US News Top 25 for 1991-2008

sakky
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:15:00 +0000

^^ yes, and a couple times before that. But generally lately, it’s been in the lower 20s, sometimes as high as 27. US News seems to be even tweaking the formula so that schools like Vanderbilt and Emory are placed higher than it.



The year that Berkeley was ranked #27 was the year that California budget cuts hit Berkeley hard. Frankly, Berkeley *deserved * to have a low ranking that year, as many of those budget cuts were infuriating to the students and made for a poor experience.

Think about having to continuously dial for 3+ hours to get a modem connection from your dorm onto the Internet (back in those days when broadband was not available and students in their dorm rooms got onto the Internet by dialing into the Berkeley dialup server through modems). Berkeley couldn’t reduce the wait-times because it didn’t have enough money to increase IT infrastructure. I remember those days. If you wanted to get onto the Internet, you would command your modem to start dialing, and then go do other things to kill time- i.e. go to the gym, go to dinner, watch some TV, hang out with friends, etc. Sometimes when you came back after doing all that, your computer would still be dialing because it still hadn’t found an open connection. {In fact, this led to students actually leveraging their network to find graduate students who would be willing to give them access to exclusive dial-in servers that their graduate programs ran, as the wait-times for those would be basically zero. So the graduate students had plenty of access to resources, but the undergrads were left to fend for themselves.}

In fact, I remember a guy back in those days who was a Berkeley student talking to his girlfriend. She went to some local no-name private school that was ranked nowhere close to Berkeley. She was telling him how she found some very interesting information on the Internet (probably about some weekend getaway place they were heading to), and how he should dial into the Internet so that they could decide whether they should go. He had to explain to her that at Berkeley it would take hours for him to even get a dialup connection and how it would be far far faster if she just told him over the phone what she read on that website. She was incredulous, as she was used to the notion of getting online in mere seconds, such that she didn’t even know that you could set up a computer’s modem for continuous dial (because she didn’t need to know). I mean, come on. That’s embarrassing. Here is a guy who was going to Berkeley - one of the premier research and technology schools in the world - and yet his girlfriend who goes to a no-name school had far better access to the Internet than he did.

I would actually argue that the #27 ranking was actually a good thing, as it provided that kick in the pants that spurred the Berkeley administration to actually make changes to improve the undergrad student experience. That ranking sparked a LOT of meetings on campus regarding what the school could do better, including several forums where students could submit demands to the administration. That included actually building better IT infrastructure to support the student demand for the Internet. While obviously this is a unprovable counterfactual, I suspect that if Berkeley’s ranking had never fallen to 27, then all those meetings would have never taken place, and consequentially, many of the beneficial changes that were subsequently made would never have occurred.