<p>I think the Atlantic Monthly has a better methodology. They had Harvard in the #5 spot, with Caltech, MIT, Princeton and Yale above it. Princeton Review is also pretty good I think. Their top 20 “best overall undergraduate academic experience” ranking contains all liberal arts colleges, with the exception of Yale (the one university to make the list). Funny, Harvard didn’t make it in that ranking last year, either, even though Yale and Princeton both did.</p>
<p>In my opinion, any of the top 20 LACs are better than Berkeley for educational purposes. And UC-Berkeley has less federal research funding (only $208 million in 2001) than either Yale or Harvard, despite having four times the number of students. So, are there five students crowded around each lab table?</p>
<p>This ranking is not very useful, not to mention not very accurate.</p>