<p>Trying to determine what is actually “better” is an exercise in futility. The very highest ranked colleges (top 15 to 20) in USNews are usually private but to a certain extent the process is stacked in their favor – for example, if USNews considered cost of tuition as a factor, a number of public universities would move into the top ten but USNews based its model for evaluation on Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, i.e., it came up with the factors it considers by examining the favorable points of those three private colleges and in the process of doing so decided to reject cost of tuition as a factor to consider because neither of those three had low costs of tuition. Even so, many public universities are in the top 20 to 50. </p>
<p>Many public universities are huge and essentially little cities within themselves (student populations can be in the 25,000 to 50,000 range). They tend to have many lower level courses with large numbers (often hundreds) of students in the class. They are heavily attended by residents of the state in which they sit, often making up 85% or more of all students at the campus.</p>