See where University of California grads work

The University of California is often a debt-free degree powerhouse that sends many of its students to top California employers such as Apple, Disney and Google, new data unveiled by the public system show.

At the UC, nearly two-thirds of alumni graduate without any debt, likely a major sweetener for students considering a bachelor’s at a time when affording a degree becomes harder. Republicans in Washington, D.C. approved legislation in July that’ll increase student loan payments for millions of borrowers and threatened to cut financial aid.

Half of alumni with a bachelor’s earn more than $79,000 within six years of graduating from a UC, other data show.

“Within just four years of graduation, the majority of Pell recipients earn more than their families,” said Katherine Newman, the UC provost, the top position for academic issues at the system, during a hearing of the UC Regents governing board on Wednesday.

So that the UC could better develop its academic programs to prepare students for the changing workforce, the UC developed a new data tool with labor market research firm Lightcast to show where tens of thousands of alumni work in California and the skills those employers seek. 

“We started developing this capacity and debuting it to our deans, who have found it incredibly helpful in thinking about what they should be doing to provide new possible programs or tweaking the ones that we have already,” Newman said in an interview.

The new dashboard also underscores the post-graduate benefits the UC provides its students as UC leaders combat massive financial threats to the university system’s bottom line. The system has sued the Trump administration several times in an attempt to prevent deep cuts to federal dollars that fund billions of dollars in health and science research at the UC. The system is also entering the new fiscal year with about $400 million less in state money than lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom promised in past years due to California’s projected multi-billion-dollar deficit..

“This is also something that our Legislature may be interested in, because it pretty profoundly indicates exactly what the University of California is contributing to the prosperity of the state,” Newman told regents.

Data includes employers and alumni degrees

Looking at the new alumni workforce data between 2019 and 2023, the top employer destinations were:

• The University of California, with nearly 45,000 jobs 
• Google, with 17,000 jobs
• Amazon, with 16,000 jobs
• Kaiser Permanente, with 13,500 jobs
• UC Davis Health, with nearly 12,000 jobs
• Meta and Apple accounted for around 9,000 jobs each

The positions reflect the economic diversity of the California workforce and include software engineers (56,000) and company founders (13,000) as well as teachers, interns, lawyers, doctors and other professions.

The data also allow the public to see that top companies select employees who finished the UC with a range of academic degrees. For example, of Google’s 17,000 positions for graduates from a UC, about 400 studied psychology, 350 studied political science and 200 studied English. The top academic disciplines at Google were computer science and engineering, at more than 5,000.

Student regent Miguel Craven said at the meeting, “I’m definitely going to send it to all my friends, because it’s a great resource.” Craven graduated from UC Merced this year with a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and is starting a master’s program at UC Davis this fall. If he were entering the workforce now, he said this is the tool he’d use to look for possible employers.

Newman added that the tool can inform new students about the different academic concentrations that are appealing to large employers.

“We have well-founded impressions of where opportunity lies in the labor market, but because it’s moving so quickly, they can become out of date.” Newman said in an interview.

As an example, she pointed to 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of New York data that shows the unemployment rate of recent bachelor’s degree earners. Recent philosophy majors have half the unemployment rate of computer science majors — 3% compared to 6%, respectively. “I don’t think most people in my world know that,” Newman said.

Alumni information can help current students

The new dashboard helps to inform students about the skills employers want. The tool uses data scraped from the web about the job expectations employers are placing in job ads and matches those with the skills students are graduating with, and showing where there are matches between the two. Communication, research, writing and leadership are the top California skills employers want — all aspects of a traditional liberal arts education that universities like the UC provide.

The new alumni employer data has limits. It relies on information Lightcast scraped from public websites such as LinkedIn rather than state employment data. As a result, the data tool captures roughly 40% of all alumni in that time range. And some of the employment-placement numbers may include the same person who had multiple jobs at a company. Still, it’s the most extensive information yet of its kind. 

While the California Employment Development Department has information on about 50% to 70% of UC alumni, that’s limited to wages and general job sectors, not actual companies. Self-employed and out-of-state students aren’t in the employment development data.

The new tool’s interactive tables allow the public to sort by UC campus, the graduation year, degree type and other combinations to inform current and future students about their possible career prospects.

How much does this tool cost the UC? Unclear. The UC Office of the President wouldn’t answer the question directly. Instead, spokesperson Omar Rodriguez noted that Lightcast is used by other campuses across the country, including community colleges and the California State University campuses. “UC is currently negotiating with the company for a longer-term agreement,” Rodriguez added.