University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley is consistently ranked among the world’s leading computer science departments, and it does it as a public university rather than a private one. Founded in 1868, it teaches computer science within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, one of the largest and most influential in the field.

A lot of technology in daily use traces back to Berkeley. The Berkeley Software Distribution shaped how Unix spread, the RISC approach to processor design was developed here, and the university has long been strong in databases, systems, security, and more recently artificial intelligence. Much of this work was done in the open and adopted widely, which is part of why Berkeley’s influence runs beyond its own graduates.

For students, Berkeley combines that research depth with the scale and relatively lower cost of a public institution, though admission to computer science is highly competitive.