<p>I’m reading over this thread and LazyKid’s points are all very valid.</p>
<p>Aside from the ones he made, I’d like to add that international rankings such as THES largely revolve around graduate study and the prominence of the faculty. That’s where foreigners hear most of their news about American schools. They concentrate on questions such as, “how often were professors from this university published in Science or Nature?” Berkeley is a great research institution and there is no denying that. It just doesn’t justify grouping it with the Ivies when we’re looking at Undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Also, I’d like to add that a lot of international perception is often uneducated at best. In Asia, where some posters have boasted, the same people who have never heard of Dartmouth or Brown often mistaken UCLA as a better university than Berkeley. How and why? Because UCLA somehow manages to sell hoodies with the UCLA logo everywhere. I don’t even know why anyone would bother wearing those shoddy hoodies…</p>