US News’ Best Colleges 2026: Where do Bay Area schools rank?

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this story misstated St. Mary’s College’s ranking on this year’s list. We regret the error.

(KRON) — It’s the start of the school year for most colleges across the country, whether they are on a semester or quarter system. For the start of the new academic year, U.S. News released its annual best colleges list on Tuesday.

From No. 1 to No. 5, U.S. News ranked these universities (in order): Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford (tied for 4th) and Yale (tied for 4th).

Here’s how some of the Bay Area (and Bay Area adjacent) schools ranked on U.S. News’ Best Colleges list:

• Stanford (No. 4)
• UC Berkeley (No. 15)
• UC Davis (No. 32)
• Santa Clara University(No. 59)
• UC Santa Cruz (No. 88)
• University of San Francisco (No. 110)
• San Francisco State University (No. 208)
• California State University, East Bay (No. 257)

UC Berkeley ranked ahead of its Southern California rival, UCLA, which ranked 17th. San Jose State was not included in the top 350 ranking among this “National Universities” list but did rank fourth under “Regional Universities West.” Saint Mary’s College was tied for 7th among Regional Universities West and 13th for Best Value in the region.

Other publications, such as Forbes and Niche, have recently published their lists for the 2025-26 school year.

With differing factors measured, Bay Area institutions’ respective rankings may vary. However, Stanford ranks consistently as a top-five university. UC Berkeley ranked as high as fifth in Forbes’ list but 48th on Niche.

Read U.S. News’ full 2026 best colleges list here.

Methodology

U.S. News weighed in more than a dozen factors to determine its ranking. The methodology differed between schools “with” and “without” SAT/ACT scores. For national universities under the “with” category, here is how the following categories were measured:

• Graduation rates (16%)
• First-year retention rates (5%)
• Graduation rate performance (10%)
• Pell graduation rates (5.5%)
• Pell graduation performance (5.5%)
• College grads earning more than a high school grad (5%)
• Borrower debt (5%)
• Peer assessment (20%)
• Financial resources per student (8%)
• Faculty salaries (6%)
• Full-time faculty (2%)
• Student-faculty ratio (2%)
• Citations per publication (1.25%)
• Field-weighted citation impact (1.25%)
• Publication share in the Top 5% of Journals by CiteScore (1%)
• Publication share in the Top 25% of Journals by CiteScore (0.5%)

Full methodology can be viewed on U.S. News’ website.