<p>Take a look at their methodology for ranking “areas of expertise”</p>
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<p>Any idiot can tell you how such rankings are greatly influenced by the size of the school. When you have a good gigantic public school, of course they are going to score well in these rankings. In the cutthroat world of academia, I can just imagine how many papers come out of Berkeley a year. However, if you take a look at the more objective “citations per paper” score you’ll see that Duke’s scores are almost always on par or better than those of Berkeley (at least for the three categories to which I have access). That means that Duke has quality scientists that do great research. It’s just not on the scale of Berkeley. </p>
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<p>UCSD is better based on what exactly? Saying that they are public schools mean nothing. Plenty of public schools are highly ranked, Berkeley for instance, Michigan, UWash, UTAustin. Being a public school isn’t an automatic handicap. </p>
<p>Also I would not say Berkeley is better than Duke in every aspect. Berkeley doesn’t have a med school, UCSD’s med is definitely not better than Duke. The only med school on par or better than Duke in Cali is UCSF.</p>