When evaluating a high school, one of the questions parents most want answered is where the school’s students end up. The University of California (UC) Infocenter offers an official tool that answers this question directly: application, admission and enrollment data organized by source high school.

What the Tool Provides

The Admissions by source school page of the University of California Infocenter lists three figures for each source school: the number of applicants, the number of admits and the number of enrollees. It also gives the average high school GPA or transfer GPA for freshman and transfer applicants, admits and enrollees separately.

Coverage includes California public and private high schools, U.S. high schools outside California, schools outside the United States, and California community colleges, California State University campuses, private four-year institutions and University of California campuses. All University of California campuses are included; UC Merced opened in 2005, so it has no data before 2005. Freshman data is reported for fall admission, and transfer data is reported for the full academic year. The page was last updated on March 12, 2026.

How to Read the Numbers

First, look at trends over three or more years, not a single year. The number of students from one high school applying to a given campus may be only a few dozen each year, so single-year admission rates fluctuate widely. Only a trend across three to five consecutive years is meaningful.

Second, the gap between admits and enrollees is informative. A large gap suggests that students from the school received more alternative offers, which often reflects their overall application results better than the admission rate itself.

Third, the average GPA is the average for applicants from that school, not an admission cutoff. It shows what level of student from the school applies and what level is admitted. It can be used to judge where the student stands within the school, but it should not be treated as a minimum score.

Fourth, cross-school comparisons must account for size. For two schools whose enrollments differ by a factor of two, the number of admits is not comparable, so proportions should be used instead; and proportions are also unstable for small samples.

How Irvine Families Can Use It

All five public high schools in the Irvine Unified School District are included in this data. There are three practical uses:

  • Before choosing a school or moving: compare admission trends across the assigned high schools, alongside each school’s course offerings. The four-page in-depth guide for each school is in the Irvine High School Guides.
  • In grades 9 and 10: use the average GPA of past admits from the student’s own school to judge where the student’s current grades stand, and decide on course rigor accordingly.
  • When building the college list in application season: review the historical admission distribution of the school’s students across campuses as one reference for the list.

Note that this data covers only the University of California system and does not include the California State University system, private universities or out-of-state institutions. It therefore reflects the results of a school’s students on the University of California pathway, not their full college outcomes. For other official institution-level data, the College Navigator from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports admission rates, costs and graduation rates on the college side.

EDUBUS Recommendation

The view of EDUBUS advisors is that the value of this data lies in positioning, not prediction. It tells parents where the student stands within the school and where the school’s students typically go; whether the student will be admitted to a particular campus depends on course rigor, grade trends and application materials, and the data alone cannot answer that question. The approach to four-year planning is described in College Admissions Planning.

Sources

More on this topic