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Academic Distinction

October 1, 2025

Following recognition as a Top 25 university by U.S. News & World Report, UC Merced has once again earned national acclaim, this time from the Wall Street Journal. In its 2026 report of the Best Colleges in the U.S., the highly respected media outlet has named UC Merced the 14th best college in...
UC Merced’s upward trajectory shows no signs of slowing as the university has cracked the Top 25 of U.S. News & World Report’s best public schools in the nation. The annual survey...
Mark Arax
UC Merced has debuted a writer-in-residence program with one of California’s premier chroniclers of its history, especially the titanic power plays for land and water that have shaped the state...
UC Merced Ph.D. graduate Fabiola Perez-Lua
A daughter of San Joaquin Valley immigrant farmworkers has earned the opportunity to study alongside a nationally prominent health researcher and energize her mission to improve the well-being of...
UC Merced remains one of the top universities in the nation according to Money’s 2025 “Best Colleges in America” report. The university earned 4.5 stars out of 5 in Money’s...
Photo depicts the blue and gold UCM art installation and professors Chih-Chun Chien, left, and Xiaoyi Lu
A new program led by UC Merced in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory aims to train graduate and undergraduate students to work in the rapidly growing industry of quantum...
Instructor Kristen Hogue works with a class of high school students in New York City.
Recently, more than 150 students at 10 high schools in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. completed Climate Justice, a UC Merced course , through a unique partnership between the...
UC Merced sociology graduate students
Only 10 years after it began, the Ph.D. program in UC Merced’s Department of Sociology made an impressive debut in U.S. News & World Report’s latest rankings of graduate-level...
Group of five female graduates at commencement
UC Merced has earned two 2025 Carnegie distinctions, the Student Access and Earnings Classification “Opportunity Colleges and Universities” and the Institutional Classification by the...
UC Merced political science mock legislative hearing
UC Merced’s School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts made a splash in the latest rankings of university graduate programs compiled by U.S. News and World Report. The university...

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