Top Ten most Prestigious Public Universities

College Search & Selection
401

<p>Hawkette, if anything the departmental comparisons are the most important.</p>

<p>If you are doing foreign language you would want the strongest foreign language department possible.</p>

<p>I think it isn’t so much common knowledge how strong Berkeley’s departments are, because I had no idea that it had a remotely good EECS department until I was accepted, and I live somewhat close.</p>

<p>Knowing now how strong it is has definitely influenced my feeling about the school. Just like the strength of the departments of whatever humanities majors you’re interested in shape your view of the school. So, at least on a personal level I think departmental comparisons are the way to go.</p>

<p>Personally the only public school I would go to is UC Berkeley, so I wouldn’t rank the other ones. I know people who’ve gone to William and Mary and the Naval Academy, but I couldn’t rank them in terms of EECS so I wouldn’t be able to create a top 10 list.</p>

402

<p>ramblin,
Again, it’s how you define “good.” Is it good for the institution (ie, research success) or is it good for the student (classroom teaching excellence and maybe even individual mentorship)? I care about the latter; I think that the former is for the prestige seekers. I’m not saying that research is unimportant, but if I’m an average undergrad, it’s not likely to benefit me. Certainly no where near as much as a close relationship with a professor and definitely no where near as much as I’ll get from my fellow students while in school and in the decades that follow.</p>

403

<p>

Only if you are dead sure you won’t change your major. Most students start out undecided or change their majors after the first year. With schools with strong programs across the board, they are assured of landing in a top 10 program regardless of how they decide. Personally, I changed my major three time and ended up in Chem Engineering in the 2nd semester of my sophomore year. I would have missed my calling had I enrolled in schools with no/weak engineering programs like W&M or UNC.</p>

<p>

That might be true for underachieving students. Undergraduate research are very common nowadays and not only in engineering or sciences. Many students are taking graduate courses and doing independent studies. Schools like UCB and Michigan have more accomplished faculty and better resources (that’s why they have higher ranked departments), hence more opportunities for aspiring undergraduate students.</p>

404

<p>Berkeley
UCLA
Cornell (remember it has at least 3 schools that are public)
U Virginia
U Michigan
U North Carolina
U Wisconsin
Purdue
Georgia Tech
University of Texas</p>

405

<p>hawkette,</p>

<p>

This list includes a lot of your pets and some of your vices. :)</p>

406

<p>goblue,
IMO,your argument is the great fallacy of CC. “Good” or “great” departments is about how the faculty members are viewed in the industry and are based on the research/publication success of the faculty. They’re not about the student. </p>

<p>Help me out for a second. If I’m an employer, how can I distinguish between the student who attended the school with the top department and the school with the # 30 department? In most cases, I can’t, at least not based on who the profs were that the student was exposed to. I can definitely tell you the differences in the students based on their intellectual strength and the level of preparedness that they bring to the interview. Sometimes the prof can influence this by doing an excellent job of preparing the student, but rarely is that skill recognized in the academic biz or in department rankings. </p>

<p>That’s why schools like Wake Forest or William & Mary are so underrated as they mostly have kids of moderately above average talent, but their profs demand a lot of them and they develop them into excellent potential hires. Compare this to many of the high academic prestige schools and the level of individual development that goes on there. It’s far too often a world of difference. The student may sometimes be of similar or even higher talent than the Wake/W&M student, but that’s almost always due to the inherent abilities of the student and not to the fact that his college was involved in some whiz-bang research.</p>

407

<p>ucb,
Now we’re getting somewhere. </p>

<p>This is another data point. Some may like it, some may loathe it. But I would argue that it has at least as much validity as the PA scores (and probably a lot more relevance to the average undergrad). </p>

<p>While we’re on the topic of excellence in the classroom, I particularly like to include the opinions of the students. Consider the following from College P…r…ow…ler which gave the following grades for Academics (defined as professors that are knowledgable, accessible and geniunely interested in their students’ welfare. Other determining facors include class size, how well professors communicate, and whether or not classes are engaging.)</p>

<p>GRADE OF A+</p>

<p>No Public Universities</p>

<p>GRADE OF A</p>

<p>No Public Universities</p>

<p>GRADE OF A-</p>

<p>U Virginia
UC Berkeley
UCLA
W&M</p>

<p>GRADE OF B+</p>

<p>Purdue
U Illinois
U Maryland
U Michigan
U North Carolina
U Pittsburgh
U Texas
UC San Diego
UC Santa Barbara
Virginia Tech</p>

