Schurr High School in Montebello and Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra sit one district line apart in the San Gabriel Valley, four miles by surface street. They send their seniors to the same University of California. In almost every other respect they are mirror images: Schurr is 92% Hispanic and 84% low-income; Keppel is 65% Asian, 41% low-income, and its students exceed the state's standards at nearly three times Schurr's rate. UC admitted Schurr's applicants at the higher rate at every one of its five most selective campuses.
Freshman admits divided by freshman applications from each school, campus by campus, as published by the UC Information Center. The higher rate in each row is shaded. Nothing here is chosen: the shading is arithmetic.
| Campus | Schurr | Keppel | Schurr applied / admitted | Keppel applied / admitted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UCLA | 9% | 7% | 85 / 8 | 195 / 14 |
| UC Berkeley | 19% | 13% | 43 / 8 | 143 / 18 |
| UC San Diego | 38% | 20% | 69 / 26 | 197 / 40 |
| UC Irvine | 28% | 13% | 83 / 23 | 215 / 29 |
| UC Santa Barbara | 35% | 32% | 46 / 16 | 152 / 48 |
| UC Davis | 35% | 49% | 40 / 14 | 103 / 50 |
| UC Santa Cruz | 57% | 77% | 28 / 16 | 64 / 49 |
| UC Riverside | 88% | 91% | 64 / 56 | 173 / 158 |
| UC Merced | 91% | 99% | 43 / 39 | 75 / 74 |
The same public filings the rest of this site runs on, for these two schools alone.
| Schurr High | Mark Keppel High | |
|---|---|---|
| City · district | Montebello · Montebello Unified | Alhambra · Alhambra Unified serves Alhambra and Monterey Park |
| Enrollment, 2023–24 | 2,139 | 2,178 |
| Hispanic or Latino | 92.5% | 26.9% |
| Asian | 2.6% | 64.8% |
| White | 0.7% | 1.1% |
| Free or reduced-price meals, 2024–25 | 84.1% | 40.9% |
| Grade 11 exceeding standard, Smarter Balanced 2024–25 | 13.3% | 36.1% |
| UCLA applicants, fall 2025 | 85 | 195 |
| Admits at the six selective campuses, fall 2025 | 95 | 199 |
Start with what these two schools are. By family income, Schurr and Keppel sit almost exactly at the two boundaries this site uses to split California's public high schools into quarters: Schurr at the edge of the poorest quarter, Keppel at the edge of the richest. By ethnicity they are close to inverses of one another. By measured achievement they are far apart: 2.7 times as many Keppel juniors exceeded the state's own standard. If you wanted to design a two-school test of how the University of California weighs a student's school against a student's results, you could not do much better than a pair that differs this much on everything except the county they sit in and the university they apply to.
Now look at where each school wins. Schurr's applicants were admitted at the higher rate at UCLA, Berkeley, San Diego, Irvine and Santa Barbara, the five campuses that turn most applicants away. Keppel's were admitted at the higher rate at Davis, Santa Cruz, Riverside and Merced, the four that admit most of them. The advantage does not run with academic preparation. It runs with selectivity: the harder the campus, the more the poorer school gains.
Race is not a factor UC may use. Proposition 209 has barred it since 1996, and application readers do not see it. What UC does use, openly, is "comprehensive review": every file is read against the opportunities at the applicant's own school. Family income, whether a parent finished college, and the school's poverty and course profile are all scored. A strong record at a school where strong records are rare reads as a student outperforming their circumstances. The same record at Keppel, where a large share of the class carries one, reads as ordinary for that school.
Two decisions sharpened it. UC stopped considering the SAT and ACT in 2021, over the recommendation of its own faculty task force, which had found the tests predictive. That removed the one measure on which a Keppel applicant could most easily stand apart from a Schurr applicant with the same grades. And the top 9% of each school's class is guaranteed a seat somewhere in the system, which is why Merced admits nearly everyone from both.
Who applies matters too, and it cuts the same way. Keppel sent 195 seniors to UCLA's applicant pool; Schurr sent 85. Both schools enroll about 2,150 students, so roughly a third of Keppel's class applied to UCLA against roughly one in six at Schurr. When a third of a class applies, many are hoping. When a sixth applies, they are mostly the top of it. Some of the gap in rates is who chose to apply, not who UC chose. School-level data cannot say how much.
It does not show how an individual Asian student at Keppel fares against an individual Hispanic student at Schurr with the same record. Only applicant-level data, which UC does not publish, can answer that, and it is the question at the centre of the federal lawsuit filed against the Regents in 2025 alleging that UC's neutral-looking factors work as proxies for race. What it does show is that UC's design, which rewards low income, first-generation status and outperforming a poor school, produces a large racial pattern when applied to two neighbouring schools that sort by race and income at once. The mechanism is class and school context. The outcome is racial because the geography is.
It is also the statewide finding in miniature. Across 871 California public high schools, applicants from the poorest quarter of schools are admitted at higher rates than those from the richest quarter at San Diego, Berkeley and UCLA, and at lower rates everywhere else, even holding test performance constant. Schurr and Keppel are that table drawn in one neighbourhood. The San Diego Swing and Head to Head pages carry the full version.
Two students with the same transcript, four miles apart, are not applying to the same University of California. Which one your student is depends on the school on the front of the application, and the only way to know is to look at what UC has actually done with applicants from that school, campus by campus. The free school report on this page is that record for your own high school.
