Points of Pride
We are committed to excellence and opportunity.
- Consistently ranked among the top three engineering programs in the nation, Berkeley Engineering delivers a world-class education at a fraction of the cost of our peer private institutions.
- 5 engineering programs, both undergraduate and graduate, rank in the top 5 nationally, and 6 are No. 1.
- 28% of undergraduates are first-generation college students, and one in four receives a Pell Grant.
- The reported median starting salary for those in the Class of 2025 is $125K, with 94% securing job offers in their senior year or earlier.
Our faculty earn the highest distinction in their fields.
- 75 faculty members (active and emeriti) have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, among the highest professional honors for an American engineer.
- Six faculty members have received the Turing Award, widely considered the “Nobel Prize” of computing, and four have been awarded Presidential National Medals of Science or Technology.
- 113 Berkeley Engineering faculty members, nearly half of all faculty at the college, hold endowed professorships or chairs, a mark of prestige in academia.
- 45 engineering faculty have won UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award over the years, among the most coveted campus recognitions for instructional quality.
We cultivate inventors, entrepreneurs and leaders who change the world.
- Engineering has been a core part of the University of California’s identity since it was founded in 1868, with faculty in mechanic arts, mining and civil engineering among the first to be hired. Our community of innovators helped build California, from its water, transportation and energy infrastructure, to the high‐tech powerhouses in Silicon Valley.
- Our faculty and alumni have led government agencies, national research labs, top research universities and professional associations. They’ve become founders and CEOs of hundreds of companies, from Apple and Google to OpenAI and DoorDash.
- Nearly 700 of our researchers have contributed to over 900 patents managed through UC Berkeley’s tech-licensing office. From these innovations — which span computing, healthcare, infrastructure, sustainability and more — nearly 200 startups were born, about two-thirds the total campuswide.
- Many of our key innovations are in the public domain, enabling wide adoption that fueled the rise of Silicon Valley and formed the backbone of modern computing. They include the SPICE circuit simulator, the BSD Unix operating system, the RISC processor architecture, the FinFET transistor design, the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) and the INGRES and POSTGRES open-source relational database systems.
- Our engineers transformed construction by streamlining the use of prestressed concrete, co-developed the finite element method that is fundamental to engineering analysis across disciplines, helped found the geotechnical earthquake engineering discipline and launched the modern field of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).
- Our faculty founded the Materials Project for the discovery, design and development of next-generation materials. This open platform hosts more than 650,000 registered users.
- We host leading research centers that help shape policies and infrastructure standards that make our communities safer. They include the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) — home to one of the largest multi-directional shake tables in the country — as well as the NHERI SimCenter and the Center for Smart Infrastructure.
- We lead the multi-institution Nuclear Science and Security Consortium, supporting research in nuclear science, national security and nuclear nonproliferation.
