UC Santa Barbara ranks as the third-best University of California campus in the nation, according to an annual U.S. News & World Report ranking released Sept.12.

Courtesy of ucsb.edu

Courtesy of ucsb.edu

The university received this ranking on U.S. News’s list of Top public Schools, which placed UCSB at eighth overall in the nation. UC Berkeley was designated as the top public university in the nation, and UCLA tied for second-best with the University of Virginia.

Other UC campuses were just below UCSB: UC Irvine ranked at ninth-best public university in the nation, and UC Davis and UC San Diego tied for 10th.

U.S. News also named UCSB the 37th-best among all national universities in a list that includes private schools alongside public schools.

Additionally, UCSB’s individual programs received high rankings amongst all national universities.

UCSB tied for 32nd-best undergraduate engineering program in the nation alongside North Carolina State University-Raleigh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Colorado-Boulder and University of Virginia.

The university also has the ninth-best materials engineering program in the U.S., according to the college ranking site.

Rankings by U.S. News take into account numerous factors: graduation and retention rates, surveys given by university administrators and high school counselors, class size, faculty pay and admissions test scores (A.C.T. and S.A.T.), among other considerations.

The magazine applied the most weight to graduation rates, retention rates and assessment scores in its ranking process. U.S. News reports UCSB has an 86 percent six-year graduation rate and a 92 percent average freshman retention rate. High school counselors scored UCSB at 3.9 out of 5, on average.

The university has a student-faculty ratio of 18 to 1, and the acceptance rate was 33 percent last fall.

A version of this story appeared on p.1 of the Thursday, September 22, 2016, print edition of the Daily Nexus.

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