What colleges are the best for psychology?

Well, nobody ranks undergraduate education. That’s because your undergraduate education is going to be broad and not that deep; you won’t only take psychology classes and you won’t only spend time in psychology departments. Besides, a school that has a great psychology department and a great psychology PhD program doesn’t necessarily have a great undergrad program - there’s probably a correlation, but you can imagine a good graduate department may pay little attention to the undergrads or the professors may be distant and bad at teaching undergrads.

With that said, psychology is my field, so I’m going to rank the departments (I’m a social/health psychologist, so that will color my rankings)

Michigan
UCLA
UCSD
UC-Davis
Michigan State
UC-Riverside
UC-Irvine
UCSC

Michigan and UCLA are very close - both are top 10 programs, so there’s virtually no difference in the quality of their departments. UCSD, UC-Davis, and Michigan State are also very close - top 25 programs in the field, great quality students, good research coming out of the departments. UC-Riverside and UC-Irvine hang out together - I have a colleague at my current postdoc from each of them - and have well-reputed psychology programs that are doing great research. UCSC doesn’t have a top PhD in psychology program, but they do have a special focus on social justice and community engagement and that doesn’t mean that their undergraduate program isn’t awesome.

One omitted UC is Santa Barbara, which has a top 20 psychology department and some famous folks there.

But, I’m going to repeat my caveats: a great graduate program/department doesn’t really mean a great undergrad program, and a low-ranked PhD program doesn’t mean that the undergrad program is not great. The production of research isn’t necessarily relevant to undergrads; even if you want a PhD, you just want to get SOME research. Actually some of the colleges that send the most students to PhD programs are small liberal arts colleges and other undergrad-focused colleges.

It sounds like you might be a junior since you’re asking about chances. I don’t think you should apply to so many OOS public universities unless you are very wealthy and your parents are willing to foot almost the whole bill (if not all of it). Additionally, you are not competitive for most of them (any of them?). Even Michigan and Michigan State are reaches for you. You might consider other Michigan schools. One of my friends went to UM-Dearborn and now has a PhD in psychology and works with me in my center. Eastern, Western, and Central Michigan are also less selective and have the advantage of being a residential campus (Dearborn is commuter).