I turned down Harvard, Princeton and Stanford for Berkeley's Physics programme

eudean
Sat, 24 Jun 2006 22:30:04 +0000

You’re right, there would be a lack of specificity. But really, the ratings are based on these arbitrary metrics anyway, weighted at arbitrary values. If MIT alumni contribute $100,000 more per year to MIT than Cal alumni do to Berkeley, does that really mean they are better than Cal? Arguable. The granularity of the rankings should be broadened, in my opinion, because such specifics don’t really mean that much in terms of college quality. We can both agree that they are good colleges, on the same level. To say that one is definitely one rank higher or lower than the other is deceitful, since people associate rankings with general quality, while they really just measure some things that somebody thought would be worth measuring.