University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university and the founding campus of the University of California. It was established in 1868 by merging the private College of California with a state agricultural, mining and mechanical arts college, and it moved to its Berkeley site in 1873. The campus sits at the foot of the East Bay hills, about 10 miles from San Francisco.

Berkeley has more than a dozen colleges and schools. They include the College of Letters and Science, the College of Engineering, the College of Chemistry, the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, the Haas School of Business, Berkeley Law, the Goldman School of Public Policy and the School of Public Health. It is best known for physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, economics and sociology. Graduate research draws on Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, founded by Ernest Lawrence in 1931, as well as the Space Sciences Laboratory and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Berkeley scientists have discovered 16 chemical elements.

Berkeley enrolls about 45,000 students, and roughly 13,000 of them are graduate students. International students from more than 100 countries make up about 13 percent of enrollment. More than two dozen Nobel laureates have served on the faculty, including Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 chemistry prize. Alumni include Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The Graduate Division oversees doctoral and master's programs, and research doctorates are central to graduate study. PhD students usually receive multiyear support that combines fellowships with graduate student instructor and researcher appointments, and student employees across the UC system are unionized. Professional degrees include the MBA, the Master of Public Policy, the Master of Engineering and the LLM. The academic year runs on semesters. Graduate students live across Berkeley and Oakland, and BART connects campus with San Francisco and the wider Bay Area.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of California, Berkeley lists 231 graduate programs across 54 subjects: 93 master's programs and 119 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in public health, biology and civil engineering. University of California, Berkeley holds rank 6 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.