If you have searched a UC campus for your major and found nothing, you are probably not doing it wrong. A surprising number of common majors simply do not exist in the UC system, and several more exist under names you would never search for.
Here is the full list, what each field is called at the UCs instead, and where to go if you want the real thing.
Majors no UC offers at all
- Kinesiology. Not one UC uses the name. The closest is UC Irvine's Physiology and Exercise Sciences, with UCLA's Physiological Science and UCSB's Physiology behind it.
- Hospitality and sports management. Neither exists anywhere in the UC system as an undergraduate major.
- Criminal justice. No UC offers a degree by that name. UC Irvine has Criminology, Law and Society, which is close. Berkeley and Santa Cruz have Legal Studies, which is not.
- A professional architecture degree. Berkeley and UCLA both teach architecture, but neither undergraduate degree is the accredited licensure track.
Majors only one UC offers
- Social work. UC Berkeley only, and it is called Social Welfare.
- Journalism. UC Irvine only, as Literary Journalism. Berkeley's famous J-School is graduate-only.
- Criminology. UC Irvine only.
- Pharmacy. UC Irvine only, as Pharmaceutical Sciences. No UC gives undergraduates a PharmD.
- Game design. UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz, and those two are genuinely strong.
Majors only two or three UCs offer
- Nutrition. Berkeley and Davis only.
- Nursing. UCLA and UC Irvine only, both overwhelmingly freshman-entry.
- Agriculture. Effectively just UC Davis, with a small Santa Cruz presence.
- Business. Five campuses have a real business major. UCLA, UCSD, UCSB and Santa Cruz offer business-flavoured economics instead.
The pattern worth internalising
Two things explain almost every gap on this list.
The UCs are research universities and the CSUs are professional ones. That division is deliberate and it is written into California's Master Plan for Higher Education. Applied and licensure-oriented fields, nursing, social work, kinesiology, criminal justice, teaching, hospitality, concentrated in the CSU system on purpose. The UCs kept the research-oriented versions of the same subjects. This is why physiology exists at UCLA and kinesiology does not.
The name is often the only thing missing. Social welfare is social work. Physiological science is kinesiology's academic sibling. Criminology is criminal justice with more statistics. If a search returns nothing, search the field rather than the title before concluding the campus has nothing for you.
What to do about it
If your field is on this list, decide which you actually want: the subject, or the credential at the end.
If you want the credential, and especially if it involves a licence, look hard at the CSU system. It is not a downgrade. For nursing, social work, kinesiology and criminal justice it is where the seats, the field placements and the professional accreditation are, and those programs are considerably more transfer-accessible than their UC near-equivalents.
If you want the subject and a UC, find the equivalent name and plan around its prerequisites, which are usually more science-heavy than the CSU version. Preparing for the wrong one is the expensive mistake, because the two lists diverge early and a missed sequence costs a year.
Related: Which UCs have kinesiology · Which UCs have social work · My major isn't on ASSIST.org · Which UCs have nursing programs
