Should you send your kid to a bad high school?

For acceptance into a famous U. of California college like Berkeley or UCLA, is it smarter for your kid to sweat through rigorous Lowell HS or coast through mediocre Mission HS?

From San Francisco Gate, a pretty informative about weird trends in U. of California undergraduate admissions — it’s now better to attend a lousy high school if you want to get into a world famous college like Berkeley or UCLA — although the journalists haven’t figured out yet what is actually going on.

These Calif. high schools surpassed elite schools in UC admissions

By Madilynne Medina,

News Reporter

April 4, 2025

New data shows that in recent years, students at several California high schools surpassed the most elite schools in gaining admission to top University of California campuses.

The University of California system released data this week that included the acceptance rates of all 10 UC campuses for the current academic year.

In other words, data for applications, acceptances, and enrollments, by race/ethnicity by high school, for the freshman class that started in the fall of 2024. The acceptances for the fall of 2025 that went out a few days ago won’t be public knowledge until probably 2026.

In examining the data, SFGATE focused on the two most selective campuses, UC Berkeley, which had an 11% acceptance rate, and UCLA, which had a 9% acceptance rate.

It’s interesting how UCLA seems to have pulled ahead of UC Berkeley in this century on many metrics. Generally, college prestige is extraordinarily stable, so I’m not sure why UCLA has eased ahead of Berkeley. When I got an MBA at UCLA in 1980-82, it was, while being a very nice place, still clearly a notch behind Berkeley in fame.

In San Francisco, students at Mission High, a public school with a large population of students who are economically disadvantaged or come from marginalized communities, had a higher acceptance rate for UC Berkeley than any other public or private high school in the city, the UC data shows. Of the 78 Mission High students who applied to UC Berkeley this year, 29 were admitted, amounting to a 37% acceptance rate.

The use of racial preferences in California have been outlawed three times: by California voters in 1996’s Proposition 209, then again in 2020’s Proposition 16, and then by the Supreme Court in 2023.

But Mission’s success didn’t stop at the San Francisco border. From 2022 to 2024, it had a higher percentage of students admitted to UC Berkeley than any other high school in California with more than 100 applicants, a data visualization by the San Francisco Chronicle showed (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms).

Public schools in blue, private schools in yellow. San Francisco’s Mission High School is the furthermost outlier at the far right of Berkeley’s acceptance rate.

Note that San Francisco has a notoriously terrible public education system despite its vast wealth and many brilliant inhabitants, as I pointed out in my 2019 article “San Francisco vs. Frisco.” But that hard-earned reputation for bureaucratic indolence and incompetence doesn’t hurt Berkeley applicants from Mission HS:

During that time period, 99 students out of 257 were admitted to the university for a 39% overall acceptance rate.

Paywall here. Below, I explain what’s going on.