The University of California, Merced, climbed once again in US News & World Report’s Best Colleges report, rising to the 26th best public school in the nation. Among all universities, UC Merced came in at No. 58 in the 2024-25 rankings released today – continued improvement over last year’s report when it cracked the Top 60 for the first time.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal placed UC Merced in the No.18 position overall and No. 5 among public institutions in its listing of the nation’s best colleges. That report also named the university the No. 1 school in the nation for social mobility, which measures how well schools serve disadvantaged students and sets them up for success. US News slotted UC Merced at No. 3 for social mobility, up one spot from last year.
“Once again, UC Merced is being recognized as a leader in charting its own path – buoyed by a quest for knowledge and innovation that are hallmarks of the UC system as well as its mission of facilitating access and opportunity for historically underserved populations,” said UC Merced Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz.
Now in its 40th year, the US News rankings evaluate nearly 1,500 national colleges and universities on 17 measures of academic quality. UC Merced continues to benefit from the revamped methodology that was implemented last year to better reflect student outcomes. Specifically, more weight has been placed on measurements such as social mobility, graduation rates, manageable debt and post-graduate success.
A particularly strong point for UC Merced is the comparison of graduation rates between the university’s Pell Grant recipients and non-Pell Grant recipients. The closer these two percentages got to being equal, the more a school was rewarded in this report. UC Merced is one of only four universities in the Top 100 that has a Pell-eligible graduate rate higher than that of the non-Pell group.
UC Merced also scored high marks in the “graduation rate performance” category. To calculate this, US News compares its predicted graduation rate for a cohort of students with the actual graduation rate. The predicted rate is based on myriad factors including the percentages of the cohort that is Pell-eligible and in the top 10% of their high schools. The more the actual rate exceeds the predicted rate, the better the score, and UC Merced’s graduation rate surpassed the predicted rate by an eye-opening 26 percentage points.
“A culture of student success has taken root here, and as the first research university built in the 21st century, UC Merced continues to redefine what postsecondary opportunity and excellence looks like,” said Muñoz.
