Winning admission into the University of California’s most competitive majors — including computer science, engineering and business — is about as likely as hitting a home run your first time at bat.
Yet even those subjects are not the hardest to get into. That honor belongs to nursing, for which you might have to hit two home runs. In a row.
Just 1% of the nearly 6,000 yearly applicants to UC’s undergraduate nursing programs, at UCLA and UC Irvine, are permitted to walk through the door.
Nursing is also notoriously hard to get into at 17 of the 20 California State University campuses offering the program — even though hospitals across the state are short the equivalent of more than 40,000 full-time nurses, as UCSF reported in 2021. Nursing jobs pay well in California — typically around $120,000 — and thousands of brainy, compassionate students want in.
The numbers....
