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From the San Francisco Chronicle:

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...

By 2030, with every baby boomer locked into old age, the need for nurses will only skyrocket, he said. So what’s stopping California’s universities from welcoming every applicant? At UC Irvine and UCLA — which together admitted 118 nursing students out of 11,776 who applied in 2023, the most recent data available — the answer is money.

UC Irvine’s engineering school, for example, spends less than $10,000 a year to educate each student. The nursing school spends at least twice that amount... A lecture hall packed with engineering students needs but one professor. But in nursing, where the stakes are about patient survival, every group of 10 students needs a single, attentive instructor.  Also expensive: computerized mannequins, which reside in hospital simulation rooms and suffer sudden heart attacks and massive strokes. These cost a couple hundred thousand dollars each...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/college-admissions/article/uc-csu-nursing-major-acceptance-rate-20230860.php.