It is because it ranks among the top ten in the world in physics, chemistry, computer science, engineering, economy, law and many other fields, and together with Stanford University in South Bay, San Francisco, it constitutes an academic center in the western United States.

By the end of June 2020, Berkeley alumni, professors and researchers had produced 1 10 Nobel Prize winners (the third in the world), 14 Fields Prize winners (the fourth in the world) and 25 Turing Prize winners (the third in the world). Ernest Lawrence, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, invented the cyclotron here and founded the famous Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in America. Seeburg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and others discovered sixteen chemical elements here, among which the 97th element "Berkelium" was named after "Berkeley".

Berkeley has trained a large number of talents for Silicon Valley, including Intel founder Gordon Moore, Apple founder stephen wozniak and Tesla founder Mark Tapenning.