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i totally agree, any ranking with stanford placed 10 places behind UCL is ***
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ah, so you agree that this ranking is complete bull**** based on relative rankings of universities with which you are familiar.
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but again, among the ppl i know, i noticed only US-bound students contest the rankings (if you look around u're bound to see this trend too)
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So I guess if one is American or US-bound and agrees with you that the rankings are bulls*** one must be wrong because one is American or has a pro-American bias. On the other hand, Europeans that agree with bull**** rankings must be right because they are Europeans.
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and while i agree Berkeley is ranked higher than UCL in repute, i seriously think that Berkeley as a whole is overrated
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Based on the nonsense that is your post, I'd say that there is good reason to seriously disregard what you seriously think. Berkeley outperforms just about every university in American across a wider breadth of disciplines in terms of academic output with the possible exception of Stanford, particularly if one considers UCSF, Berkeley's de facto med school. Its not as strong as some of the top schools in terms of undergrad selectivity, but it's still damn strong. And the OP coming from out of state will do just fine dealing with Berkeley's first-rate faculty.
The reason why several Americans think the ranking is out-and-out bs is because of the relative rankings of several colleges within the US, putting aside their comparison to universities outside the States.
For me, it's this fact as well as awareness of certain institutions internationally. And I am sorry, in terms of academic output you just can't tell me that relatively underfunded universities like McGill compete favorably against universities that spend hundreds of millions on research.
But if one argues that it's not academic output that is the measure being applied here, one must argue academic selectivity of undergrads is a focus. And again, by that measure, the rankings are out of kilter.
So what the hell is behind the ranking? The only apparent rhyme or reason to it is geographical bias: it upgrades non-US universities and especially British ones, downgrades US ones particularly those on the West Coast. No wonder non-US-bound Europeans don't dispute it, since they are excused from standards of what is bs and what isn't.
If you want to point to rankings by non-US or European sources, look at the Shanghai rankings:
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm
1 Harvard
2 Stanford
3 Berkeley
4 Cambridge
5 MIT
6 CalTech
7 Columbia
8 Princeton
9 Chicago
10 Oxford
etc.