How are you determining expected rankings? USNWR is not a measure of the “best colleges” it’s a weighted average of a long list of criteria, many of which are well correlated with endowment or endowment metrics The sections weighed 5% or greater in the 2021 ranking are:
20% – Survey asking academics to rank colleges on a scale of"distinguished" (5) to “marginal” (1). Berkeley usually does quite well in this section, ranking notably higher than all of the private colleges you listed.
17.5% – 6 Year Graduation Rate … Berkeley’s 6 year graduation rate is on the low side among the group you listed, but not the lowest. Berkeley having a far larger portion of not higher income students and larger student body hurts them.
10% – Financial Resources per Student – This one hurts Berkeley. Their endowment is far lower than any of the private colleges on your list, and they use that smaller endowment to support far more students than the private colleges.
8% – Class Size – This is another one that hurts Berkeley, and is well correlated with financial resources.
7% – Faculty Compensation – Again Berkeley has greater financial limitations than the privates yo u listed.
5% – Average SAT Scores – As I recall, Berkeley’s 25th percentile SAT scores are lower than the privates you listed
Given these weightings, I find it impressive that Berkeley was ranked as high as 22nd. That’s far higher than one would expect based on endowment and CA financial support. UC’s mission of serving students of California differs from the criteria emphasized in the ranking. For example, a simple way to rise in the ranking would be for Berkeley to cut undergrad student body to a similar size as the privates you listed. I expect all of the criteria listed above except for the “distinguished” survey in which Berkeley was already top would shoot up with a smaller student body. However, UCs mission is to serve as many CA students as possible, so cutting class size goes against this mission.
That’s right, this is simply a ranking where money matters a lot. As you said, it’s not a true measure of the “best” colleges. Having worked with people from a lot of these top schools in a STEM field, I’ve been very impressed with Berkeley and Michigan students, among others. I’ve also fired Stanford and MIT grads, and realized quite a few Caltech grads are not as well rounded for management careers. This is all relative of course and major dependent. I’m sure Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Chicago are hard to beat in the classics. But for CS/Eng/Biotech, the line is not that easy to cut. Berkeley is up there with the best of the best.
As always, these are “overall” rankings and no one goes to college for an “overall” degree. They may have university-level bragging rights, but the major-specific rankings mean much more to prospective students (to the extent that ranking mean anything). Berkeley is unsurprisingly at a tie for #2 in Computer Science. MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley have pretty much populated the top 4 slots for decades.
You can run a trend analysis or whatever with your own “data points.”
What I posted was their drop from what I believe were the high points/rankings (at least recently) for ND and USC in the USNWR rankings. That’s my data point. The “data point” of highest USNWR ranking and the drop from there.
I live in the Bay Area and have heard stories. I also took a couple classes at the extension. If college ranking is about college experience with fond memories, I highly doubt Berkeley would be way up there.
It seems there is also an East Coast bias in the US News rankings. Stanford, the UCs and Pomona are always lower ranked than Princeton, Harvard, UVa and Williams across the university and LAC rankings.
The top 20 are all extremely costly private schools. The tuition at these places is mind boggling. You have to be super rich to go to these schools. Except for UCLA, of course. Good luck getting in there if you have ever gotten a single B.
Very high endowment colleges tend to have outstanding FA, making them affordable for typical students who are not “super rich”… often far lower net cost than UCLA for not high income students. This helps boost their ranking for a variety of reasons. For example, the 2nd highest weighed category was graduation rate. If the college is affordable, students are less likely to leave for financial reasons. Some specific numbers from Harvard’s NPC are below, assuming 1 kid in college with typical assets:
$65k Income – $0 cost to parents
$100k Income – $5k cost to parents
$150k Income – $15k cost to parents
There will lots of discussion in this part of the country as Pitt has been ranked higher than Penn State for what looks to be the first time in USNews’ ranking history.
Thanks - that’s precisely what I did. I thought it provided a broader perspective.
Fwiw, they’ve all been in the top 100 for 3 years.
In terms of geographical variation, West Coast schools Stanford and Caltech have ranked first in their category. UVA tends to place amid the UCs. The Midwest’s highest placement appears to have been Carleton, which reached third in its category.
The above noted, it does appear that USN designed its rankings with an awareness of schools’ perceived rankings, so, in this sense, the exercise is biased toward general perception, as well as recursive.
For those who are aware of overall score, Amherst showed a notable increase, and now places closer to the first ranked school, Williams, than to third-ranked Swarthmore.
Still, most students fall in the category of both not qualifying for significant need-based aid, but also not being not super rich. For the vast majority of students, these tuition rates are a significant financial hardship. Especially now.