The California Representation Index

Only one campus is within five points of California. San Diego State scores 96: its undergraduates are 39% Hispanic, 36% white, 14% Asian and 4% Black, against a state that is 39%, 35%, 15% and 5%. Azusa Pacific University is next at 92, and then the field falls away: the median Cal State scores 77 and the median UC campus 74. The private universities, there for comparison, have a median of 81.

Every campus misses in one direction. No campus is a little off everywhere. Each one is off mainly in a single group, which is what the "largest gap" column names. 6 of the 9 UC campuses are off because Asian students, 15% of California, are 33% of UCLA, 41% of Berkeley and 44% of Irvine. 10 of the 23 Cal States are off because Hispanic students, 39% of California, are 66% of Fresno State and 80% of Cal State LA. The UC gap is an admissions gap: those campuses select from the whole state. The Cal State gap is a geography gap: each campus enrolls its own region, and its region is not California in miniature.

White students are under the state's share at almost every public campus. California is 35% white; 25 of the 32 public campuses are below that, and at Cal State LA and CSU Dominguez Hills the figure is 4%. The seven public campuses above the state share are the rural and coastal ones: Cal Poly Humboldt at 54%, Cal Maritime, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Chico, Sonoma, UC Santa Barbara and San Diego State. (The privates split down the middle, 21 under and 21 over.)

In headcount, the missing group is white students. Put every UC and Cal State campus together and there are 601,716 known domestic undergraduates. If each campus matched California, 208,717 of them would be white; 128,311 are. That is a shortfall of 80,406 students, the largest gap of any group in either direction: Asian students are 47,845 above their proportional count, Hispanic students 35,720 above, Black students 9,323 below. The white shortfall is 54,660 at the Cal States and 25,746 at UC, and in students it is largest at Cal State Fullerton (7,839), Cal State Long Beach, Cal State LA, San Jose State and Cal Poly Pomona. Measured against the size of the group rather than in students, white students are not the furthest behind: at UC they are at 64% of their proportional count, Black students at 50% and American Indian students at 34%.

Black students are under the state's share at 26 of 32 public campuses. California is 5.4% Black. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is 0.8%, UC San Diego 1.9% and UC Davis 2.0%; the only public campuses above the state share are six Cal States, led by Dominguez Hills at 13% and East Bay at 10%. This gap never shows in the "largest gap" column because it is small in points, so it is worth saying separately. It is also where the privates differ most from the public systems: 23 of the 42 are at or above the state share, Pomona at 11.1%, USC 8.6%, Stanford 8.5%.

The privates, briefly. The ones that look most like California are not the famous ones but the mid-sized religious and regional colleges: Azusa Pacific University at 92, California Lutheran University and University of Redlands at 90. The selective privates run from Harvey Mudd and USC at 81 to Stanford at 72 and Caltech at 68, and the most common private gap is the reverse of the Cal State one: too few Hispanic students, at 17 of the 42. Pitzer is 14% Hispanic and Scripps 12%, against a state that is 39%.

The index leaves international students out, and at some campuses that is a lot of students. UC Davis is 13% international, Irvine 12%, San Diego 11%, Berkeley 10%, Stanford 13% and USC 13%; no Cal State is above 4%. The art schools go further: Art Center College of Design 44%, California College of the Arts 32%, California Institute of the Arts 26%, Menlo College 22%. Those students have no place in a comparison to the California population, so they are removed before the shares are computed, and a score describes a campus's domestic undergraduates only. Art Center College of Design, last on the list, is the extreme case: the score is computed on the 55% of its students who are known and domestic.

What this means for your student. Who is on a campus is one part of whether it fits; whether it will say yes is the other, and that varies more by high school than most families expect. The free school report on this page shows how your own high school's applicants have fared at each UC campus, and which campuses have been admitting students from schools like yours.