<p>
</p>
<p>You said that only Berkeley and Michigan stand out, that is what I was addressing. I did not say that UT was better than Berkeley or Michigan only that it had top programs as well.</p>
<p>I agree with Dbate. The University of Texas has highly ranked programs in virtually every field. It belongs in any discussion of top public universities.</p>
<p>Wisconsin has about as many highly ranked programs as Michigan. It covers many fields Michigan does not.</p>
<p>^^ Yes, Texas does well. This is an aggregate of all 41 NRC rankings compiled by someone at your rival, Texas A&M:</p>
<ol>
<li>Stanford
2. Berkeley</li>
<li>Michigan</li>
<li>Cornell
5. Wisconsin</li>
<li>UCLA</li>
<li>Texas</li>
<li>Columbia
9. Washington/Illinois/Penn</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
</ol>
<p>[NRC</a> Rankings](<a href=“NRC Rankings”>NRC Rankings)</p>
<p>That is a very interesting page. Thanks UCBChemEGrad.</p>
<p>However that was produced by Texas A&M so it may have some flaws ;)</p>
<p>No. It was produced by the National Research Council. The data is just presented on an A&M site.</p>
<p>Ut-Austin is an excellent school. I never said it wasn’t. I just stated that Cal and Michigan stand out at the top of the public school category. To be honest, Cal really stands alone, everyone else is down the pecking order.</p>
<p>I added these up myself a while ago, based on the 1995 NRC rankings. Here’s how I’d stack them up, based on how many top 10 programs a school has (I award 2 points for each program in this category) and how many programs ranked #11-#25 (1 point) in the 41 “core academic areas” listed by NRC:</p>
<p>rank/school/top 10 programs/#11-#25 programs/score</p>
<ol>
<li>Berkeley 35/1 71</li>
<li>Stanford 31/8 70</li>
<li>Harvard 25/4 54</li>
<li>Cornell 19/12 50</li>
<li>(tie) Michigan 14/21 49</li>
<li>(tie) UCLA 15/19 49</li>
<li>Princeton 21/6 48</li>
<li>Wisconsin 14/19 47</li>
<li>(tie) Chicago 16/12 44</li>
<li>(tie) Penn 14/16 44</li>
<li>Yale 18/7 43</li>
<li>MIT 20/2 42</li>
<li>Columbia 13/15 41</li>
<li>Texas 7/21 35</li>
<li>UIUC 10/13 33</li>
<li>Caltech 12/6 30</li>
<li>JHU 8/12 28</li>
<li>Minnesota 5/17 27</li>
<li>Duke 7/12 26</li>
<li>Northwestern 6/11 23</li>
<li>UNC Chapel Hill 3/16 22</li>
<li>Virginia 4/11 19</li>
<li>Brown 2/14 18 </li>
<li>NYU 2/13 17</li>
<li>WUSTL 3/8 14</li>
<li>Purdue 4/4 12</li>
</ol>
<p>Schools like Emory, Vanderbilt, and Georgetown scored 0/0. Notre Dame was 0/3, CMU 1/6, Rice 1/5, Georgia Tech 2/3.</p>
<p>Some caveats. First, I may have missed a few schools as I was generally working off the top national universities in the US News ranking, which obviously does not correlate particularly well with NRC rankings—but these would likely be schools that come out toward the lower end of these rankings. Second, this is old (1995) NRC data. Third, I was doing this late at night and may have missed or mistabulated some departmental rankings. Fourth, you might come out with a different ranking depending on where you draw the cutoffs and how you weight the categories; Princeton and MIT, for example, are arguably underrated in my ranking because they’re effectively punished for not having the full range of programs that a Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, or Wisconsin has, but what they do have is outstanding. (I didn’t deduct points for missing programs, but with a limited number of programs it’s hard to rack up points in my system even if the programs you do have are outstanding). </p>
<p>That said, I think this exercise is pretty revealing. Schools like Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA, Wisconsin, and, yes, Texas and UIUC have outstanding faculties—they’re competitive with the very best private schools in the country, and rather stronger than all but a handful of top privates on this score. Some other schools that rarely get mentioned as academic leaders—Minnesota comes to mind—are clearly deserving of more respect than they typically get. I think these things are generally recognized in academia, but not so much in US News, and rarely on CC.</p>
<p>
Yes, Princeton and MIT do better in this compilation, when you only look at the average of the programs they have:</p>
<ol>
<li>MIT
2. Berkeley</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Caltech</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Cornell
10. UCSD</li>
<li>Columbia
12. Michigan</li>
<li>UCLA</li>
<li>Penn
15. Wisconsin</li>
<li>Texas</li>
<li>Washington</li>
<li>Illinois</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins</li>
</ol>
<p>[NRC</a> Rankings](<a href=“NRC Rankings”>NRC Rankings)</p>
<p>This ranking shows depth of programs…not breadth.</p>
<p>From the above findings I feel that UCLA does deserve its place near the top with Michigan. So can anyone tell me why UVA is so highly ranked as a top public?</p>
<p>^ It’s smaller and more selective than others (partly due to less competition from other nearby flagship publics). So, in USNWR ranking it does well.
I think its PA score is a little high, but perhaps the raters do take undergraduate into account like they are supposed to.</p>
<p>
Heh, maybe I should give the little 'ruins more credit too…;)</p>
<p>^ how old are you? you just seem to spend a lot of time trashing other schools and defending berkeley. i understand the need for an occasional ego boost, but you’re overdoing it, man.</p>
<p>^ I agree…I’ll back off.</p>
<p>UVa’s own internal study will answer that question–they don’t have the same goods as the other top schools.</p>
<p><a href=“http://media.gatewayva.com/cdp/pdf/WAG_Report.pdf[/url]”>http://media.gatewayva.com/cdp/pdf/WAG_Report.pdf</a></p>
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<p>Wow. Way to man up. I never would’ve expected that… ;)</p>
<p>top publics for undergrad:</p>
<p>William & Mary</p>
<p>UVirginia
UMichigan
UCBerkely
UCLA
UNorth Carolina</p>
<p>Ga Tech
Wisconsin
Washington</p>