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The University of California (UC) is California's system of public research universities. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. The system is the state's land-grant university. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-system public postsecondary education plan, which also includes the California Community Colleges and California State University systems.

The ten campuses have a combined enrollment of 299,407 students, with 26,100 faculty members and 192,400 staff members, and more than 2.5 million alumni. Nine campuses enroll undergraduate and graduate students, while UC San Francisco enrolls only graduate and professional students in the medical and health sciences. The University of California College of the Law, San Francisco is legally affiliated with the University of California and shares its name, but operates autonomously.

The University of California manages or co-manages three national laboratories for the United States Department of Energy: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The university is governed by a Board of Regents, whose autonomy from the rest of the state government is protected by the Constitution of California.

The University of California was founded on March 23, 1868, in Oakland after acquiring the assets of the College of California. It moved to Berkeley in 1873. The university also affiliated with independent medical and law schools in San Francisco. Over the following decades, it established branch locations and satellite programs elsewhere in the state, while Berkeley remained its only campus.

Beginning in March 1951, the University of California began reorganizing its administration to separate the Berkeley campus from the university-wide administration. UC president Robert Gordon Sproul remained the system's chief executive, while Clark Kerr became Berkeley's first chancellor and Raymond B. Allen became the first chancellor of an independently administered University of California, Los Angeles. However, the reorganization faced resistance from Sproul and his allies and was not completed during his presidency. After Kerr succeeded Sproul as UC president, the university was reorganized as a multicampus system between 1957 and 1960. Chancellors were appointed at additional campuses, and the campuses received greater administrative autonomy.

History

Early history

In 1849, the state of California ratified its first constitution, which contained the express objective of creating a complete educational system including a state university. Taking advantage of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts, the California State Legislature established an Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in 1866. However, it existed only on paper, as a placeholder to secure federal land-grant funds.

Meanwhile, Congregational minister Henry Durant, an alumnus of Yale, had established the private Contra Costa Academy, on June 20, 1853, in Oakland, California. The initial site was bounded by Twelfth and Fourteenth Streets and Harrison and Franklin Streets in downtown Oakland (and is marked today by State Historical Plaque No. 45 at the northeast corner of Thirteenth and Franklin). In turn, the academy's trustees were granted a charter in 1855 for a College of California, though the college continued to operate as a college preparatory school until it added college-level courses in 1860. The college's trustees, educators, and supporters believed in the importance of a liberal arts education (especially the study of the Greek and Roman classics), but ran into a lack of interest in liberal arts colleges on the American frontier (for post-secondary degrees, the college was graduating only three or four students per year).

In November 1857, the college's trustees began to acquire various parcels of land facing the Golden Gate in what is now Berkeley for a future planned campus to the north of Oakland. But first, they needed to secure the college's water rights by buying a large farm to the east. In 1864, they organized the College Homestead Association, which borrowed $35,000 to purchase the land, plus another $33,000 to purchase 160 acres (650,000 m2) of land to the south of the future campus. The association subdivided the latter parcel and started selling lots with the hope it could raise enough money to repay its lenders and also create a new college town. But sales of new homesteads fell short.

Governor Frederick Low favored the establishment of a state university based upon the University of Michigan plan, and thus in one sense may be regarded as the founder of the University of California. At the College of California's 1867 commencement exercises, where Low was present, Yale University professor Benjamin Silliman Jr. criticized Californians for establishing a polytechnic school, instead of a real university. That same day, Low reportedly first suggested a merger of the already-functional College of California (which had a liberal arts focus, land, buildings, faculty, and students, but not enough money) with the nonfunctional state college (which had a polytechnical focus, money and nothing else), and went on to participate in the ensuing negotiations.

Governance

All University of California campuses except the College of the Law in San Francisco are governed by the Regents of the University of California as required by the Constitution of the State of California. Eighteen regents are appointed by the governor for 12-year terms. One member is a student appointed for a one-year term. There are also seven ex officio members—the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the State Assembly, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, president and vice president of the UC alumni associations, and the UC president. The Academic Senate, made up of faculty members, is empowered by the regents to set academic policies. In addition, the system-wide faculty chair and vice-chair sit on the Board of Regents as non-voting members.

President of the University of California

Originally, the president was the chief executive of the first campus, Berkeley. In turn, other UC locations (with the exception of the Hastings College of the Law) were treated as off-site departments of the Berkeley campus, and were headed by provosts who were subordinate to the president. In March 1951, the regents reorganized the university's governing structure. Starting with the 1952–53 academic year, day-to-day "chief executive officer" functions for the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses were transferred to chancellors who were vested with a high degree of autonomy, and reported as equals to UC's president. As noted above, the regents promoted five additional UC locations to campuses and allowed them to have chancellors of their own in a series of decisions from 1958 to 1964, and the three campuses added since then have also been run by chancellors. In turn, all chancellors (again, with the exception of Hastings) report as equals to the University of California President. Today, the UC Office of the President (UCOP) and the Office of the Secretary and Chief of Staff to the Regents of the University of California share an office building in downtown Oakland that serves as the UC system's headquarters.

