Type | Public |
---|---|
Established | 1915 |
Dean | Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Executive Dean [1] |
Academic staff | ~750 [2] |
Undergraduates | ~23,601 [3] |
Postgraduates | 2,417 [4] |
Location | , , |
Affiliations | University of California, Berkeley |
Website | ls |
The College of Letters and Science (L&S) is the largest of the 15 colleges at the University of California, Berkeley and encompasses the liberal arts. The college was established in its present state in 1915 with the merger of the College of Letters, the College of Social Science, and the College of Natural Science. As of the 2022-23 academic year, there were about 23,601 undergraduates and 2,417 graduate students enrolled in the college. [4] [3] The College of Letters and Science awards only Bachelor of Arts degrees at the undergraduate level, in contrast to the other schools and colleges of UC Berkeley which award only Bachelor of Science degrees at the undergraduate level.
L&S is organized into five divisions: arts and humanities, biological sciences, mathematical and physical sciences, social sciences, and the undergraduate division. [5] Of the graduate divisions, social sciences is the most popular, followed by mathematical and physical sciences, arts and humanities, and biological science. [4] The undergraduate division serves the 23,000 undergraduate students in L&S. Each division has its own administration, including a dean, associate dean, and assistant deans. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks serves as the college's executive dean. [1] L&S has about 750 faculty members, including 13 Nobel laureates, 3 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 12 MacArthur Fellows. [2]
The majority of undergraduates at the university are enrolled in the College of Letters and Science. Although freshman applicants indicate an area of interest on their applications, all freshmen in L&S enter as undeclared majors. This contrasts with other undergraduate colleges at UC Berkeley, such as the College of Engineering, where applicants indicate their major on the application and enter as declared majors. [6] L&S undergraduates must declare a major before they begin their junior year. [7] "Capped majors" (e.g. Economics, Public Health, Psychology) are impacted and have more stringent declaration policies. [8] All undergraduates in L&S must complete classes in reading & composition, quantitative reasoning, foreign language, and a seven-course breadth requirement. [9]
L&S offers a wide variety of graduate programs, including master's and doctorate programs. Many of these programs are ranked within the top five in their field by U.S. News & World Report. [10] Two programs, Jewish Studies and Near Eastern Religions, are joint programs with the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. One program, Medical Anthropology, is a joint program with UCSF. [11] The L&S graduate division serves 87 master's/first professional students and 2,676 doctoral students as of Fall 2013. [4]
The main disadvantage of the size of L&S is an impersonal undergraduate experience, especially in large lower-division survey courses (before students declare specific majors, begin to work more closely with department advisers and faculty members in their chosen major, and switch to smaller upper-division courses). [12] During the Berkeley student protests in the 1960s, one student reportedly wore a placard which mocked the preprinted warning on the punched cards used in that era to automate class registration and grading for many thousands of students: "I am a UC student. Please do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate me". [13] It is because of L&S's impersonal atmosphere that UC President Clark Kerr experimented with residential college systems at the newer UC campuses at San Diego and Santa Cruz. [14]
The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, the system is composed of its ten campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, along with numerous research centers and academic centers abroad. The system is the state's land-grant university.
The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, it is the state's first land-grant university and is the founding campus of the University of California system.
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the main campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2023, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,812 undergraduate and 1,952 graduate students. Satellite facilities in other Santa Cruz locations include the Coastal Science Campus and the Westside Research Park and the Silicon Valley Center in Santa Clara, along with administrative control of the Lick Observatory near San Jose in the Diablo Range and the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The University of California, Davis is a public land-grant research university in Davis, California, United States. It is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institution was first founded as an agricultural branch of the system in 1905, known as the University Farm, and became the sixth campus of the University of California in 1959.
The University of California, San Diego is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, UC San Diego is the southernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California. It offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, enrolling 33,096 undergraduate and 9,872 graduate students, with the second largest student housing capacity in the nation. The university occupies 2,178 acres (881 ha) near the Pacific coast.
The University of California, Irvine is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California, United States. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and professional degrees, and roughly 30,000 undergraduates and 6,000 graduate students were enrolled at UCI as of Fall 2019. The university is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and had $523.7 million in research and development expenditures in 2021. UCI became a member of the Association of American Universities in 1996.
The University of California, Riverside is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on 1,900 acres (769 ha) in a suburban district of Riverside with a branch campus of 20 acres (8 ha) in Palm Desert. In 1907, the predecessor to UCR was founded as the UC Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside which pioneered research in biological pest control and the use of growth regulators.
