<p>Hey, I'm just wondering here. UC Berkeley is ranked 20 some overall in world rankings. But when I go into specific majors, I found that it's almost always in the top 10 list? So does anyone know why its overall is not in top 10 when it's in top 10 for most common majors such as engineering, math, economics, etc...</p>
<p>20-something… Very low, I agree. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Anyway, I think you’re talking about subject-specific grad school rankings. UC Berkeley is often ranked as much better for grad school than undergrad (though the latter is also excellent).</p>
<p>Rankings are flawed, anyway. They change the methods every year to generate a new list to make more money.</p>
<p>^Berkeley has been consistently ranked in the similar area for a number of years, however.</p>
<p>I feel Berkeley undergrad is not as strong as the grad school. Grad students have rather small classes and receive a lot of direct attention while undergrad classes are filled with so many students professors can’t even recognize your face. </p>
<p>Without a question, they’re still good professors; but many would prefer the LAC style classroom with a no-name professor leading a course of 20 students and this format of teaching has proven quite successful given their showing in student PhD productivity rankings.</p>
<p>So is the ranking for undergrad and grad combined, because I’m certain that Berkeley is pretty much the best for engineering (2-3), especially civil (1st for the past 10 years). Engineering is generally an undergrad course right?</p>
<p>oh yeah, on that note, is quality of life at school taken into account (eg. dorms, cleanliness, computers, gyms, etc…)?</p>
<p>The USNWR rankings that most posters talk about here are for undergraduate quality only. However, the USNWR academic “Peer Assessment” factor, which counts 22.5% for national universities and LACs, may be influenced by the graduate program reputations. If you took out this rather subjective factor, leaving only the more objective metrics, Berkeley’s ranking would be lower (worse, that is). In comparisons to highly-ranked private schools, the top public flagships tend to suffer due to larger average class size, lower retention and on-time graduation rates, lower student selectivity (measured by average test scores, etc.), and lower per-student spending.</p>
<p>Here is a ranking based only on SAT 75th percentile M+CR scores. Berkeley comes out at #42, the highest-ranked public university.
<a href=“USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings”>USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings;
<p>Cost is not factored into the USNWR rankings. Specific department rankings do not factor into the USNWR or any other major undergraduate ranking. Some of the most selective private universities do not even offer engineering programs.</p>
<p>[How</a> U.S. News Calculates the College Rankings - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2010/08/17/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings?PageNr=1]How”>http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2010/08/17/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings?PageNr=1)</p>
<p>The major “world rankings” tend to use very different methods than the USNWR undergraduate rankings. They are more oriented toward faculty research productivity.</p>
<p>@sentimentGX4</p>
<p>If you go to office hours professors will know who you are.</p>
<p>@tk21769 When you said lower per-student spending, are you implying that if students need to pay more to study there, the school gets ranked higher?</p>
<p>no, how much the university spends per student.</p>
<p>^ No. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Generous per-student spending indicates that a college can offer a wide variety of programs and services. U.S. News measures financial resources by using the average spending per student on instruction, research, student services, and related educational expenditures in the 2008 and 2009 fiscal years.<a href=“%5Burl%5Dhttp://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2010/08/17/how-us-news-calculates-the-college-rankings?PageNr=4%5B/url%5D”>/quote</a></p>
<p>^ The above quote typifies the nonsensical thinking that goes into the U.S. News rankings. If you had two schools with identical faculties and identical student bodies and identical curricula and identical graduation rates, and school A paid its faculty 20% more than school B, then school A would be ranked higher by U.S. News. Yes, it’s true that the schools that offer the most programs and services are among the biggest spenders. But so are those that operate least efficiently relative to their peers. The U.S. News ranking is designed to reward schools that produce higher education at the highest cost-per-unit. That’s one big reason that larger schools, public or private, generally don’t fare as well in this particular ranking; they’re punished for achieving economies of scale, like, for example, being able to spread the fixed costs of maintaining a top-notch library over a base of 20,000 students, thus lowering the cost-per-student, while some smaller school with a similar library spreads similar costs over a base of 5,000 students, thus having a higher cost-per-student for which it is rewarded in the U.S. News ranking. </p>
<p>Because colleges and universities compete for higher U.S. News rankings, at the margins this creates an incentive for colleges and universities to raise costs, even if there’s no educational advantage to it. I once heard a college administrator speculate out loud that if he raised tuition 20%, recycled half of the increased revenue into need-based FA (making the increase cost-neutral for students receiving need-based FA), and put the rest into raising faculty salaries, it would move his school up several places in the U.S. News rankings, because both the increased FA and the increased faculty salaries would count as increased spending-per-student. Indeed, if instead of providing in-state tuition at a steep discount, public universities just charged everyone a single high tuition rate comparable to what the elite privates charge, and pumped all that additional revenue right back into need-based aid for in-state students so that the net cost to in-state students stayed the same, they’d rocket up the U.S. News rankings. No one would be better off—the students would effectively be paying the same, and the universities would have no more real resources to work with. But because of the bizarre ways U.S. News measures things, their rankings would improve.</p>
