Colleges Near The Bay Area

Despite being one of the most famous regions in the country, the Bay Area's four-year college landscape is smaller than its reputation might suggest and lopsided toward two outliers: Stanford (4% admit) and UC Berkeley (11%) are both genuinely world-selective, and almost everything else here -- Santa Clara University, the University of San Francisco, San Jose State, San Francisco State -- admits the large majority of applicants. This page combines the San Francisco-Oakland and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas into one, since they function as a single college-search radius for most students despite being two separate federal metro definitions.