Student Life

UCSB Ranked #2 in the Nation Among Public Research Universities

According to a recent book -- The Rise of American Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era by Hugh Davis Graham and Nancy Diamond -- UC Santa Barbara is number two among U.S. public research universities.

The rankings focus on research dollars, publications in prestigious journals, and awards -- as opposed to previous ranking models that relied heavily on subjective evaluations of institutions' reputations.

The study used five criteria which were divided by the total number of faculty: federal research grants, quantity of faculty publications, and the number of articles published in a select group of journals in the sciences, the number of articles in prestigious journals in the social sciences, and the number of awards and fellowships granted in the arts and humanities.

"Santa Barbara . . . represents the hidden success stories of postwar American higher education, screened by larger and older institutions whose greater name recognition is a proxy for higher status," the book said.

Said Chancellor Henry T. Yang, "When one recalls that our first Ph.D. was granted in the early 1960s, we have come a long way in a short period of time."