Verified Federal Data · No Paid Rankings
Best Colleges in California
Top California colleges ranked by what actually matters after graduation: earnings, completion rates, and what you actually pay. Federal data. No surveys, no sponsorships.
How We Rank California Colleges
Rankings use a composite score from verified federal data: graduate earnings (28%), graduation rate (25%), social mobility via Pell Grant share (20%), debt burden (15%), and net cost for low-income students (12%). Where a school has not reported one of these, that component is dropped and the remaining weights are rescaled rather than filled in with an estimate. Only 4-year non-profit schools with sufficient data qualify.
- →Earnings: Median annual earnings 10 years after enrollment. Source: College Scorecard.
- →Graduation rate: Full-time first-time students completing within 150% of normal time. Source: IPEDS.
- →Net price: Average annual cost after all grants and scholarships. Source: IPEDS.
- →Social mobility: Share of students receiving Pell Grants — a direct measure of access for low-income students. Source: IPEDS.
- →Debt burden: Median federal loan debt at graduation. Source: College Scorecard.
Top 10 Colleges in California (2026)
Ranked by composite: earnings, graduation rate, social mobility, debt, affordability.
| # | School | Earnings (10yr) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Stanford University Stanford, CA | $124,080 |
| 2 |  California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA | $128,566 |
| 3 |  University of California-Berkeley Berkeley, CA | $92,446 |
| 4 | Homestead Schools Torrance, CA | $59,398 |
| 5 |  Claremont McKenna College Claremont, CA | $104,736 |
| 6 |  University of California-Irvine Irvine, CA | $80,735 |
| 7 |  University of California-Davis Davis, CA | $80,838 |
| 8 |  University of California-Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA | $82,511 |
| 9 |  University of California-San Diego La Jolla, CA | $84,943 |
| 10 |  University of California-Merced Merced, CA | $64,368 |
112 California schools in dataset. Top 10 shown. Data: IPEDS + College Scorecard. Updated annually.
All 112 Colleges in the Dataset
The ranking above shows the top 10 by composite score. Every school in the full dataset is listed here so you can explore beyond the top results.
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