At a Glance
UC Riverside admits 86.1% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
What families actually pay, by income level
After grants and scholarships. Before loans. Public school prices shown at in-state rates.
Source: College Scorecard / IPEDS, 2024-25
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Based on average need-based grant. Actual cost varies by family income — see chart above.
Shown at in-state rates.
Debt at Graduation
63.2%
receive need-based grant aid
$18,621
average debt at graduation
UC Riverside graduates carry an average of $18,621 in debt.
Merit Aid
986
students received merit aid
$7,204
average merit award
Getting In
UC Riverside admits 86.1% of applicants.
This school reports SAT section scores but leaves the composite range blank, so there is no mid-50% band to chart.
ACT composite range not reported by this school.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
University of California, Riverside rates your personal essay as Very Important — equal weight to your GPA. Don't underestimate it. Demonstrated interest is Not Considered here — campus visits and emails to admissions won't affect your odds.
Student Life
29.1% of UC Riverside classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At UC Riverside, 29.1% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section I-3 (class sizes)
22:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
From out of state (freshman class)
1.7%
Live on campus
38%
Men in fraternities
2%
Women in sororities
4%
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
UC Riverside's student body is 9.7% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
UC Riverside graduates 64.2% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
UC Riverside graduates 64.2% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
UC Riverside
64.2%
4-yr grad rate
Extra year cost: $38,942*
* In-state cost of attendance. Out-of-state students pay significantly more.
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2025–26, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
75.5%
Overall 6-yr rate
74.7%
Pell recipient rate
Lower-income students graduate at nearly the same rate as their peers — a sign of strong institutional support.
Freshman Retention
88%
88% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Riverside.
Riverside is a city of roughly 315,000 in the Inland Empire, about an hour east of downtown Los Angeles and an hour from the coast. The campus sits below Box Springs Mountain on the edge of town, with the Carillon bell tower at its centre and a botanic garden climbing the hillside behind it. It is a working Southern California city rather than a beach town or a college town — students commute widely, and the region's logistics and health-care employers are the ones next door.
Notable Alumni
Richard R. Schrock
Won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing metal catalysts for olefin metathesis, a reaction now used daily to make pharmaceuticals, fuels and synthetic fibres more cleanly. He took his bachelor's degree in chemistry here.
Class of 1967
Billy Collins
Served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003, and is among the most widely read living American poets. He earned both his master's and his doctorate at Riverside.
Class of 1971
Steve Breen
Won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning twice, in 1998 and 2009. He started drawing cartoons for The Highlander, the student paper, while taking a political science degree here.
Class of 1992
Michael Huerta
Ran the Federal Aviation Administration as its Administrator, overseeing US civil aviation and the integration of drones into national airspace.
Class of 1978
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
The City
Mid-size city
Riverside, CA
Best For
Traditions
The Carillon Bell Tower
The 161-foot tower at the centre of campus holds a 48-bell carillon and is the landmark students orient themselves by — concerts are played from it, and it appears on nearly everything the university prints.
The Highlanders and Scotty the Bear
Riverside runs a Scottish theme it chose deliberately at founding — Highlanders, tartan, and a pipe band — attached, unusually, to a bear mascot named Scotty.
The C on Box Springs Mountain
A large concrete C is set into the hillside above campus, built by students in the 1950s and repainted by them since. Hiking up to it is the standard first-week outing.
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Riverside
Joshua Tree National Park
About 1 hour 30 minutesThe nearest national park, and the classic desert weekend out of the Inland Empire.
Big Bear Lake
About 1 hour 15 minutesSki runs in winter and a lake in summer, up in the San Bernardino Mountains directly north of campus.
Los Angeles and the Orange County beaches
About 1 hourBoth are roughly an hour in opposite directions, traffic permitting — the reason many students describe Riverside as central rather than remote.
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Ontario International Airport (ONT)
About 25 minutes from campus
For international flights: Los Angeles International (LAX) — about 1 hour 15 minutes by road.
Pro sports nearby
- Ontario Reign AHLAbout 25 minutes away
- Los Angeles Dodgers MLBAbout 1 hour away
- Los Angeles Angels MLBAbout 50 minutes away
- Los Angeles Lakers NBAAbout 1 hour 15 minutes away
Career Proximity
The Inland Empire is one of the largest logistics and distribution regions in the country, and Riverside's own economy runs on that plus health care, agriculture research and government.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Amazon
- Kaiser Permanente
- Riverside University Health System
- County of Riverside
- Esri
- Bourns
Downtown Los Angeles, about 1 hour west; Ontario's logistics corridor is about 20 minutes
Who Thrives Here
UC Riverside is test-blind, so no SAT or ACT score is read, and it admits 86.1% of applicants — which makes it one of the genuinely reachable doors into the University of California. What it reads is the transcript: the average high school GPA of enrolled first-years is 3.75, and the application essay is rated Very Important while recommendations, interviews and extracurricular activities are all marked Not Considered. The student body looks like California rather than like a selective university: 41.8% Hispanic, 34.4% Asian, 9.7% white, 3.9% Black, with 96.2% of the entering class from in-state. The number worth pausing on is the one underneath that: 74.7% of Pell-grant recipients graduate within six years against 75.5% of all students, so students who arrive with the least finish at very nearly the same rate as everyone else. The trade-off is scale in the classroom. Teaching runs at 22 students per faculty member, only 29.1% of class sections have fewer than 20 students, and 253 of 1,585 sections carry 100 or more. Aid covers 86.6% of demonstrated need, and graduates who borrow leave owing $18,621.