For the ninth consecutive year, UC Santa Barbara has placed in the Top 10 for national public universities ranked by U.S. News & World Report. The magazine’s 2022-2023 Best Colleges listing of Top Public Schools placed the campus at No. 7.

Among all Best National Universities, which includes both public and private institutions, UC Santa Barbara placed No. 32. 

The UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering ranked No. 19 among public universities and No. 33 overall for Best Undergraduate Programs at Engineering Schools Whose Highest Degree is a Doctorate. The college ranked No. 11 among public universities and No. 18 overall in the Best Undergraduate Chemical Engineering Programs rankings, and No. 6 among undergraduate materials programs and tenth among both public and private institutions. UCSB came in at No. 15 among electrical and computer engineering programs at public universities and No. 25 among both public and private institutions, climbing by at least four spots in each category compared to a year ago. The Computer Science Program climbed four spots to No. 14 among public universities and seven slots to No. 29 among all institutions compared to last year's undergraduate rankings. 

Among all national universities ranked as Best Colleges for Veterans, the campus is No. 14. In addition, UC Santa Barbara ranked No. 15 among all national universities for Social Mobility, which measures how successfully schools enroll and graduate students who receive federal Pell Grants. These students typically come from households with family incomes less than $50,000 annually, with most Pell Grant money going to students with a total family income below $20,000.

The magazine’s complete rankings for 2022-2023 are now online.

UCSB continues to earn high marks in other national, and even international, university rankings. Forbes’s annual list of America’s Top Colleges has UC Santa Barbara at No. 13 among public universities and at No. 39 overall. The 2022 Academic Ranking of World Universities, which evaluated 2,500 institutions to determine the top 1,000 worldwide, rated UC Santa Barbara No. 14 among U.S. public universities to make the list, No. 32 among all U.S. universities in the ranking, and No. 57 globally among all universities included.

To rank colleges and universities included in its Best Colleges lists, U.S. News & World Report assigned institutions to categories developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. UCSB’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.

The rankings 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.

The U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges 2023 Guidebook starts shipping in October.