<p>“If you had two schools with identical faculties and identical student bodies and identical curricula and identical graduation rates, and school A paid its faculty 20% more than school B, then school A would be ranked higher by U.S. News.”</p>
<p>If school A continues to pay 20% more, it won’t have an identical faculty to school B for very long.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily true. Pay scales at UC Berkeley, for example, are on the whole lower than at many elite privates. Yet Berkeley has historically had little trouble recruiting and retaining top faculty in almost every discipline. Why? Well, academics like to be paid, just like everyone else. But at least at the top levels, they tend to be driven as much or more by academic prestige. Many will join a more prestigious faculty over a less prestigious faculty, even if the latter pays more, because being on the more prestigious faculty is a marker of professional success. And once they’ve been there a while, family commitments and lifestyle choices may lock them in. </p>
<p>Now it’s true that if there’s a faculty recruiting battle between two equally prestigious schools and one pays more, the higher pay may be a factor. So in the long run Stanford’s ability to outbid UC Berkeley may make a difference. But so far the faculties are remarkably competitive despite (I presume) substantially higher average pay at Stanford.</p>
<p>Indeed, in my hypothetical, giving an across-the-board pay raise to everyone currently on the faculty might create a different kind of problem. Academic job markets are sticker than most because of tenure; a decision for a faculty member to leave is almost always unilateral. A school that overcompensates its faculty relative to its peers may lock in its existing faculty. Fewer may leave for opportunities elsewhere; it’s generally harder to swallow a pay cut, even if it comes with added prestige, than it is to opt for lower-paid prestige at the outset. But that may mean fewer new hires, less fresh blood and fewer fresh ideas coming into the school, and more senior people hanging on longer, past their prime years of productivity. This will generally pad pay scales even more, because faculty salary structures tend to reward seniority. But it may tend toward retention of overpaid deadwood, and less bang for the faculty buck because the salary of one dinosaur may easily equal the salaries of two young, energetic, up-and-coming faculty members.</p>
<p>ask and you shall receive:</p>
<p>Top 500 Ranked Universities for
Highest FT Faculty Salaries</p>
<p>[College</a> Rankings - Top 500 Ranked Universities for Highest FT Faculty Salaries](<a href=“USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings”>Top 500 Ranked Colleges - Highest Full-Time Faculty Salaries)</p>
<p>OP, the answer is simple – Berkeley undergrad has a relatively higher faculty to student ratio compared to its peers. And, with Berkeley’s huge undergrad student body, large classes become inevitable. For Berkeley to rise in USNews ranking, all it needs to do is to decrease the undergrad student population, and perhaps, abolish a few programs. If Berkeley would have an undergrad student body of 10k (maximum) and a faculty-to-student ratio of 1:8, it would easily rise in the ranking and would overtake half of the Ivies.</p>
<p>Because USNWR “rankings” are ********.</p>
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<p>what you really mean is higher **student to faculty **ratio, don’t you?</p>
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<p>Maybe. But keep in mind that class size (and faculty salary, too) are among 6 sub-sub-factors under the “faculty resources” sub-factor, and that these 6 together only add up to 20% of the total ranking.</p>
<p>One can quibble with just about any of the USNWR metrics, their weighting, how they are gathered, whether the financials adequately account for variations in cost of living, etc. However, in many cases the individual sub-sub metrics in isolation would generate a set of schools very similar to the overall ranking. For example Princeton is near the top whether you look at average SATs alone, faculty salaries alone, S:F rate alone, endowment per student alone, or admit rate alone. The metrics tend to be mutually corroborating. So when you put many of them together, I think the result is fairly plausible as long as you don’t take differences of a few ranking positions too seriously. </p>
<p>But yes, the relative ranking of public universities is one of the most important points of contention. The top flagships generally have huge libraries, produce lots of research, and offer a very wide range of majors including some of the best available programs in certain fields such as engineering. All while charging about half (or less) of the private school sticker prices. The USNWR rankings don’t capture these advantages too well. Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t. Any ranking needs to make assumptions and apply constraints to what it is measuring. The Washington Monthly ranking takes a different approach that is much more favorable to schools like UC Berkeley.</p>
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<p>Berkeley has two qualities that attract academic talent. You touched on one, academic prestige. The other quality is its public nature. A lot of professors are egalatarian and have some social responsibility sense…many professors graduated from public universities and have a feeling to sort of “give back”.</p>