The Walter A. Haas School of Business is the business school of the University of California, Berkeley, a public research university in Berkeley, California. It was the first business school at a public university in the United States.
The University of California, Berkeley College of Engineering is the public engineering school of the University of California, Berkeley. Established in 1931, it occupies fourteen buildings on the northeast side of the main campus and also operates the 150-acre (61-hectare) Richmond Field Station. It is also considered highly selective and is consistently ranked among the top engineering schools in both the nation and the world.
The College of Letters and Science is the largest college within the University of California, Davis.
The UCLA School of Education and Information Studies is one of the academic and professional schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. Located in Los Angeles, California, the school combines two departments. Established in 1881, the school is the oldest unit at UCLA, having been founded as a normal school prior to the establishment of the university. It was incorporated into the University of California in 1919.
The Rausser College of Natural Resources (RCNR), or Rausser College, is the oldest college at the University of California, Berkeley and in the University of California system. Established in 1868 as the College of Agriculture under the federal Morrill Land-Grant Acts, CNR is the first state-run agricultural experiment station. The college is home to four internationally top-ranked academic departments: Agriculture and Resource Economics; Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology; and Plant and Microbial Biology, and one interdisciplinary program, Energy and Resources Group. Since February 2020, it is named after former dean and distinguished professor emeritus Gordon Rausser after his landmark $50 million naming gift to the college.
The history of the University of California, Riverside, or UCR, started in 1907 when UCR was the University's Citrus Experiment Station. By the 1950s, the University had established a teaching-focused liberal arts curriculum at the site, in the spirit of a small liberal arts college, but California's rapidly growing population made it necessary for the Riverside campus to become a full-fledged general campus of the UC system, and it was so designated in 1959.
The UCLA College of Letters and Science is the arts and sciences college of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It encompasses the Life and Physical Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Honors Program and other programs for both undergraduate and graduate students. It is often called UCLA College or the College, which is not ambiguous because the College is the only educational unit at UCLA to be currently denominated as a "college." All other educational units at UCLA are currently labeled as schools or institutes.
The University of California, Riverside, is organized into three academic colleges, two professional schools, and two graduate schools. These units provide 81 majors and 52 minors, 48 master's degree programs, and 42 PhD programs. It is the only UC campus to offer undergraduate degrees in Creative Writing and Public Policy, and one of only three UCs to offer an undergraduate degree in Business Administration. Additionally, UCR's doctoral program in the emerging field of Dance theory, founded in 1992, was the first program of its kind in the United States. UCR's various academic units are as follows:
The School of Social Welfare of the University of California, Berkeley, was established June 1, 1944 and is located in Haviland Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Its focus is to prepare graduates to become agents of social change through direct practice, agency management, policymaking, and leading new discoveries that address the grand challenges confronting society. Berkeley Social Welfare offers the Bachelor of Arts in Social Welfare through the College of Letters and Science (L&S), the M.S.W., and the Ph.D. Haviland Hall includes its own library, The Social Research Library, which was founded in 1957 and contains approximately 34,400 volumes and 200 active serial titles. The library originally housed volumes specifically for the social work field and expanded in 2014 to include education, psychology, public policy. The library also maintains an Indigenous Social Work space.
The Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science at the University of California, Berkeley is an optometry school at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers a graduate-level, four-year professional program leading to the Doctor of Optometry degree (OD), and a one-year, ACOE-accredited residency program in clinical optometry specialties. It is also the home department for the multidisciplinary Vision Science Group at UC Berkeley, whose graduate students earn either MS or PhD degrees.
The College of Engineering (CoE) is one of the three undergraduate colleges at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The College offers a mid-sized, interdisciplinary environment where innovation drives the development of both fundamental science and applied technology solutions.
The Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering is an undergraduate and graduate-level engineering school offering BS, BA, MEng, MS, MAS and PhD degrees at the University of California, San Diego in San Diego, California. The Jacobs School of Engineering is the youngest engineering school of the nation's top ten, the largest by enrollment in the University of California system, as well as the largest engineering school on the West Coast and the ninth-largest in the country. More than thirty faculty have been named members of the National Academies. The current dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering is Albert P. Pisano.
The College of Letters and Science is the largest college at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The College, which offers 90 majors and 38 minors to over 20,000 undergraduates and 2,000 graduate students, has about 700 faculty members.