<p>GRADE OF B</p>

<p>Indiana U
Ohio State
Penn State
Rutgers
U Connecticut
U Delaware
U Florida
U Georgia
U Iowa
U Minnesota
U Washington
U Wisconsin
UC Davis
UC Irvine
UC Riverside
UC Santa Cruz</p>

<p>GRADE OF B-</p>

<p>Clemson
Michigan State
Texas A&M
others</p>

408

<p>

You don’t think employers know the difference between a #1 ranked department and a #30 ranked department? Why then would all the top engineering employers recruit at schools like UCB and Michigan but not necessarily at schools like UVa? Why would Microsoft hire the most engineers from UIUC?</p>

<p>Besides, schools with more accomplished faculty have more successful (PhD) graduates and stronger industrial connections. You can get more opportunities for a job referral through associated with your research project or through your professor.</p>

409

<p>

You’re kidding, right? The credibility of your otherwise elegant assertions re UCB have diminished a little for me.
UCB doesn’t even HAVE an accredited undergraduate BMUS degree, just a BA in “music”. Michigan SOM is a leading conservatory that ranks overall in the top 5-10 range depending on department/instrument UG and further, in terms of graduate studies, ranks in the top three for things such as composition. (Eg. USN 1999: Overall, 4th; Conducting, 1st; Composition, 2nd, Piano, Orchestra, 4th; Opera/Voice, 5th; Jazz, 7th…NRC1995 Overall 9th)</p>

<p>Perhaps this is not common knowledge among non-musicians, since the USNews et al now eschews ranking performing arts schools (in 1999) and the “USNEWS phemon” seems to lead to some of these closely held assumptions about prestige.
The foregoing is not to diminish UCB’s very excellent ACADEMIC-BASED music history/ethno-musicology GRAD degrees, which are well-regarded. But it is ridiculous to suggest that a school with a nationally and internationally well-regarded School of Music could possibly be “blown away” by a liberal arts department that cannot even confer a specific music degree such as “piano.” Pedagogically speaking, that’s like comparing a 2-year community college instrumentation engineering certificate with an engineering degree from UMich, UIll, etc. Just not comparable in scope.</p>

410

<p>“Personally the only public school I would go to is UC Berkeley, so I wouldn’t rank the other ones.”</p>

<p>Then you would be very foolish. Many of the top ranked graduate departments are in public schools. Once again too many here on CC forget that we’re talking about universities here in TOTAL and not just based on undergraduate perceptions.</p>

411

<p>goblue,
I’m not an expert on engineering recruiting, but my sense is that the recruiting opportunities don’t differ that dramatically for the schools you mention (UCB, U Michigan, U Virginia) once you account for institution size and location and function. </p>

<p>U Michigan has 26,000+ undergrads and UC Berkeley has 25,000+ while U Virginia has but 14,000. Maybe someone has the data, but do you know if their respective placement is that far out of relation to their size? </p>

<p>Geography also plays a part. Large industry has historically had deep roots in the Midwest and so naturally a place like U Michigan (and other Big Ten schools like Purdue, U Wisconsin, etc) would place well there. Likewise, California is the nation’s largest state and economy by far and UCB is the flagship university. If they weren’t dominant in their placement there with the many attractive California-based employers, that would be the surprise. But compare the placement of UCB and U Michigan with U Virginia’s for employers located in the shadow of the world biggest customer (the Pentagon) and my sense is that both would lag. Maybe I’m wrong in this case, but geographic incumbency has a lot of power in recruiting, even in engineering. </p>

<p>Finally, my understanding is that a lot of the engineering students at U Virginia will combine their work with the undergraduate business school in preparation for a post-graduate career on Wall Street or in business. U Virginia may not be a placement powerhouse for engineering, but the employers that I know generally respect their students and don’t see U Virginia undergrads as materially different from the product that comes out of UC Berkeley or U Michigan. Do you think that they have it wrong?</p>

