UC Berkeley Economics Professors Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan and Gabriel Zucman, and Economics Ph.D. candidate Akcan Balkir, were featured in The Atlantic.
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the richest of rich Americans pay an average tax rate of 34 percent, higher than any other cohort’s. In reality, as everyone has long known, they pay less than that. A new study by some of the country’s most...
This article originally appeared in Berkeley News on August 25, 2025.
In this first-person narrative, incoming first-year student Inès Pajot tells UC Berkeley News about cofounding a climate coalition in high school and how her early interest in astrophysics will inspire her...
The number of unhoused individuals in the U.S. reached a record high of 770,000 at the end of 2024 (Porter 2024). Homelessness policy remains a source of vehement partisan debate. Some argue that homelessness is, in fact, a housing problem, with permanent housing solutions required to help those most in need. Others argue that those who are chronically unhoused must have issues that go beyond lack of affordable housing; instead, untreated mental illness and substance use are often at the heart of the problem. Should homelessness policy target housing or mental health treatment? My research...
Psychology transfer student Mariano Vincent Salvador never imagined seeing himself at UC Berkeley. The 27-year-old was once academically dismissed from Diablo Valley College (DVC) with a 1.6 GPA. Now he’s thriving as an A-student at UC Berkeley.
Salvador’s arduous academic journey began at DVC as a college student who didn’t understand the value of learning and was unsure about his future. This led to academic struggles, probation, and eventually, his dismissal because of low grades and a lack of academic units completed. ...
Now available to all students, faculty, staff and alumni, the class features lectures and discussions with top UC Berkeley scholars and offers suggestions on navigating especially challenging conversations during polarized times.
Amir Rafiei has long known that some topics can be divisive. But he hadn’t realized how his own actions may have caused divides in his seemingly neutral hobby of filmmaking.
Sometimes he’d feel “locked in” with his own thoughts and ideas. He’d stop listening to what his collaborators were saying about shot techniques or narrative structures...
On a sunny summer morning in Sacramento, Janet Mendoza-Partida was walking from her office at the California Department of Education along tree-lined streets to the state Capitol, a thoughtful young woman explaining why she feels divided between two worlds.
Her parents are Mexican immigrants who raised their children in Watsonville — her father a farmworker, her mother a childcare provider. Even a few years ago, before starting studies at UC Berkeley, Mendoza-Partida said she could not see far beyond the agricultural community where she grew up and dreamed of being a teacher....
All year I have been reading articles that paint an apocalyptic picture of humanities instruction in the age of artificial intelligence. They basically...
Angela (she/her) is a 2025 SURF L&S researcher majoring in Psychology and Computer Science. For her SURF project this summer, Angela is researching the topic “EQVision: Affective Tracking of Multiple Characters in Context.”
How did you get interested in the topic of your project?
To promote deeper learning and fairer outcomes, many education systems have moved away from traditional in-class exams toward lower-stakes, more flexible forms of assessment. Yet despite the growing popularity of this shift, we still know little about its long-term consequences. What began as a single in-class exam has evolved into a mix of midterms, finals, take-home tests, re-takes, problem sets, and participation-based grading. In some cases, assessments now depend more on whether students complete their work than how well they perform. This trend has extended beyond the classroom: many...
UC Berkeley’s influence traverses the globe, and thanks to the Judith Stronach Travel Seminar, its creative scholars can as well.
This past November, art history professors Zamansele Nsele and Ivy Mills led a group of six graduate students to Senegal for an immersive, nine-day trip to the 2024 Dak'Art Biennale — a major art exhibition that showcases contemporary African art every other year.
All year I have been reading articles that paint an apocalyptic picture of humanities instruction in the age of artificial intelligence. They 
Angela (she/her) is a 2025 SURF L&S researcher majoring in Psychology and Computer Science. For her SURF project this summer, Angela is researching the topic “EQVision: Affective Tracking of Multiple Characters in Context.”