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.

Admissions

Berkeley admitted 14,502 of 126,843 first-year applicants for autumn 2025, an overall rate of about 11 per cent, but computer science does not behave like the average. The CS major has been direct-admit through the College of Computing, Data Science and Society since 2023, with EECS available separately through the College of Engineering, and students admitted to another Berkeley college must pass a comprehensive review to switch in later. Naming the major on the application therefore matters more here than almost anywhere else. The University of California is test-blind, so grades carry the weight: the middle half of admitted students held weighted GPAs of 4.31 to 4.65.