About UC Berkeley

• A UC Berkeley overview
• Campus history and timeline
• National rankings and faculty honors
• Chancellors of UC Berkeley
• Cal traditions
• More about UC Berkeley

A UC Berkeley overview

The UC Berkeley community has grown to some 33,000 students, plus 21,000 faculty and staff members. The campus's architecturally diverse buildings, wooded glens, and parklands spread across 1,232 acres, extending into the Oakland/Berkeley hills and overlooking San Francisco Bay.

With its mission of teaching, research, and public service, UC Berkeley, or Cal as it is known to alumni, is one of the world's most distinguished institutions of higher education. It is renowned for the excellence of its faculty and students, the scope of its research and publications, the size and quality of its library collections, and the excellence of its laboratory and educational facilities.

Berkeley's faculty traditionally comprises internationally renowned researchers, scholars, and teachers, many of them the leading experts in their fields and all of them committed to educational excellence. Since 1939, the university has had 18 Nobel laureates on its faculty. Its 1,250 current ladder-rank faculty members include recipients of hundreds of major awards and honors.

Berkeley's students are top scholars. On the undergraduate side, typically 99 percent of entering freshmen have graduated in the top 10 percent of their class, a higher percentage than at any other university in the nation. On the graduate side, UC Berkeley has awarded more doctoral degrees than any other university in the country. Since 1988, Berkeley has attracted to its graduate programs more recipients of National Science Foundation Fellowships and Minority Graduate Fellowships than any other public institution. Berkeley students come from 100 countries, and they study abroad in 29 countries. There are 650 student organizations on campus and nearly 420,000 alumni worldwide.

The campus offers approximately 7,000 courses annually in 347 degree programs in 14 schools and colleges. In the most recent National Research Council survey of American graduate programs [link to B1] (1995), Berkeley had both the largest number and the highest percentage of top-ranked doctoral programs in the nation. Of the 36 UC Berkeley programs ranked in the study, 35 were judged to be among the top 10 in the nation. Stanford was ranked second with 31 programs in the top 10; Harvard was third, with 26.

The Library holds more than nine million volumes and 80,000 serial titles. The Association of Research Libraries has ranked it as the No. 1 public research university library in North America and No. 3 overall (behind Harvard and Yale).

UC Berkeley has graduated more students who became Peace Corps volunteers than any other school. Among many other distinctions, Cal is the institution where the cyclotron was invented, plutonium was discovered, and the human polio virus was first isolated. Berkeley also is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement.