The University of California, Berkeley (also referred to as Cal, California, Berkeley and UC Berkeley) is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The university occupies 6,651 acres (2,692 ha) with the central campus resting on approximately 200 acres (80.9 ha).
The University was founded in 1868 in a merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College. Berkeley was a founding member of the Association of American Universities. Sixty-two Nobel Laureates have been affiliated with the university as faculty, researchers, or alumni.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked UC Berkeley 3rd internationally. Newsweek and Webometrics Ranking of World Universities ranked Berkeley 5th in the World. UC Berkeley is the top ranked public university and ranks 21st overall in the U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Colleges 2009: National Universities". It ranked 2nd for undergraduate engineering and 3rd for undergraduate Business Program.
Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project which he personally headquartered at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. Since that time, the university has managed or co-managed the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as its later rival, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Cal student-athletes compete intercollegiately as the California Golden Bears. A member of both the Pacific-10 Conference and the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in the NCAA, Cal students have won national titles in many sports, including football, men's basketball, baseball, softball, water polo, rugby, and crew. In addition, they have won over 100 Olympic medals. The official colors of the university and its athletic teams are Yale blue and California gold.
History
Founded in the wake of the gold rush by leaders of the newly established 31st state, the University of California's flagship campus at Berkeley has become one of the preeminent universities in the world. Its early guiding lights, charged with providing education (both "practical" and "classical") for the state's people, gradually established a distinguished faculty (with 20 Nobel laureates to date), a stellar research library, and more than 350 academic programs.
This California institution became a catalyst of economic growth and social innovation — the place where vitamin E was discovered, a lost Scarlatti opera found, the flu virus identified, and the nation's first no-fault divorce law drafted. Scholars at Berkeley have conducted groundbreaking research on urban street gangs and on basic human nutritional requirements, identified why wartime supply ships were failing at sea, invented technologies to build faster and cheaper computer chips, and imaged the infant universe.
In recognition of broad and deep excellence, respected sources have repeatedly ranked UC Berkeley at or near the top in fields ranging from engineering and the "hard" sciences to the social sciences, arts, and humanities. The National Research Council, in the most recent version of its highly regarded report on U.S. public and private universities, ranked Berkeley no. 1 nationally in the number of campus graduate programs (35 out of 36) among the top 10 in their fields.
In accordance with UC's "public" character, the university has long served talented individuals regardless of means. As early as 1897, financial aid was available for "needy and deserving" students. More than a century later, UC Berkeley combines outstanding teaching and research programs with broad access for students of all means — educating more federal Pell Grant recipients from low-income families than all eight Ivy League universities combined. Close to 30 percent of UC Berkeley freshmen are the first in their families to attend college.
Library
Berkeley’s 32 libraries tie together to make the fourth largest academic library in the United States surpassed only by the Library of Congress, Harvard, and Yale. In 2003, the Association of Research Libraries ranked it as the top public and third overall university library in North America based on various statistical measures of quality. As of 2006, Berkeley's library system contains over 10 million volumes and maintains over 70,000 serial titles. The libraries together cover over 12 acres (49,000 m2) of land and comprise one of the largest library complexes in the world. Doe Library serves as the library system's reference, periodical, and administrative center, while most of the main collections are housed in the subterranean Gardner Main Stacks and Moffitt Undergraduate Library. The Bancroft Library, with holdings of over 400,000 printed volumes, maintains a collection that documents the history of the western part of North America, with an emphasis on California, Mexico and Central America.
Faculty and Research
Berkeley's current faculty includes 227 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows, 2 Fields Medal winners, 83 Fulbright Scholars, 139 Guggenheim Fellows, 87 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 132 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, 84 Sloan Fellows, and 7 Wolf Prize winners. 62 Nobel Laureates have been associated with the university as faculty, alumni or researchers, the sixth most of any university in the world; twenty have served on its faculty.
Academic Ranking
According to the National Research Council, Berkeley ranks first nationally in the number of graduate programs in the top ten in their fields (97%, 35 of 36 programs) and first nationally in the number of "distinguished" programs for the scholarship of the faculty (32 programs). Berkeley is the only university in the nation to achieve top 5 rankings for all of its PhD programs in those disciplines covered by the US News and World Report graduate school survey. In a survey of "Top American Research Universities" released by The Center for Measuring University Performance at Arizona State University, Berkeley ranked seventh overall and first among public institutions
In addition to its distinguished post-graduate programs, US News also consistently ranks Berkeley as the nation’s top undergraduate public university and within the top three overall for both Undergraduate Business and Undergraduate Engineering. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Berkeley's undergraduate program twenty-first nationally in terms of "academic excellence." In its 2007 annual college rankings, The Washington Monthly ranks Berkeley third nationally with criteria based on research, community service, and social mobility. 31% of admitted students receive federal Pell grants.
The THES - QS World University Rankings ranked Berkeley eighth in the world in 2006 , and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute for Higher Education ranked Berkeley third in the world in its 2007 rankings. Those rankings were based upon alumni and faculty quality defined by academic reputation, as well as awards won, papers published, international presence, student to faculty ratio, frequency of citation by peers, and performance relative to size. In the 2006 international edition of Newsweek, Berkeley was the fifth-ranked global university.
Schools
Berkeley's 130-plus academic departments and programs are organized into 14 unique colleges and schools. "Colleges" are both undergraduate and graduate, while "Schools" are generally graduate only, though some offer undergraduate majors, minors, or courses.
- School of Business
- College of Chemistry
- Graduate School of Education
- College of Engineering
- College of Environmental Design
- Graduate School of Journalism
- Boalt Hall School of Law
- School of Information
- College of Letters and Science
- College of Natural Resources
- School of Optometry
- School of Public Health
- Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy
- School of Social Welfare
Berkeley is a comprehensive university, offering over 7,000 courses in nearly 300 degree programs. The university awards over 5,500 bachelor's degrees, 2,000 master's degrees, 900 doctorates, and 200 law degrees each year. The student-faculty ratio is 15.5 to 1, and the average class consists of 30 students (not including discussion sections led by graduate student instructors). Class size ranges from introductory courses with hundreds of students and seminars with fewer than ten.
Berkeley's current faculty includes 221 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows, 2 Fields Medal winners, 83 Fulbright Scholars, 139 Guggenheim Fellows, 87 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 132 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, 84 Sloan Fellows, and 7 Wolf Prize winners. 61 Nobel Laureates are associated with the university, the sixth most of any university in the world; twenty have served on its faculty. (See list of distinguished Berkeley faculty.)
Berkeley's enrollment of National Merit Scholars was third in the nation until 2002, when participation in the National Merit program was discontinued.
Berkeley awards the following degrees: B.A., B.S., M.A., M.S., M.F.A., M.B.A., M.F.E., M.C.P., M.Arch., M.Eng., M.F., M.I.M.S., M.J., M.L.A., M.P.H., M.P.P., M.S.W., M.U.D., LL.M., Ph.D., D.Eng., Ed.D., D.O., Dr.P.H., J.D., J.S.D.
University of Californa Berkeley was ranked 36th in the 2008 THES-QS World University Ranking
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