<p>So much nonsense on here--</p>
<p>USNW has a column in their ranking entitled "selectivity ranking"--look at the magazine, please. This is the ranking I used and listed above. It ranks the schools entirely by how hard they are to get into. Also, Princeton Review has exactly the same thing--it has a "selectivity score"--as well as academic scores and financial aid scores. The scores I used (and listed above) are the selectivity scores as published in this book. These ranking are used for one purpose only--to indicate how difficult it is to get into a school.</p>
<p>For example, Harvey Mudd only ranks 18th on the overall liberal arts colleges--but it is ranked #1 in the selectivity rank--meaning it is the hardest school to get into of all the liberal arts colleges. </p>
<p>But, yes the schools you mentioned are also weaker--even though they are ranked higher on the overall list. For example UC Berkeley ranks 21, while Northwestern ranks 12th--but the peer ranking and academic ratings are much, much higher for Berkeley than Northwestern. </p>
<p>Look at a few statistics and then tell me that the UC top schools are so much "weaker" than John Hopkins or Northwestern.</p>
<p>To save space, I will only post the stats on UC Berkeley.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.berkeley.edu/about/honors/%5B/url%5D">http://www.berkeley.edu/about/honors/</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.berkeley.edu/about/honors/grad/%5B/url%5D">http://www.berkeley.edu/about/honors/grad/</a></p>
<p>UC Berkeley has 97% of its academic departments ranked as being in the top 10 in the country. This puts it #1 among all universities and colleges in the country according to the National Research Council (an independent group).</p>
<p>Additionally, they have 6 nobel laureates and 389 guggenheim fellows among the faculty at UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>Also--as I previously pointed out the average unweighted GPA of students at UC Berkeley is 3.84. Compare this to Princeton's average UW GPA of 3.83 </p>
<p>Note that unlike most other states (New York is the exception), California has two different public college systems. Out of the total 33 campuses (10 University of California campuses and the 23 California State College campuses), UC Berkeley and UCLA are the cream of the crop. Yet of all these 33 schools, 6 of the UC campuses rank within the top 50 national universities in the country per USNW. And this is all the more amazing when you you consider that the private universities on this list have a major advantage over the publics on this list since the ranking takes into account things like "academic contribution rates" which are always greater at private colleges than public colleges.</p>