World Renowned

A new, comprehensive international ranking of universities places UC Santa Barbara among the best institutions in the world. 

The 2022 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) evaluated 2,500 institutions to determine the top 1,000 worldwide. Among U.S. public universities to make the list, UC Santa Barbara is No. 14. The campus ranked No. 32 among all U.S. universities in the ranking, and No. 57 globally among all universities included.

First published 2003, the ARWU evaluates and ranks universities based on indicators including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals; the number of highly cited researchers selected by Clarivate; the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science; the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index in the Web of Science™, and the per capita performance of a university. 

ShanghaiRankings, which produces ARWU, also assesses universities by areas of study. In its 2022 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS), UC Santa Barbara landed in the upper echelon for multiple fields.

The campus ranked No. 5 in the world in the field of communication, and No. 9 worldwide for electrical and computer engineering. The campus ranked No. 13 globally for physics, and No. 20 for automation and control, a subfield of engineering.

National rankings are also included in the GRAS, which comprises 54 subjects in the natural sciences, life sciences, medical sciences and social sciences, as well as engineering.

Compared against other U.S. institutions, UC Santa Barbara had five subjects land top 10 area-specific rankings. The campus ranked fourth in the U.S. in the area of communication, sixth for metallurgical engineering and seventh for electrical and computer engineering, while earning the No. 8 spot for both automation and control and physics.

UCSB also had several subjects earn top 20 rankings: chemical engineering (No. 12), ecology (No. 14), oceanography (No. 17), and chemistry (No. 19).

More than 1,800 out of 5,000 universities across 96 countries and regions are listed in the GRAS 2022. The rankings use a range of academic indicators and third-party data to measure the performance of world universities in relevant subjects, including international academic awards, top academic achievements, research output, research quality and international collaboration. 

The index of international academic awards is based on the Academic Excellence Survey (AES) conducted by ShanghaiRanking. Hailing from 110 institutions and 18 countries/regions, and covering 64 subjects, 1,424 professors from top world universities participated in the survey.