In new rankings released today (Monday, Sept. 29) by the Wall Street Journal and College Pulse, UC Berkeley was named the No. 1 public college in the country — the second year in a row it received the distinction.
Monday’s ranking comes one week after the release of U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 Best Colleges list, which also named Berkeley as the top public school in the country.
The Wall Street Journal’s rankings use a unique methodology designed to measure the financial and career success of graduates. It most heavily weighs the impact a college has on graduate salaries, beyond an estimate of what they would have earned from attending college in general. After graduate salaries, the rankings considered factors such as graduation rates and diversity, and used a survey of 120,000 students and recent alumni from colleges across the country to measure teaching quality, student satisfaction and more.
“Today’s ranking in the Wall Street Journal confirms Berkeley’s role as an extraordinary engine of economic mobility for many thousands of students every year,” said Chancellor Rich Lyons. “Over the course of the last decade, the estimated return on a Berkeley student’s investment jumped by 30%, from $255,000 to $331,000. That, combined with our world-class research enterprise, is just part of what makes Berkeley one of society’s greatest assets.”