UC Santa Barbara admitted its largest class thus far with 53,259 first-year and transfer students for the 2025-26 academic year, an 11.6% increase from the previous year’s 47,716 admits total. 

The UC admitted 149,368 first-year students from a pool of 205,348 applicants. Nexus file photo

This increase follows a University of California (UC)-wide pattern of increased admissions, including a record-breaking number of California resident first-year admits of over 100,000 students. This is a 7% increase from the 2024-25 academic year.

This increase is due in part to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s five-year funding compact with the UC system to grow California resident admissions from 2022 to 2027. The compact includes a 5% budget increase each year to boost admissions, expand affordability and expand resources to underrepresented demographics.

In April, the Trump administration revoked 12 UCSB international student visas, with 11 being reinstated shortly after. Despite these events and growing concern over international students’ safety, applications did not fall and UCSB admitted 10,298 international students — a substantial increase from 6,283 students last year. 

The spike in admissions could also be explained by the end of the 2010 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), which placed a cap on maximum admissions for UCSB until 2025. The LRDP outlined a student enrollment growth rate of 1% per year in order to follow the population growth of Santa Barbara County, all while developing new housing and expansive resources to fill the needs of the rising campus population. 

In accordance with the LRDP, the University is working on three major housing projects which include the Ocean Road housing project that will provide 540 additional housing units for faculty and staff and the San Benito housing project that will provide 2,224 new undergraduate beds with a planned opening of fall 2027. The last project is to add additional beds to the existing on-campus dormitories known as the Channel Island Five. 

A version of this article appeared on p. 3 of the Oct. 2, 2025 print edition of the Daily Nexus