This is a ranking of the top 20 California universities ranked relative to each other by average world rank for the year 2020-2021. In this ranking “California universities” is defined as being constituted by any university within the U.S. state of California.

The ranking was created by using metadata sourced from the four prominent rankings of world universities (each ranking released in 2020): Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE), and U.S. News & World Report (USNWR).

Rank was checked on each list for every California university ranked on any of the lists. Then for each university all its rank placements were averaged across lists to create the new list of average ranking for each university. The universities were then ranked according to their average ranking. The university with the highest average is thus ranked 1st, the one with the second highest average 2nd, and so on. 

Finally, the results were tabled, and are shown below (Table 1.). The leftmost column shows the final relative placement (relative placement based on average rank, i.e.), the “institution” column shows the institution ranked, the next four rightward columns (ARWU, QS, THE, USNWR) show the rank for each given institution in each of those selected world rankings, and the rightmost column (“Average World Rank”) averages the four ranking lists’ rank placement for each university. 

Some observations —

• The original ranking which best predicts the summed average is USNWR.
• The original ranking which most poorly predicts the summed average is ARWU.
• Both ARWU and USNWR predict the top 10, but in the wrong order.
• The top 9 California universities are all within the top 100 universities in the world; the top 5 are all within the top 20 universities in the world.

If anything appears to be in error, please email me at tuulifunctional@snmcgannon.com.

Ranking of Universities in California, 2020-21

Rank	Institution	ARWU	QS	THE	USNWR	Average World Rank
1	Stanford	2	2	2	3	2.25
2	Caltech	8	4	4	7	5.75
3	Berkeley	5	30	7	4	11.5
4	UCSF	21	(NR)	(NR)	15	18
5	UCLA	13	36	15	13	19.25
6	UC San Diego	18	54	33	21	31.5
7	USC	61	121	53	70	76.25
8	UC Santa Barbara	49	152	68	56	81.25
9	UC Davis	91	112	64	66	83.25
10	UC Irvine	69	210	98	78	113.75
11	UC Santa Cruz	151	416	201	81	212.25
12	UC Riverside	201	449	251	158	264.75
13	UC Merced	401	(NR)	301	693	465
14	Fresno State	(NR)	(NR)	(NR)	494	494
15	San Diego State	401	801	601	614	604.25
16	University of San Diego	(NR)	801	(NR)	(NR)	801
17	Cal State Fullerton	(NR)	(NR)	(NR)	868	868
18	Cal Poly	(NR)	(NR)	(NR)	925	925
19	Cal State Long Beach	(NR)	(NR)	1001	(NR)	1001
20	SF State	(NR)	(NR)	(NR)	1089	1089

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*The header image used in this article (depicting the California flag) is under the Creative Commons license.