Beginning this fall, the University of California will replace the two personal statement prompts in the UC Application with short answer questions that students can choose from.  

Freshman applicants will now choose four out of eight "personal insight" questions to answer.  Each is limited to 350 words and will have equal weighting.

The new questions will be available August 1st as part of the fall 2017 application.

Click here for FAQs or here for the personal insight questions.

The University of California today announced freshman applications for the Fall of 2016 grew to over 166,000, up 5.2 percent from the Fall of 2015.  Transfer applications grew to nearly 40,000, up 11.8 percent year over year, resulting in a record 206,00 applications for the year.

All nine campuses reported increases in freshman applications, ranging from 4.7% growth at UC Berkeley and UCLA, to 11.8 percent growth at UC Merced.

Click here for the University of California press release, or here for the detailed breakdown by campus and residency.

It's official—the University of California Board of Regents approved a budget plan to enroll an additional 10,000 California undergraduates over the next three years, including 5,000 freshman and transfer students for the Fall of 2016. 

Click here for the article.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's take on the University of California and the shift at many of its campuses to greater foreign and out-of-state enrollment.  According to the article, the UC system accepted 62% of in-state applicants in the 2014 school year compared to 84% four years earlier.

The good news for Class of 2020 applicants is that in-state admissions should improve this year, thanks to $50 million in additional state and UC system support.  If approved later this week, an additional 5,000 in-state applicants will be admitted relative to last year.

Click here for the article, or here for our take on Fall 2015 UC admission trends.

With the University of California application now open for submissions, it's time to make sure everything is in order.  

Here are the top five tips for freshman applicants, courtesy of the University of California:

Here's an updated list of reported admission rates for the Class of 2019. This update adds several popular private and public schools to the list, including Clark University, DePauw, Oberlin, Smith, University of Richmond and Washington & Lee University.  

Click Continue Reading for the list.

An update to College Kickstart 2015 has just been posted! 

In addition to Class of 2019 admission rate updates to our database, this release features an enhanced Plan Highlights page to help Plus Edition subscribers get organized and track admission requirements for the schools on their list.  If you're a Plus Edition subscriber, you'll now be able to see application requirements at a glance for all of the schools on your list, including testing, recommendations, interviews and most importantly, essay counts! 

Click on Continue Reading for the details. 

University of California counselor conferences have commenced, and there are lots of useful insights to be gleaned—including the latest freshman admission profiles from this past year (Class of 2019).

We've tabulated the findings for you in this post. Two things to keep in mind:

• The profiles are for California residents only
• The profiles are for admitted students, so they're likely to appear more selective than the profile for the class that actually enrolls

Click Continue Reading for the list.

The Fall 2016 application is now available for University of California applicants.  You can begin filling out the application now, but as always, you'll need to wait until November to submit it.

Click here to access the UC application website.

In search of colleges and universities with strong undergraduate international relations programs?

Courtesy of Foreign Policy magazine and the College of William & Mary, we've compiled their list of top 25 programs in the United States, along with admit rate and test score data to help you locate safety, target and reach schools to add to your list.  As always, we've also included a link to each school's websites to help you explore further.

The report also calls out Chinese and Arabic as the two most important languages for aspiring international relations majors to learn, and global climate change as the most important topic to contend with over the next ten years.

Click on Continue Reading for the list, or here for the Foreign Policy article. 

An update to College Kickstart 2015 has just been posted! 

This release features a new Plan Highlights page to help you get organized and track admission requirements for each school on your list.  We've also added two new MixFixer™ filters to help you find safeties, targets and reaches with greater ease, and updated our database with the latest admission rates for University of California campuses.  

Click on continue reading for the details. 

Hot off the press!  We've had a chance to review the Fall 2015 admissions data released earlier today by the University of California and thought it would be helpful to summarize it and our key findings.  

Long story short, overall freshman admission rates are down and its getting tougher for California residents as the University of California focuses on increasing the mix of "full pay" out of state and international students to hedge against budget uncertainty.  If you're an out of state or international student, pay close attention...there appears to be a window of opportunity to take advantage of favorable odds at several UC campuses.

Click on Continue Reading for the details.

The University of California recently introduced an online information center to increase transparency to UC admissions and other areas of public interest.  Though the site has not been updated with 2015 admissions data, it should prove handy for those of you interested in understanding how gender, residency, GPA and other factors influence admissions.  Note: it does not currently provide test score statistics, nor does it detail admission rate by departments or majors within a university.  

Click here for the press release, or here to go directly to InfoCenter.

Lots of big-name schools post their decisions over the next 48 hours, including Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, Rice, University of Pennsylvania and Yale.

Continue reading for the updated list of regular decision notification dates for several popular private and public schools. Good luck, seniors!