At a Glance
UC Berkeley admits 11.4% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
What families actually pay, by income level
After grants and scholarships. Before loans. Public school prices shown at in-state rates.
Source: College Scorecard / IPEDS, 2024-25
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Based on average need-based grant. Actual cost varies by family income — see chart above.
Shown at in-state rates.
Debt at Graduation
Not reported by this school
receive need-based grant aid
$18,653
average debt at graduation
UC Berkeley graduates carry an average of $18,653 in debt.
Merit Aid
1,788
students received merit aid
$9,858
average merit award
Getting In
UC Berkeley admits 11.4% of applicants.
This school reports SAT section scores but leaves the composite range blank, so there is no mid-50% band to chart.
ACT composite range not reported by this school.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
University of California, Berkeley rates your personal essay as Very Important — equal weight to your GPA. Don't underestimate it. Demonstrated interest is Not Considered here — campus visits and emails to admissions won't affect your odds.
Student Life
50.9% of UC Berkeley classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At UC Berkeley, 50.9% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section I-3 (class sizes)
18:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
Live on campus
30%
Men in fraternities
2.6%
Women in sororities
6.1%
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
UC Berkeley's student body is 19.1% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
UC Berkeley graduates 81.3% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
UC Berkeley graduates 81.3% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
UC Berkeley
81.3%
4-yr grad rate
Extra year cost: $45,619*
* In-state cost of attendance. Out-of-state students pay significantly more.
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2025–26, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
93.7%
Overall 6-yr rate
89.8%
Pell recipient rate
There's a 3.9 point gap between overall and Pell Grant graduation rates. Worth asking the school about support resources.
Freshman Retention
97%
97% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Berkeley.
Berkeley is a dense, walkable, politically loud small city that sits directly across the bay from San Francisco, and the university is the reason it exists in its current form. Telegraph Avenue runs into the south edge of campus and the hills rise behind it, so a student can be at a lab bench, a protest and a trailhead within an hour. The trade-off is cost: the Bay Area rental market is among the most expensive in the country, which is the practical reason 70% of undergraduates live off campus. BART puts downtown San Francisco about half an hour away without a car.
Notable Alumni
Gordon Moore
Co-founded Intel and wrote the 1965 observation that became Moore's law. He graduated here in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
Class of 1950
Joan Didion
Essayist and novelist whose Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking reshaped American nonfiction. She took a BA in English here in 1956 and won Vogue's Prix de Paris essay contest in her senior year, which became her first job.
Class of 1956
Steve Wozniak
Designed the Apple I and Apple II and co-founded Apple. He started the degree here in 1971, came back a decade later to finish it, and received it in electrical engineering and computer sciences under the enrolled name Rocky Raccoon Clark.
Class of 1987
Chien-Shiung Wu
Experimental physicist whose 1956 Wu experiment overturned the assumed conservation of parity, and who worked on the Manhattan Project. She completed her PhD in physics here in 1940.
Class of 1940
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
The City
Mid-size city
Berkeley, CA
Best For
Traditions
The Big Game and the Stanford Axe
The football game against Stanford has been played since 1892, and the winner keeps the Axe — a trophy that was physically stolen back and forth for decades before the two schools agreed to compete for it.
The Campanile
Sather Tower, finished in 1914, plays live carillon concerts three times a day during term. It is the campus landmark and the thing students set their watches by.
The Free Speech Movement
The 1964 protests that began on Sproul Plaza made student political organising part of Berkeley's identity, and Sproul is still where campaigning, tabling and argument happen every weekday.
Golden Bear rituals
Cal's teams have been the Golden Bears since 1895, and the Cal Band's pre-game march down to Memorial Stadium — built directly over the Hayward Fault — is the ritual that fills the hill above campus.
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Berkeley
San Francisco
About 30 minutes on BARTMuseums, live music, the coast and an international airport, reachable without a car from a station a few blocks from campus.
Point Reyes and the Marin coast
About 1.5 hoursCliffs, beaches and hiking on the far side of the Golden Gate — the standard escape when the semester gets heavy.
Napa and Sonoma
About 1 hourWine country, and the nearest genuinely rural landscape for anyone who wants a day away from the city grid.
Lake Tahoe
About 3.5 hoursSkiing in winter and alpine lakes in summer. Far enough to be a planned trip rather than a Saturday.
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Oakland International (OAK)
About 25 minutes from campus
For international flights: San Francisco International (SFO) — about 45 minutes.
Pro sports nearby
- Golden State Warriors NBA
- San Francisco Giants MLB
- San Francisco 49ers NFL
- San Jose Sharks NHL
Career Proximity
Berkeley sits inside one of the densest technical job markets in the world: San Francisco is half an hour away by train, Silicon Valley about an hour by car, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is on the hill directly above campus.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Apple
- Genentech
- Salesforce
San Francisco — about 30 minutes by BART, no car required
Who Thrives Here
Berkeley admits 11.4% and does not look at SAT or ACT scores at all, so the transcript is the case, and 39.8% of enrolled first-years arrived with a straight-A record. In state that buys a $18,464 sticker at a university whose largest major is computer science at 18.7% of degrees, with engineering another 10.3% and social sciences 16.4%. Out of state it is $57,734, and aid covers 88.4% of need rather than all of it. The outcomes are why families accept the odds — 97% return for a second year, 81.3% finish in four years and 93.7% within six — and classes are smaller than the enrollment suggests, with 50.9% of sections under 20 students. Two things to be honest about before the deposit. Housing is the first: 30% of undergraduates live in university housing and everyone else competes in one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. The waitlist is the second: 6,479 students accepted a place on it for Fall 2025 and Berkeley admitted none of them. Greek life is small here — 2.6% of men and 6.1% of women — so the social centre of gravity sits with research groups, student politics and a city that has been arguing with itself since the Free Speech Movement.