The 90% Club

The 90% Club is not Palo Alto and Irvine. It is Coliseum College Prep in Oakland (43 of 43 admitted, 99% low-income), Hughson High in Stanislaus County (28 of 28), Caruthers High in Fresno County (24 of 24), a run of Los Angeles charter networks, and a long tail of small rural high schools. The average school here is 72% low-income against 63% across all ranked public schools, and its parental college experience index is 52 against 60. 68 of the 112 are at least three-quarters low-income.

Their test results run the other way from their admit rates. The median school in this group has 23% of its juniors passing SBAC math — the statewide rate is 30.5% — and 75 of the 112 sit below that statewide math bar. The honest reading is that this is a story about who applies as much as who gets in: at a school that sends 20 applicants out of a class of 300, those 20 are the top of the class, and UC takes nearly all of them. The Club is where UC's yes rate is highest, not where its bar is highest — and it is the mirror image of The Feeder Ranking, where the biggest feeders are affluent, high-scoring, and turn away more of their applicants than these schools do.

The new Selective UC offers column shows what the yes is worth. Across all 112 schools UC made 3,869 offers at Berkeley, Davis, UCLA, San Diego and Santa Barbara — and 38% of them went to just five schools: American, Cupertino, Monta Vista, Irvington and Mountain House, the affluent, high-scoring exceptions on this list. The median school here collects 0.60 selective offers per student admitted, against 0.82 for California public schools overall, and 98 of the 105 with published campus counts hold fewer selective offers than they have admitted students. Nearly everyone gets in; far fewer get in there.