Each year, more than 60,000 people earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of California. Now, new data released by California’s flagship university system shows which companies have been hiring graduates of the UC system, and for what jobs.
The UC system itself is a major employer of graduates, according to the data, which accounts for a fraction of alumni who have graduated since 2000.
The UC system is the largest public research university system in the country, with 10 campuses, five medical centers and other facilities. The data represents “roughly 35 percent of all UC alumni graduating in the past 25 years,” from 2000 through 2024, whose employment data could be found and scraped from public self-reported sources, like LinkedIn.
The data on employment was provided by Lightcast, a company that specializes in collecting and analyzing data on the labor market. The employment data “should be interpreted as illustrative examples of UC alumni employment rather than a comprehensive account of it,” according to the dashboard released by UC.
The number of employees includes duplicates, as it is a count of “employment occurrences” and one alumnus could be counted more than once if they held different positions at the same company, or the same position at different companies.
Still, the data provides some insight as to where graduates are getting jobs, and what jobs they are getting.
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Outside of the university system, who is the biggest employer of Bruins, Golden Bears, Tritons, Aggies, Anteaters, Highlanders, Gauchos, Banana Slugs and Golden Bobcats? Google tops the list, with a slight upper hand over Amazon. Health care giant Kaiser Permanente comes in third, with over 50,000 employment occurrences combined between the three of them.
The University of California, its campuses and institutions account for four of the top 10 employers, according to the data. Meta, Apple and biotechnology giant Genentech round out the list.
Overall, the most common job title for those included in the analysis was software engineer, with 56,000 jobs counted, followed by associate, research associate, and research assistant, with between 14,000 and 20,000 each. Law clerks, project managers and founders were next on the list, each with 13,000 to 14,000 jobs among the cohort.
But many of the job titles are highly industry-specific, with academic positions within the UC system accounting for a large portion. Outside of public and private institutions of higher learning, this chart also shows the 50 most common job titles for UC alumni at each of the top 15 employers. To explore the data, you can sort by number of employees, or employer, and search by job title.
Software engineers were by far the most common positions for UC graduates at tech companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft, as well as aerospace manufacturer Northrop Grumman. In the health care industry, at Kaiser Permanente, the most common job titles for alumni were pharmacists, nurses and project managers. Genentech has hired hundreds of technicians, scientists and researchers who graduated from UC programs.
