UC Berkeley Transfer Analysis
Introduction
Transferring to UC Berkeley is one of the most competitive academic pathways in the United States. Every year, thousands of students apply to join one of the world’s most notable public research universities. But how has that competition changed over time? And which majors are truly the hardest to break into?
This report examines UC Berkeley transfer admission data from 2015 to 2025, drawing on records from the UC Berkeley Office of Planning & Analysis and the UC Information Center. Three visualizations explore the overall trend in applications and admissions, the most selective majors for transfer students in 2024, and the relationship between GPA and selectivity across all majors.
Visualization 1: A Decade of Transfer Admissions
What this reveals: Over the past decade, the number of students applying to transfer to UC Berkeley has surged by approximately 35%, rising from 17,285 in 2015 to a record 23,345 in 2025. Yet the number of admitted students has grown at a far slower pace, increasing from 3,268 to 5,056 over the same period. While applicants have increased over time, admits have grown at a comparable or slightly faster rate, suggesting that transfer admission has not become more restrictive over time and may have become modestly less selective. The enrollee trend remains relatively stable in comparison, indicating that a consistent proportion of admitted students ultimately choose to attend Berkeley.
Design decisions: A multi-line chart was chosen to allow direct visual comparison of all three metrics across time on a single axis. Berkeley’s official brand colors were used intentionally, dark blue for applicants, gold for admits, and a lighter blue for enrollees. This was to tie the visualization thematically to the institution being studied. A minimal theme reduces visual clutter and keeps focus on the trend lines themselves. Points are plotted at each year to make individual data values easier to read.
Visualization 2: The Most Selective Majors
What this reveals: The 2025 transfer admit rates reveal that major selectivity at UC Berkeley is driven less by broad disciplinary categories and more by concentrated demand in a small number of programs. Computer Science remains a clear outlier at 2.7% with Business Administration following at 4.9%, reinforcing the idea that a handful of high-demand majors act as structural bottlenecks for transfer admissions. Looking past these extremes, most majors fall within a relatively compressed range of roughly 8% to 14% spanning both STEM fields (such as EECS, DS, Materials Science, and Engineering) and non-STEM fields (such as Sociology, Political Science, and Legal Studies). This overlap suggests that STEM status alone does not determine selectivity, as several social science and interdiscipliary majors are as competitive as traditionally technical disciplines. Overall, the distribution indicates that admissions selectivity is shaped more by program capacity constraints and applicant demand than by academic domain, with only a few majors disproportionally driving the upper tail of competitiveness.
Design decisions: A horizontal bar chart was chosen because major names are long and read more naturally along a horizontal axis. The chart is intentionally limited to the 15 most selective majors rather than all 75 because showing every major would produce a wall of bars. Bars are sorted by admit rate with the most selective at the bottom, so the eye naturally reads upward from the hardest to the least competitive. The same Berkeley brand color palette used throughout the report encodes broad discipline, allowing the reader to quickly identify patterns — for instance, the dominance of Engineering in light blue near the top of the list. Admit rate percentages are labeled directly on each bar to eliminate the need to reference the x-axis.
Visualization 3: GPA, Selectivity, and the Size of the Pipeline
What this reveals: This scatter plot examines whether majors that require higher GPAs from admitted transfer students are also more selective overall. The negative trend line confirms a clear relationship — as the lower bound of the admitted GPA range increases, the admit rate tends to fall. In other words, the most competitive majors demand both academic excellence and accept a far smaller share of applicants. Computer Science and Business Administration sit at the extreme bottom right, with GPA floors near 4.0 and admit rates below 5%. Meanwhile, several Arts & Humanities and Life Sciences majors occupy the upper left — lower GPA floors and higher admit rates. Bubble size encodes the number of applicants per major, revealing that the most competitive majors also attract the largest applicant pools, compounding their selectivity. Hovering over any bubble reveals the major name, admit rate, GPA floor, and applicant count.
Design decisions: A bubble scatter plot was chosen because it encodes three variables simultaneously: GPA floor on the x-axis, admit rate on the y-axis, and applicant volume through bubble size. This makes it the most information-dense of the three visualizations. The chart is made interactive using plotly, allowing viewers to hover over individual bubbles to identify specific majors, which is essential given that 75 majors are plotted at once. A small amount of jitter was applied to reduce overplotting in the dense right cluster without meaningfully distorting the underlying data. The dashed linear trend line with a confidence interval provides a statistical anchor for the visual pattern. The same discipline color palette is used here as in Visualization 2, so viewers familiar with the bar chart can immediately identify discipline clusters in the scatter plot without re-reading the legend.
Data sources: UC Berkeley Office of Planning & Analysis; UC Information Center, Transfers by Major (February 2026 update).