In case you care about rankings, a couple of new rankings has come out in the last couple of days…
Forbes has UC-Berkeley at #13, and yes, the #1 public school
https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/#5fb50f941987
College World University Rankings has Berkeley at #8 in the world, actually two spots down from last year.
https://cwur.org/2019-2020.php
Forbes list is a bit ridiculous with respect to ranking universities in Chicago & in the Midwest. For example, Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame & Michigan are lumped together at #16, #17, #18 & #20 with Williams College thrown in at #19. Seems like Forbes treats the Midwestern US schools as a problem that needs to be dealt with & just does so as a group.
Appears that Forbes is out of touch with all of the above listed schools.
@ProfessorPlum168 ,
Lists are a reflection of the eye of the list maker, but I always find it interesting to note the differences between lists. And, I enjoy determining if the list maker’s methodology aligns with my (and my child’s) wants from his future university.
It’s interesting to see Wake Forest ranked 27 on US News, 56 on Forbes, 224 (83rd in USA) on CWUR. And it’s interesting to see that a school like U of Chicago which is in the top 10 of many lists is at 220 (82 in USA) on CWUR.
I don’t know how much effort I should allow into trying to determine if the fluctuations matter, if being named at all is the only sign that matters, or if it any of these lists matters at all. But I enjoy thinking about it.
Thanks for the links.
@EconPop since Forbes is about making money, the Forbes list does lean a lot towards things like after-graduation salary and lack of student debt and not necessarily prestige. So personally for a profession like Engineering and CS which typically does not extend beyond undergraduate work, the Forbes list is quite reliable IMO. But I posted this in the Berkeley forum since this is very relevant to Berkeley given the silly events in the past few weeks with the USNews ranking.
@EconPop UChicago is ranked 10th on CWUR. You must be referring to U of Illinois at Chicago at 220th.
And should be at least a tiny bit concerning for Cal.
At this point I’ll gladly take anything above #20 lol.
Not really that interesting because the US News ranking is based on National Universities and does not consider LAC (e.g. Amherst, Williams, etc.) and regional colleges in contrast Forbes includes all colleges in their rankings. Wake Forest at around #50 is probably about right when looked at ALL U.S. colleges.
So which Top 15 colleges above these would you replace? They all look very strong in the rankings including 8 of the ivies, Stanford, Caltech, UCB, Duke, etc. Maybe you can argue UChicago should be top 10 but I don’t see a problem with their #16-20. It’s splitting hairs as to who should be ranked higher.
At the end of the day, it’s just a list and not the end all be all as many make it out to be.
There are 6 that I would replace. But I think that you miss my point.
@Publisher Good thing is rankings are like posts… you can ignore ones you don’t like. Not that different than WSJ or Niche…
WSJ
1 Harvard
2 MIT
3 Yale
4 Columbia
5 Caltech
6 Stanford
7 Brown
7 Duke
9 Princeton
10 Penn
Niche