I’ve just been confused lately about the prestige difference between UC Berkeley and all the ivy league schools except Harvard. Most of the articles I’ve seen say that UC Berkeley is one of the top four most reputable schools in the world, the three above it being Stanford, Harvard, and (sometimes) Princeton, while at the same time UC Berkeley is the 20th best school in the nation (with the other ivy league schools ranking far above it). I’m confused about these two prestige factors: what do you think matters more, world prestige or national prestige? Also, how is world vs. national prestige determined? I’m not related to this issue with the schools I’m considering; I’m honestly just curious.
It depends on the context whether prestige or the difference in prestige matters at all; if it does, which school has more prestige in a way that matters depends on the context.
The world rankings, like US News, are usually based on number of research articles published and citation by their professors. As stated on the Global Rankings page, the ranking are “based on 12 indicators that measure their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations.” The regular rankings are based on acceptance rate, freshman retention, graduation rate, percentage of Alumni who donate, etc.
I wouldn’t list Berkeley in the top 4 universities in the world, nor do I think many other people would, so I’m not sure where you pulled that statistic. Among the top universities in the world are Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, and University of Chicago–and that’s already 8 schools. Most of those are obvious inclusions on any list, no matter whom you ask.
Berkeley is a very good school, though, and you shouldn’t get hung up on rankings. The question should be: what do you want to do? What do you want to study? Berkeley’s proximity to Silicon Valley make it an extremely good choice for techies. It’s less good for other things.
Rankings often serve more like a Rorschach test for those reading them than as an effective evaluation of what they are purportedly measuring. For this reason, simpler evaluations can offer the most validity. Ranked by the standardized scoring of – and therefore perhaps the academic preparation of – its undergraduate students, UC-Berkeley currently places 37th in the U.S.
(“50 Smartest Colleges in America,” Business Insider.)
Be aware that standardized scores are a poor measure in this case because of the way the UC system does its admissions.
UC Berkeley does its admissions with the goal of serving the entire state, including the poor rural parts and the ghettos. They want the top 3 students from the lousy school who made the most of the few opportunities available to them more than they want the student who was, say, in the top third of their class at a rich school, but prepped a lot for the SATs. As a result, in admission they weigh grades and class rigor much more than test scores.
Literally 99 percent of the class at UC Berkeley was in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. That is not true for any Ivy League School, not even Harvard.
It’s just a different way of choosing who the “best” students are, but it makes it look like Berkeley is much easier to get into than it really is. My kids attend a small rigorous private college prep school, and naviance shows that it is easier for students there to get into Cornell, Penn or Brown than it is to get into UC Berkeley.
ps - I don’t have a kid a Berkeley and I have no dog in this fight
@ThankYouforHelp,
“Literally 99 percent of the class at UC Berkeley was in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. That is not true for any Ivy League School, not even Harvard.” – Interesting! Do you have a source for this info?
They are probably estimating based on ELC GPA data submitted by high schools, since high-school-determined class rank is not collected or used for admissions.
Also, UCs probably get students mostly from typical high schools; it is entirely possible that the elite private universities get their larger percentage of “low ranking” students from elite high schools (where a top-end student may not be in the top tenth of a school full of top-end students).
My mistake - it was 98 percent, not 99 percent. 98% at Berkeley and 97% at UCLA.
87 percent at Cornell, 92 percent at Brown. Even Harvard is “only” 95 percent. I checked some other top schools outside of the ivy league. Its 90 percent at Notre Dame, Duke and Northwestern, for example, and 88 percent at Johns Hopkins.
I imagine that the only reason Berkeley isn’t 100 percent on that stat is because it’s a Pac 12 school with about 40 sports full of recruited athletes. The UCs want the top few kids from every California high school, and that necessarily includes the poor kids in inner city Oakland, the rural farm communities, the schools full of recent immigrants for whom English is their second language, and so on. That brings the average test scores down, but a lot of those kids are going to be major achievers when they have the opportunity.
My point is not to claim that Berkeley is a better school than those others. My point is only that Berkeley emphasizes grades more than test scores, and is a LOT harder get into than you would think if you only compared avarage standardized test scores.
Note that the grades/GPA emphasis over test scores applies to other UCs. After UC Davis released results, there were several threads where students were complaining about being rejected or waitlisted from their “safety” UC Davis. Mostly, these were students with top-end test scores but second-tier GPAs (i.e. 3.80-4.19 UC-weighted, or roughly 3.4-3.8 unweighted with lots of honors and AP courses) who made the mistake of basing “reach/match/safety” on test scores. Many also applied to popular majors.
I find the Shanghai rankings to be particularly useless when evaluating quality of education since they rely solely on papers published and citations. In other words, they evaluate research, not education. Granted there is some correlation between the 2, but they are not intrinsically linked.
Perhaps those rankings’ markets are international students aiming for funded PhD programs in the US, rather than international or domestic students looking for undergraduate schools.
Combined US News department ranking for undergraduate business and engineering and graduate biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, earth sciences, economics, education, English, history, math, physics, political science, psychology and sociology:
“Be aware that standardized scores are a poor measure in this case” (#5)
The cited figure (#4) placed UCB conservatively within the top 3% of all schools nationally. If Berkeley’s rarefied standardized test scores are in fact a poor measure of the university’s quality, well, that’s too bad for Berkeley.
I don’t understand. Why is it “too bad” for Berkeley?
Berkeley chooses to weigh grades and achievement vis a vis the rest of your high school (whatever high school it is) more heavily than standardized test scores. The ones who get in are the super hard working overachievers from across the social spectrum of California, even those communities that don’t produce as many top SAT scores. That’s who the Regents want.
People who apply to Berkeley should be made aware of this, or they are likely to be disappointed when they get rejected thinking that Berkeley had the same admissions difficulty as other colleges with an equivalent SAT average. It doesn’t. There is a reason that Berkeley accepts less than 17% of applicants while many colleges with equivalent standardized test scores offer admission to well over 50% of their applicants.
To use a real life example, Naviance tells me that my childrens’ prep school easily could place over half the graduating class at NYU or Boston College every year if the students wanted to go there. It can only get a few into Berkeley every year, because Berkeley only wants the very top of the class. NYU and BC are great schools and have the same average SAT scores as Berkeley, but they are substantially easier to get into than Berkeley.
Comparing colleges by standardized test scores is a convenient shorthand tool for selectivity, but it doesn’t work very well in this case.
That is an excellent point regarding UCs prioritizing GPA over tests scores. I have heard of many dissapointed students being rejected from UCs they thought were safeties. Unless you are a student with a very high UC GPA, no UC should be counted on as a safety with the exception of just a couple less applied to campuses.
I wonder how removing the test factor out of the rankings would impact all the UCs?
They don’t just prioritize GPA, they prioritize 10-11th grade GPA. Naviance from our highly ranked public demonstrates that UCB is actually pretty easy to get into if you load up on “easy” APs in 10th and take as many as you can jam down your throat in 11th grade. Not much holistic about it at all.
The poor kids who don’t realize they needed to take summer school before freshman year to get on track for science APs by sophomore year are screwed.
You are correct up to a point, but you can only get honors credit for 8 semester courses, I believe. The problem for those in the highly ranked public and private schools is that you are weighed against others from the same situation as you. They don’t want to let in the kid in the top quarter of the class at Palo Alto High over the kid who was first in his class at a rural high school outside of Bakersfield just because the kid at Palo Alto studied for a year with a private SAT tutor.
98% at Berkeley and 97% at UCLA.