Cerritos College Acceptance Rate, GPA, and Admission Requirements

Cerritos's Scholars' Honors Program (SHP) feeds two named, distinct transfer partnerships rather than one generic "honors transfer" pipeline: UCLA's TAP and UC Irvine's H2H. Each requires its own Intent-to-Transfer Form, with UC Irvine's deadline falling in early December - ahead of UCLA's mid-December deadline - and each runs separate certification workshops. A student aiming at both UC campuses needs to track two parallel calendars inside the same honors program, not assume one form covers both; missing the earlier UC Irvine deadline doesn't affect UCLA eligibility, but conflating the two paperwork trails is the easiest way to miss one of them.

For impacted UCLA majors, TAP certification requires a 3.4+ overall GPA and 3.0+ in major prep; a GPA between 3.2 and 3.4 doesn't disqualify a student, but it does trigger a mandatory requirement to declare an alternate (non-impacted) major and meet with a transfer counselor - skip that step and Cerritos will not TAP-certify the application at all. Because the primary/alternate major pairing generally cannot be changed once submitted on the UC application, this is a decision to make deliberately with a counselor in the fall, not something to leave until the GPA picture is final.

Cerritos's Nursing Program (Option A for traditional applicants, Option C for LVNs/military-trained applicants seeking advanced placement) takes applications only once annually - a recent cycle's deadline was February 27 at 4:00 PM, and that single cycle fills both the Fall and the following Spring cohort. A student a semester behind on prerequisites when that window closes effectively loses a full year, not just a semester, so prerequisite sequencing has to be planned multiple terms ahead rather than reactively.

The Cerritos Complete Transfer Success Pathway (two years of free in-state tuition, tied to the CSU Transfer Success Pathway or UC Dual Admissions) has its own October 3 deadline and onboarding requirements (English/math completion proof, a counseling course by spring), entirely separate from a UC Transfer Admission Guarantee (TAG) or TAP certification process. A student should pursue the financial pathway and the academic transfer-guarantee pathway side by side - they layer rather than substitute for each other - and missing the October financial deadline doesn't affect TAG or TAP eligibility, but treating them as the same thing risks letting one lapse while focused on the other.