one visible in the data on this page.

68,845 students applied to UC Santa Cruz for fall 2023; 43,054 were admitted (62.5%). 4,381 enrolled. Only about 10% 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 Cruz enrolls about 17,940 undergraduates in total, 53% of them women, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 22 to 1.

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

UC Santa Cruz 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.

UC Santa Cruz signals that it values rigor of secondary school record and academic GPA above the rest of the file. 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 Cruz's reported Common Data Set, so the full chart below reflects what the school itself says it values, not a generic guess.

UC Santa Cruz's published cost of attendance, before any aid, is roughly $41,179 per year. Tuition and fees are $16,005 for CA residents and $50,205 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 $17,890 a year, and it ranges from $8,717 for families earning under $30,000 to $33,323 for families earning over $110,000. 32% 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 UC Santa Cruz student who received federal aid earns $68,396 a year, up from $49,716 at six years. 75% of first-time, full-time students graduate within six years, and 88% return for a second year. Among graduates who borrowed, median federal debt at graduation is $16,666; 28% 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 Cruz ranks #27 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.

If UC Santa Cruz is on your list, schools with a similar admit profile are worth a look: Florida Atlantic University, Fort Valley State University, and Lincoln University (PA). 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.