Almost all the famous universities in California are located in the coastal areas (San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles), and most of them are inland colleges. Famous universities include private Stanford University, California Institute of Technology and public University of California at Berkeley. Among them, the University of California, as a public university system, has several campuses, established in 1868, with the oldest campus in Berkeley and other campuses in six cities including San Francisco and Los Angeles. The University of California at Berkeley has the best equipment and the strongest faculty. California State University is called California State University, which has 20 branches and more than 200 public and private colleges. The University of California (UC) is a university system with ten campuses in California, USA, and is one of the most influential public university systems in the world, and is known as "the model of public higher education".

The campuses include UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, UC Irvine, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and UC Riverside. As the largest university alliance in the world, the University of California has no so-called "main campus", and its ten public universities are all parallel campuses, ranking among the best in various academic indicators and university rankings. The "branch school" in the school name belongs to the Chinese-English translation difference.