UCLA's Real Acceptance Rate, School by School

UCLA's most recent Common Data Set filing puts its acceptance rate at 8.97% for the Fall 2024 entering class: 146,276 applicants, 13,114 admitted. That number gets repeated everywhere, and it's accurate as far as it goes. What it doesn't tell you is that UCLA doesn't run one admissions process. It runs six, one per undergraduate school, and the rate you're actually up against depends entirely on which school you apply through. In UCLA's own most recent published data, those six rates span from 0.5% to 24%, a 48x spread inside a single campus and a single admissions cycle.

One nuance worth flagging up front: UCLA's official CDS headline (8.97%) is filed for Fall 2024, the most recent year the university has certified. The school-by-school breakdown below comes from UCLA's own admissions office, current through Fall 2025, one year more recent. Every number below carries its cohort year so you can see exactly what you're looking at. And the two sources agree with each other where they overlap: UCLA's six schools' Fall 2024 applicant and admit totals add up to 146,276 and 13,114, an exact match to the CDS filing, which is a useful cross-check that both are counting the same thing.

The real breakdown, by school

UCLA's Undergraduate Admissions office publishes admit rates for each of its six schools on its own First-Year Profile pages. Here's every school, Fall 2025, sorted from most to least competitive:

| School | Fall 2025 admit rate | Fall 2024 admit rate | |---|---|---| | School of Nursing | 0.5% | 0.9% | | School of Theater, Film and Television | 4.3% | 3.7% | | School of the Arts and Architecture | 5.1% | 5.5% | | Henry Samueli School of Engineering | 6.8% | 5.3% | | The College (Letters and Science) | 11% | 11% | | Herb Alpert School of Music | 24% | 20% |

Source: UCLA Undergraduate Admissions, First-Year Profile, Fall 2025 and Fall 2024.

The College, UCLA's largest school by far with 97,110 applicants in Fall 2024 alone, sits closest to the campus-wide headline for the obvious reason that it's the school most applicants actually apply through. Nursing sits nowhere near it. If your target major lives in Nursing, Theater, Film and Television, or Arts and Architecture, the 8.97% headline isn't your number, and it isn't close.

It gets more specific than school-level, and it changes the picture again

UCLA publishes one layer deeper than most campuses: admit rates by individual major within each school, not just by school. That data shows real variation happening inside schools that look uniform from the school-level table above.

| Major | School | Fall 2025 admit rate | Fall 2024 admit rate | |---|---|---|---| | Nursing Prelicensure | Nursing | 0.5% | 0.9% | | Film and Television | Theater, Film and TV | 1.3% | 1.1% | | Theater | Theater, Film and TV | 8.2% | — | | Mechanical Engineering | Engineering | 3.9% | 3.8% | | Computer Science and Engineering | Engineering | 7.2% | 4.1% | | Computer Science | Engineering | 7.3% | 4.1% | | Social Sciences | The College | 9.3% | 9.3% | | Humanities | The College | 9.9% | 9.5% | | Life Sciences | The College | 11% | — | | Physical Sciences | The College | 14% | — | | Music Performance | Music | 27% | 31% |

Source: UCLA Undergraduate Admissions, First-Year Profile by major, Fall 2025 and Fall 2024.

Two things jump out. First, inside the School of Theater, Film and Television, the school-level rate of 4.3% hides a gap of more than 6x between its two majors: Theater admitted 8.2% of Fall 2025 applicants while Film and Television admitted 1.3%. Second, Computer Science and the newer Computer Science and Engineering major both moved from 4.1% in Fall 2024 to roughly 7.2-7.3% in Fall 2025, alongside a drop in Computer Science's applicant count from 10,529 to 6,806. We're reporting that number as UCLA filed it rather than guessing at the cause. It could reflect how UCLA now splits applicant interest across two adjacent, closely related majors rather than one. Whatever's behind it, the practical point stands: even "computer science at UCLA" isn't one admissions decision, it's at least two, filed separately, with separate rates.

The squeeze is real, but it isn't uniform

Here's where UCLA's data tells a more complicated story than a simple "everything's getting harder" headline would suggest. Comparing Fall 2024 to Fall 2025, most of the majors and schools with a trend point actually admitted a larger share of applicants, not a smaller one: Engineering rose from 5.3% to 6.8%, Computer Science and Computer Science and Engineering both roughly doubled, Humanities and Film and Television ticked up, and the Herb Alpert School of Music rose from 20% to 24%.

Only two programs in this data tightened: Nursing Prelicensure, down from 0.9% to 0.5%, and Music Performance, down from 31% to 27%. Both are also two of UCLA's smallest programs by applicant volume, at roughly 5,700 and 312 applicants respectively, next to The College pulling in 98,459 applicants. That pattern, the smallest and most tightly capped programs moving in the opposite direction from everything around them, is consistent with what you'd expect when a fixed number of seats meets a program too specialized to expand on demand, even while the broader applicant pool across the rest of campus keeps growing. UCLA's total freshman applicant pool, like every UC campus, sits against a systemwide test-blind policy that removes score-based self-selection from the front end of the process; we cover what that means for how your application actually gets read on our test policy tracker, but it's part of why volume at this scale, 146,276 applicants for six schools, is the baseline UCLA operates at even in a year where most individual rates loosened slightly.

The honest takeaway: don't assume every UCLA major is getting steadily harder every year. Some are. Some aren't. The only way to know which is true for your target major is to look at that major's own rate, not the campus headline and not even the school-level number.

If you're comparing UCLA against other UC campuses for your list, our college list builder uses real, school-specific admit-rate data instead of one campus-wide figure, which is exactly the gap this article is pointing at.

The waitlist is a longer shot than you'd like, but not a formality

UCLA's Fall 2024 waitlist numbers tell a more survivable story than a lot of selective campuses: the university offered 15,023 students a waitlist spot, 9,198 accepted it, and 1,211 were eventually admitted. That's roughly 13% of everyone who held a spot on the list, not a coin flip, but a real outcome that happens often enough to be worth planning around rather than writing off. If UCLA waitlists you, treat it as a genuine, if unlikely, path, not a soft rejection and not a guarantee either.

What this means for your list

The school you select on your UCLA application, and where your intended major happens to sit within it, is one of the biggest levers on your odds that you actually control. A student applying to Music Performance is not making the same bet as a student applying to Nursing Prelicensure, even on the same application, in the same cycle, to the same university.

A few things follow from that directly:

• Research your target major's specific rate, not just the school it sits in. The Theater/Film and Television gap alone, 8.2% versus 1.3%, shows that school-level numbers can mask enormous variation one layer down.
• The data here says nothing about switching majors after you enroll. UCLA's published numbers cover admission decisions, not internal transfer policy, so we won't invent a claim about how easy that path is. If a switch is part of your plan, confirm it directly with UCLA rather than assuming it functions as a backdoor.
• There's no early round to time around. Like every UC campus, UCLA has no Early Decision or Early Action plan; every applicant files in the same November window. Our application deadlines guide covers how that period sits against everything else if UCLA is one of several schools on your list.

Want to know where your actual odds sit, by school and by major, across the UC schools on your list? Book a call with a Dewey Smart strategist and we'll go through it against your specific targets.