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UC Berkeley

200 California Hall, Berkeley, CA

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UC Berkeley, founded in 1868, is the flagship and oldest campus of the University of California system, and its public-university research output — measured by faculty Nobel Prizes, National Academy memberships, and federal research funding — consistently rivals that of far more expensive private institutions, at a fraction of the tuition cost for California residents. The campus was the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, when student protests over political activity restrictions on campus helped launch a wave of student activism that spread to universities across the country, cementing Berkeley's reputation as one of the most politically engaged campuses in the nation. Berkeley's engineering and computer science programs have produced a disproportionate share of Silicon Valley's founders and early employees, and the campus's role in developing early internet infrastructure and open-source software — including the Berkeley Software Distribution version of Unix — gave it outsized influence on the technology industry's technical foundations. As a public university serving a large, socioeconomically diverse student body far larger than most elite private schools, Berkeley's combination of research-university firepower and broad public accessibility is central to why it's consistently ranked as the top public university in the country.

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