Your student's real odds at every UC, Cal State and private — built from your own high school's admissions record.

First, the thing nobody tells California parents

My name is Jim Stewart. I have two sons. When the first one started applying, I did what every parent does — I went looking for a straight answer to one question: given his grades, at his school, what are his actual chances?

Nobody had one. The counselor had a caseload in the hundreds and a scattergram covering the handful of kids who happened to self-report. The college websites publish a single admit rate for eighty thousand applicants. The paid consultants wanted several thousand dollars and opened with a questionnaire about his “passion narrative.”

So I went and got the filings myself. California publishes an enormous amount: what every UC campus did with applicants from every California high school, what Cal State did with the same schools, and how every one of those schools scored on the state's own tests. Nobody had put the three side by side. When I did, the picture was not the one I expected.

None of that is a scandal and none of it requires bad faith. Eligibility in the Local Context guarantees the top 9% of every high school a UC seat — relative rank, regardless of how the school performs in absolute terms — and comprehensive review is designed to weigh context. It is working exactly as written.

That is the whole product. We take the record of what these campuses actually did with applicants from your high school, and we put your student against it.

Why you haven't already been told this

Not because it is hidden. Every number we use is public. It is because putting it together is nobody's job.

• Your counselor is buried. California's counselor-to-student ratios are among the worst in the country. A counselor with four hundred seniors cannot audit one transcript against nine campuses' admit histories, and it is not fair to ask.
• The scattergram is thin and it is stale. A dozen self-reported dots from your school, some of them from before UC went test-blind, is not a record. It is an anecdote with axes.
• Published admit rates are the wrong denominator. UCLA's overall rate tells you what happened to eighty thousand strangers. It does not tell you what happened to the nineteen applicants from your student's school last year.
• The consultants are priced for a different family. Independent counselors in California routinely charge in the thousands. Much of what you are buying at that price is the data assembly — and the data assembly is the part a computer should be doing.
• The transcript itself lies to you. The GPA printed on it is almost never the GPA UC computes. UC counts grades 10 and 11 only, a–g courses only, and caps honor points at eight. Families plan a whole year around a number no admissions officer will ever see.

That last one is worth sitting with. If you are working from the transcript GPA, you are probably wrong about where your student stands right now — in either direction.

What you actually get

One file per student — $47 covers the first one, and you can rebuild it as many times as you like as their record changes. Here is what is in it.

• The GPA UC will actually compute — capped, grades 10 and 11, a–g only. Plus the CSU version, which is computed differently again. Enter the courses and we compute both, or upload the transcript and we read them off the transcript PDF for you instead.
• Odds at all nine UC campuses, built from what each campus did with applicants from your student's own high school rather than from a statewide average.
• Your high school's Cal State record, matched to your student — campus by campus, hardest first, including the campuses that admitted nobody from your school. For most families this is the section that changes the list, because it is where the "safety" turns out not to be one.
• Which Cal States are harder than the UC. Impaction has quietly made several CSU campuses a tougher admit than most of the University of California for a student in a given band. Nobody's college night slide says this.
• The private colleges, ranked on your priorities and priced. Not a US News list — scored on what you say matters (spending on teaching, who is actually in the classroom, what graduates earn and finish, social fit, whether admissions still reads a record), with your family's net price at each one against the campus's published average.
• What Early Decision is really worth, at the campuses that publish the split — and where the published lift is inflated by recruited athletes and international applicants rather than being available to you.
• The whole thing as a PDF you can print and put on the kitchen table, which is where the actual argument with your seventeen-year-old is going to happen anyway.

And a sentence we will keep repeating because it matters: these are estimates from a published record, not a prediction about your child. Admissions committees read essays, recommendations and circumstances that no public file contains. Anyone who tells you they can give you a real probability for one teenager is selling you something worse than this.

How it works

1. Take the free one first, if you have not

   Your high school's own record — its UC history campus by campus, what Cal State did with the same applicants, and the one UC campus you name worked out in full. By email, no card, no account, at admittedca.com. It is a real report and it is genuinely free. If that is all you came for, take it and go with our blessing.

2. Tell us the grade, then unlock the file — $47

   One tap for the grade, then an address, a password and the card. That is the whole of it. One payment, it never renews, and there is a 30-day full refund if the file does not tell you something you did not already know.

3. Then the rest of the questions

   Name, high school, GPA, course load, what they do outside class. Two minutes, mostly tapping, and the portal opens on them with the grade already in. They come after the payment because they are the work — they are what the file is built out of, not a form standing in front of a price.

What it costs

For comparison, the going rate for a California independent college counselor runs to several thousand dollars, and a single application fee is around $80. We are not claiming to replace a good counselor. We are claiming to do the part that is arithmetic, properly, for the price of one application.

Who this is not for

Genuinely — skip it if any of these are you:

• You want someone to write the essays. We do not touch them, and the people who do should worry you.
• You want a guaranteed answer. There isn't one. If a “42% at Davis” would be read in your house as a promise rather than as an estimate off a public record, this will make your year worse, not better.
• Your student is outside California. The whole thing is built on California's filings for California high schools. It has nothing useful to say about a school in Texas.
• You already have the data. If you have your school's campus-level UC and CSU admit history in front of you and you have recomputed the capped UC GPA yourself, you have the expensive part. Truly — go and use it.

Questions parents actually ask

Start with one question

What grade is your student in? That is the whole first step. The next one is the card, and then two minutes of questions builds the file. If you would rather see the shape of this before you pay for it, take your school's own record free by email first — it is the same data, read at the school level instead of at your student's.