Rankings

UCLA performs well in all of the national and international rankings of public and private universities, including the most widely known list published by U.S. News & World Report. Below, you’ll find an overview of some of the more significant and well-known national and international rankings.

National Rankings

This year, UCLA joins UC Berkeley as the nation’s No. 1 public university, ranking 20th among all national universities in the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings. The U.S. News & World Report rankings, despite their popularity, tell only part of the story. They place more emphasis on factors that tend to favor private universities, such as endowment size, rate of alumni giving and student-faculty ratios. Nevertheless, they can be a useful tool that focuses largely on factors related to undergraduate education.

Global Rankings

UCLA ranked 9th out of 100 universities in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings. Distinct from the annual World University Rankings, these rankings are derived solely from the opinions of senior, published academics from around the globe.

U.S. News introduced a new global ranking of universities in 2014. The methodology for this ranking is very different from the publication’s U.S. ranking system. It gives much more weight to academic research and reputation, as well as graduate and professional school quality.

More than 1,200 institutions are evaluated in this ranking, which is based heavily on faculty publications and citations, as well as the number of alumni and faculty who have won Nobel Prizes.

UCLA was 15th overall among the top 1,102 universities in the world in the respected Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The rankings rely on performance indicators such as the quality of teaching, research and the international mix of staff and students.

Other Rankings

In 2022 (the most recent ranking), Forbes evaluates colleges and universities based on alumni earnings, net price, net student debt, school quality, timely graduation and the number of Pell Grant recipients.

Forbes revised its methodology in 2018 to put more emphasis on the survey’s three financial factors — earnings, price and debt — and the publication switched to net price (which takes into account the impact of students’ financial aid and the costs of room and board) instead of list price.

In 2019 (the most recent ranking), the center placed UCLA among the nation’s top research universities — both public and private. This ranking focuses on nine key measures of university research performance, including competitively awarded research grants and contracts, faculty membership in the National Academies, faculty awards, the number of doctorates awarded and other factors. UCLA was ranked in the top 25 among all research universities in seven of these measures, including:

  • 7th in the nation in total research expenditures
  • 8th in the nation in faculty awards
  • 14th in the nation in national academy memberships