<p>As for UIUC’s relationship to Microsoft, I suspect that some of this goes to Marc Andreessen and his high profile success with Mosaic. Do you know how active Microsoft was at UIUC prior to Netscape’s emergence? As for today, I don’t consider Microsoft as leading edge; IMO its technological prominence/prestige is more like what IBM was circa 1990. It’s declining. </p>

<p>IMO, due to its size advantage, U Virginia is a superior undergraduate destination for prospective students, but I would concur with your view that it lags UC Berkeley and U Michigan in grad school-generated research relationships and prominence in the PhD world.</p>

412

<p>Cal Career Fair: <a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Fairs/08CalWebDir.pdf[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Fairs/08CalWebDir.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
Cal EECS Career Fair: <a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Fairs/08EECSWebDir.pdf[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Fairs/08EECSWebDir.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
Engineering companies from all across the country are recruiting at Cal.</p>

<p>Compared to UVa’s Engineering Career Fair: <a href=“https://virginia-csm.symplicity.com/events/students.php?cf=ECDF09&cck=1&au=&ck=[/url]”>https://virginia-csm.symplicity.com/events/students.php?cf=ECDF09&cck=1&au=&ck=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

413

<p>ucb,
I found some more Teaching data for you. This time, it’s from Business Week. Below is how the students graded the teaching going on at the undergraduate business schools of each of these public universities:</p>

<p>A+ , U Virginia (McIntire)
A+ , W&M (Mason)
A , U Texas (McCombs)
A , U North Carolina (Kenan)</p>

<p>B , U Michigan (Ross)
B , UC Berkeley (Haas)
B , U Washington (Foster)
B , Indiana U (Kelley)</p>

<p>C , U Illinois</p>

414

<p>UC Berkeley 1
UVA 2/3
W&M 2/3
UNC-CH 4/5
UCLA 4/5
UMich 6
GT 7</p>

415

<p>goblue,
Re your statement,</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>On the UC Berkeley Career Fair link you provided, there were 56 companies listed with their addresses. 46 of them are located in California. Of the other 10, at least 6 have locations in California. </p>

<p>I’m not trying to take anything away from UCB and it’s an impressive list of companies, especially if you want to work in the information technology industry, but it’s not like you have this slew of Ohio-based manufacturing businesses flying out to California to hire UCB undergrads instead of home-grown kids in Columbus or kids coming out of engineering programs in nearby states. </p>

<p>My guess is that there are additional employers that could be added to the UCB list, but the observation remains that regional factors dominate in college recruiting practices. </p>

<p>As for U Virginia’s career fair, I would expect it to be dominated by employers from northern Virginia. If you go thru the list of 122 companies, you’ll find that that is the case as virtually all of the big players in the aerospace world are represented. I wouldn’t expect a Silicon Valley-based info tech company to go to Charlottesville in search of engineering students. Isn’t that kind of “duh?”</p>

416

<p>What about Shippensburg State?</p>

417

<p>When I think of prestige, I think of the quality of the hot, tougher majors AKA Engineering/Business/Sciences (let’s be honest, if someone said they were majoring in art or something in UC Berkeley, you would second guess the student’s academic capabilities compared to a student who got in under the business program).</p>

<p>Here’s my top 10 (btw, Im basing this off undergrad programs. I don’t really know enough for grad schools)</p>

<ol>
<li>UC Berk</li>
<li>Michigan</li>
<li>UCLA
4.UIUC</li>
<li>UCSD</li>
<li>Georgia Tech</li>
<li>U of Wisconsin</li>
<li>UT Austin</li>
<li>U of Washington</li>
<li>UCSB</li>
</ol>

<p>just my opinion guys, of course there’s going to be bias in everyone’s list</p>

418

<p>You’re really going to leave off UVa and UNC? Two schools that are a consensus top 5?</p>

419

<p>hawkette, according to BW, the only 4 top 25 BBA programs that don’t have As for teaching are Ross, Haas, Sloan and Tepper. Those four also happen to be known for being the toughest undergraduate programs. You are bound to have disgruntled students in tougher programs.</p>

420

<ol>
<li>University of Virgina </li>
<li>UCLA</li>
<li>Cal Berkley</li>
<li>UNC</li>
<li>Michigan </li>
<li>University of Texas at Austin</li>
<li>Wisconsin</li>
<li>College of William and Mary</li>
<li>Illinois</li>
<li>Florida</li>
</ol>