2025 College Rankings

The University of California–Berkeley is one of the state’s largest public institutions and, as the original “Public Ivy,” is widely regarded as one of the most elite. Yet in the public imagination, Berkeley is perhaps better known as a historic hub of student activism, beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present day.

Berkeley suffers from a deeply activist administration. The university has not adopted any form of institutional neutrality, and its recent actions suggest a concerning set of priorities. Berkeley filed a brief supporting affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case before the Supreme Court. It has also adopted a range of symbolic activist commitments, including a land acknowledgment apologizing for the university’s presence on the ancestral homelands of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, along with a series of environmental pledges.

Unsurprisingly for a school so thoroughly shaped by administrative activism, Berkeley is a hub for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The university employs a Chief Diversity Officer, and nearly 80 percent of faculty job postings require applicants to submit a DEI statement. Berkeley has nearly four DEI staffers for every 1,000 students.

The school is also “test blind” in admissions, meaning that it does not consider SAT or ACT scores—an indication that it prioritizes demographic diversity over merit. Berkeley has received the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) award, signaling its institutional commitment to DEI. Members of the administration have even publicly resisted efforts by the Trump administration to scale back DEI programming in public institutions, making clear their intent to double-down rather than reconsider.

The student body at Berkeley is ideologically skewed far to the left. The university ranks in the bottom third of colleges for student ideological pluralism, with a liberal-to-conservative student ratio of six to one. Despite its storied history as the birthplace of the “Free Speech Movement,” Berkeley now ranks in the lower half of schools on political tolerance. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Berkeley students are significantly more likely to oppose allowing right-leaning speakers on campus than left-leaning ones. FIRE also found that Berkeley students are more supportive than average of illiberal forms of protest—such as shout-downs, obstructing speeches, and even using violence—to prevent certain views from being expressed.

These disruptive tactics were on full display during the campus protests against Israel that followed Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre. Jewish students were frequently harassed—the AMCHA Initiative recorded 73 anti-Semitic incidents per 1,000 students—and protesters set up encampments that remained until the administration agreed to “review” its investments in Israeli companies. This move was widely interpreted as a concession to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Berkeley’s handling of the surge in campus anti-Semitism has drawn national scrutiny. In the past two years, it has been the subject of two major investigations—one by Congress and another by the Department of Education.

That said, Berkeley performs strongly in terms of student economic outcomes, ranking in the top 15 percent of the schools that we analyzed. It boasts excellent retention and graduation rates, both of which exceed expectations, based on SAT scores and Pell Grant data. The university has a 96 percent retention rate and a 94 percent six-year graduation rate. It also ranks highly in return on investment: on average, students can pay back the cost of attendance in just over a year.