A Top Ten — Again

In its 2021 listing of the “Top Public Schools,” U.S. News & World Report has ranked UC Santa Barbara No. 6.

Among “Best National Universities,” which includes both public and private institutions, UC Santa Barbara placed No. 30.

UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering is ranked No. 22 among public universities on the U.S. News & World Report list of “Best Programs at Engineering Schools Whose Highest Degree is a Doctorate.”

In addition, UC Santa Barbara is ranked No. 5 among public universities — and No. 21 overall — on the magazine’s list of “Best Colleges for Veterans.” Among public universities, UC Santa Barbara placed No. 10 on the “Best Ethnic Diversity” ranking, and on the list of Top Performers on Social Mobility, the campus ranked No. 9. Social mobility measures how well schools graduated students who received federal Pell Grants (those typically coming from households whose family incomes are less than $50,000 annually, though most Pell Grant money goes to students with a total family income below $20,000).

Within the University of California system, only UCLA and UC Berkeley ranked above UC Santa Barbara on U.S. News & World Report’s list of top public schools.

The magazine has released its annual college rankings online at usnews.com/colleges. The “Best Colleges 2021” guidebook goes on sale today.

To rank colleges and universities for the Best Colleges 2021 guidebook, U.S. News & World Report assigned institutions to categories developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. UC Santa Barbara’s category of national universities includes only institutions that emphasize faculty research and offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus master’s degrees and doctoral programs.

UC Santa Barbara, which this year experienced a highly competitive admissions process, continues to attract the best of the best. Among prospective freshmen and undergraduate transfer students, academic qualifications and diversity remain exceptionally high. For the 2020-21 academic year, the average high school grade-point average of applicants admitted is 4.31. “Students admitted demonstrated intellectual vitality, community involvement and inspiring achievements,” said Admissions Director Lisa Przekop. We look forward to the positive impacts they will contribute to our student community.”

With 10 national centers and institutes, and more than 100 research units, UC Santa Barbara offers unparalleled learning opportunities for undergraduate students. The world-class faculty includes six Nobel laureates, two Academy and Emmy Award winners, and recipients of the Millennium Technology Prize, National Medal of Technology and Innovation and Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

UC Santa Barbara has performed exceptionally well in other national rankings. The campus placed No. 10 among public universities on Washington Monthly’s 2020 National University rankings, and landed among the top public universities on Money magazine’s 2020 list of The Best Public Colleges in America.

The rankings in the Best Colleges 2021 guidebook are based on data U.S. News & World Report collects directly from colleges and universities, as well as from other sources. Additional data was obtained from the American Association of University Professors, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Council for Aid to Education and the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. The magazine evaluates and analyzes data on various indicators of academic quality and assigns a weight to each factor based on its relative importance. It then tabulates composite scores and ranks institutions against others in the same peer group.

Complete U.S. News & World Report rankings are available at https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges.