<p>Since you live in “Chinatown, SF” and you’re heading to CalTech, I take it you’re Chinese?</p>
<p>Consult the Shanghai Jiaotong Ranking of World Universities. Hopefully, that will help you feel better about yourself.</p>
<p>^Actually no. I’m Indian and I live with a Chinese step mom in Chinatown…Not so sure what that has to do with this thread.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Villanova does not belong at this level.<br>
.</p>
<p>Northwestern is on par with Duke/Chicago and the non-HYP Ivies. Cal doesn’t belong in this elite group. The world doesn’t revolve around the Ivy League folks.</p>
<p>
That’s exactly right. Considering the entire university, Cal is the only one that crosses into HYPSM realm (according to academic minds). ;)</p>
<p>ha!..</p>
<p>UCBChemE nails the Dookie again</p>
<p>Duke: #6 (8.61%)
UCB: #41 (1.90%)</p>
<p><a href=“WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights”>WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights;
<p>Considering Williams is an LAC, they should really change the acronym to HYPSD.;)</p>
<p>^ Uh huh…a ranking with some sleight of hand stats…and surely UCB is a top destination school for a lot of those “feeders”.</p>
<p>Here’s a simpler one for ya:</p>
<p>"All in all, what would you say is the best college or university in the United States? (open-ended responses)</p>
<p>Best/Second Best %</p>
<p>Harvard University, 24%
Stanford University, 11%
Yale University, 11%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 6%
University of California at Berkeley, 4%
Princeton University, 4%"</p>
<p>'What about post-graduates themselves, who might be expected to know better than others what schools are prestigious, given that they applied to schools at least twice (for undergraduate and graduate work) and most likely spent a good deal of time evaluating schools? Here’s the list of schools most often mentioned by college graduates with at least some post-graduate education:</p>
<p>Harvard, 29%
Stanford, 27%
Yale, 14%
MIT, 11%
Berkeley, 7%
Princeton, 7%
Michigan, 7%"</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> Number One University in Eyes of Public](<a href=“Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public”>Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public)</p>
<p>Sorry: I would put Duke in Group 1 along with Caltech, Berkeley, Northwestern or Cornell. I think Duke is a fantastic school and prestigious for undergraduate education.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Please remember that we’re talking about prestige, and in this kind of topic, Berkeley is a force to be reckoned with after HYPSM. Very few schools in the universe can we honestly say is more prestigious than UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Maybe so, but the scope of what people study at a great university can cover everything under the sun. Mummies, birds, quarks and gluons, syntactic structures, the Peloponnesian War, Jane Austen, kinship realtions … all kinds of weird stuff.</p>
<p>Most of us are almost completely ignorant about almost all of these things, both before and after we go to school. So it is hard to identify a set of opinions that represent what we should “think well of” when it comes to a fraction of them. Instead, we often apply some set of metrics like average SAT scores as if they have the same meaning as measuring the vital signs of a patient. They really don’t.</p>
<p>Here’s a simpler one for ya:</p>
<p>"All in all, what would you say is the best college or university in the United States? (open-ended responses)</p>
<p>Best/Second Best %"</p>
<p>But the “average person” has no basis of knowing what is the best. This is a measure of brand awareness / recognition.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>RML, no, you can’t extrapolate your Berkeley-centric experiences to the country. There are many, many parts of the country in which Berkeley is simply a very good university, but nothing anyone bows down to. Just one of many good universities.</p>
<p>^ Pizzagirl, then how do you explain the similar results to the “post-grad” survey? I think they have a better ideas of knowing what is the best. Perhaps the “average” person is smarter than you think.</p>
<p>"Here’s a simpler one for ya:</p>
<p>"All in all, what would you say is the best college or university in the United States? (open-ended responses)</p>
<p>Best/Second Best %</p>
<p>Harvard University, 24%
Stanford University, 11%
Yale University, 11%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 6%
University of California at Berkeley, 4%
Princeton University, 4%“”</p>
<p>Yeah, sure…your source is perfectly accurate. Btw, why didnt you post the whole list or at least the top 10? Lemme do the favor and show then how accurate your source is.</p>
<p>Harvard 24%
Stanford 11%
Yale 11%
MIT 6%
Notre Dame 4%
Princeton 4%
UC Berkeley 4%
UCLA 3%
UMich 3%
Duke 3%
Ohio State 2%
Texas A&M 2%
UT Austin 2%
Penn State 2%
UPenn 2%
UNC CH 2%
LSU 1%</p>
<p>^ Never claimed it was accurate. I said the survey was simpler. Gallup says this: "For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.</p>
<p>In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls."</p>
<p>
Uh, because posting the whole list did not reinforce the point I was making. :)</p>
<p>Why didn’t you address the post grad survey? Results are quite similar.</p>
<p>
Or the 1999 version instead of the 2003 one, in which UCLA came in ahead of Berkeley. 
</p>
<p>
Goodness, that’s quite a stretch. Who knows what other schools are out there? The universe is a rather large place, and there could well be universities who would laugh at our primitive technology. (I hope not.)</p>
<p>
warblers, people obviously got a lot smarter over those 4 years. ;)</p>
<p>
My point is that we need to know the group of people among whom a school must be “prestigious” before we can answer the OP’s question adequately. If we are talking about prestige for any and all groups, I suppose some hybrid of the NRC Average of All Scores and WSJ feeder ranking might be suitable.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, name me the schools that are considered to be generally more prestigious than UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>and BTW, i would not bow down to any graduate. and no one needs to.</p>