Kerr's vision for UC governance was "one university with pluralistic decision-making". In other words, the internal delegation of operational authority to chancellors at the campus level and allowing nine other campuses to become separate centers of academic life independent of Berkeley did not change the fact that all campuses remain part of one legal entity. As a 1968 UC centennial coffee table book explained: "Yet for all its campuses, colleges, schools, institutes, and research stations, it remains one University, under one Board of Regents and one president—the University of California." UC continues to take a "united approach" as one university in matters in which it inures to UC's advantage to do so, such as when negotiating with the legislature and governor in Sacramento. The University of California continues to manage certain matters at the systemwide level in order to maintain common standards across all campuses, such as student admissions, appointment and promotion of faculty, and approval of academic programs.

Campuses and rankings

At present, the UC system officially describes itself as a system of "10 campuses" consisting of the campuses listed below. These campuses are under the direct control of the regents and president. Only ten campuses are listed on the official UC letterhead.

Although it shares the name and public status of the UC system, the College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly Hastings College of the Law) is not controlled by the regents or president; it has a separate board of directors and must seek funding directly from the Legislature. However, under the California Education Code, Hastings degrees are awarded in the name of the regents and bear the signature of the UC president. Furthermore, Education Code section 92201 states that Hastings "is affiliated with the University of California, and is the law department thereof".

University rankings

Annually, UC campuses are ranked highly by various publications. Six UC campuses rank in the top 50 U.S. National Universities of 2026 by U.S. News & World Report: Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, and UC Davis. Four UC campuses also ranked in the top 50 in the U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities Rankings in 2026, namely Berkeley, UCLA, UCSF, and UC San Diego. UCSF is ranked as one of the top universities in biomedicine in the world and the UCSF School of Medicine is ranked 3rd in the United States among research-oriented medical schools and for primary care by U.S. News & World Report.

Three UC campuses: Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego all ranked in the top 15 universities in the US according to the 2020 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) US National University Rankings and also in the top 20 in World University Rankings. The Academic Ranking of World Universities also ranked UCSF, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara in the top 50 US National Universities and in the top 100 World Universities in 2020.

Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego all ranked in the top 50 universities in the world according to both the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2021 and the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) for 2020, while UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Davis ranked in the top 100 universities in the world. Forbes also ranked the six UC campuses mentioned above as being in the top 50 universities in America in 2021. Forbes also named the top three public universities in America as all being UC campuses, namely, Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD, and ranked three more campuses, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Irvine as being among the top 20 public universities in America in 2021. The six aforementioned campuses are all considered Public Ivies. The QS World University Rankings for 2021 ranked three UC campuses: Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego as being in the top 100 universities in the world.

Academics

As of the end of fiscal year 2023, UC controls 13,810 active patents. UC researchers and faculty were responsible for 1,440 new inventions that same year. On average, UC researchers create four new inventions per day.

Eight of UC's ten campuses (Berkeley, UC Davis, UCI, UCLA, UC Riverside, UCSD, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz) are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an alliance of elite American research universities founded in 1900 at UC's suggestion. Collectively, the system counts among its faculty (as of 2002):

• 389 members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 5 Fields Medal recipients
• 19 Fulbright Scholars
• 25 MacArthur Fellows
• 254 members of the National Academy of Sciences
• 91 members of the National Academy of Engineering
• 13 National Medal of Science laureates
• 61 Nobel laureates
• 106 members of the Institute of Medicine

Nobel Prize winners

Of the twelve Nobel laureates named in 2024, five have prior UC affiliations as alumni (Gary Ruvkun and David Baker), faculty (John Hopfield, Geoffrey Hinton, and James A. Robinson), and postdocs (Baker and Hinton).

As of October 2021, the following data are taken from List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation, which counts university alumni and staff, and are not the official count from the University of California.

UC Libraries

At 40.8 million print volumes, the University of California library system is home to one of the largest collections of printed materials in the world. On July 27, 2021, all ten campuses went live with a unified online library catalog, UC Library Search. Besides on-campus libraries, the UC system also maintains two regional library facilities (one each for Northern and Southern California), which each accept older items from all UC campus libraries in their respective region. As of 2019, Northern Regional Library Facility is home to 7.4 million items, while Southern Regional Library Facility is home to 6.5 million items.

Academic calendar

In 1966, UC switched its academic calendar from the semester system to the quarter system. This was "part of a national trend to join state campuses across the U.S. that were aligning with private universities, including Stanford, that had operated on quarters since World War I to accommodate students in military training programs".

Berkeley returned to the semester system in 1983, and Merced has operated on the semester system since its 2005 opening. However, all five law schools operate on the semester system, as does the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

In fall 2024, with the quarter system in decline nationwide (down to about 50 institutions and falling), UC initiated a systemwide study of switching all campuses back to the semester system.

Admissions

Each UC campus handles admissions separately, but a student wishing to apply for an undergraduate or transfer admission uses one application for all UC campuses. Graduate and professional school admissions are handled directly and separately by each department or program to which one applies.

In May 2020, UC approved plans to suspend standardized testing score requirements in admissions until 2024. In May 2021, after a student lawsuit, the University of California announced that it would no longer consider SAT and ACT scores in admissions and scholarship decisions.

The Early Academic Outreach Program (EAOP) was established in 1976 by University of California (UC) in response to the State Legislature's recommendation to expand post-secondary opportunities to all of California's students including those who are first-generation, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and English-language learners. As UC's largest academic preparation program, EAOP assists middle and high school students with academic preparation, admissions requirements, and financial aid requirements for higher education. The program designs and provides services to foster students' academic development, and delivers those services in partnership with other academic preparation programs, schools, other higher education institutions and community/industry partners.

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