<p>I checked a bunch of online undergrad college rankings.
And i was surprised to see that berkeley was not even top 20.
around ten years ago berkeley was top 10 from wat i heard..
is the us news ranking unreliable or has berkeley plummeted 10 rankings?</p>
<p>Cal is ranked top 10 (usually #1) when it comes to public schools.</p>
<p>The weighting factors used by the rankings push the public schools down compared to privates with similar peer respect. While Cal is almost always the top public college in the list, that top public position is around 21st.</p>
<p>I think one reason is that a lot of the top California students are selecting UCLA and UC San Diego over Berkeley. Though Berkeley may still be considered #1 in ranking over the other two overall, UCLA and UCSD, as well as Davis have some superior programs over Berkeley. I think it is better to look at division versus overall ranking. Who cares if your school is #1 if you are in a low ranking major. Everyone knows that the best engineers do not come out of Harvard.</p>
<p>It’s ranked # 2/3 for engineering. :)</p>
<p>It all depends on the criteria that the rankings are based on. I recently stumbled upon a ranking that is “based on [a university’s] contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country).”</p>
<p>And guess who’s ranked #1. 
[Washington</a> Monthly](<a href=“http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings/national_university_rank.php]Washington”>http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings/national_university_rank.php)</p>
<p>Harvard is not in top ten of any of the Engineering fields in the 2010 US News and World report: Aerospace, Biological, Biomedical, Chemical, Civil, Electrical, Industrials, Mechanical, Eng. Physics.
Just making a point that a top rated school such as Harvard (ranked #1 as a National University), is not a good measure of a top university for everyone. Especially, not in engineering, in this example. Take that into consideration when selecting a university. </p>
<p>Though Berkeley is ranked 20th overall, the departments may have higher rankings, as in certain fields (not all) of Engineering. I am guessing that is what you were talking about…</p>
<p>The U.S. News have a prejudice against public schools… A public school will never crack the top 20. Based on overall performance (grad school included) I would say Berkeley is top 10 top 15.</p>
<p>wasn’t berkeley in top 15 or so a few decades ago?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, the problem with that logic is twofold. Firstly, most people, frankly, do not pursue their major as a career. Let’s face it - most history majors will not become professional historians, most psych majors will not become professional psychologists, most poli-sci majors will not become professional political scientists. Even many engineering majors won’t work as engineers, instead opting for jobs in consulting or finance instead. That begs the question: who cares if you graduate from a highly ranked program if you’re not going to remain in that field anyway? </p>
<p>Secondly, the presumption is that you actually know what you want to major in, and the fact is, most high school seniors don’t. The average college student tries on several majors before settling on one. What if you choose a school that is ranked #1 in a particular field…only to find out later that you don’t really want to major in that field?</p>
<p>Doesn’t US News take the size of a university’s endowment into consideration? That probably affects Berkeley’s ranking. Anyways, top 20 in the country is an excellent ranking.</p>
<p>US News is bias against public schools. East coast and private universities will always rank higher than they should be on its rankings.
… but who cares about rankings? Success depends on what you do, not where you do it at. If you have the passion and determination, you can be successful no matter where you go.</p>
<p>if us news is biased why do so many people follow that ranking system? are there more reliable ranking lists out there? It just seems so weird because i heard from several adults that uc berkeley regular undergrad was ranked in top 5 like 15-25 years ago.</p>
<p>The older USNews rankings had Berkeley in Top 5-10 because the methodology was based entirely on peer assessment. Berkeley is #6 on peer assessment rank for 2010…like it has been over the last 20 years.</p>
<p>Yeah, the very fact that many people don’t know what they’re majoring in is a good reason to go to berkeley. I’m not aware of that many programs at either UCSD, Davis or UCLA that are actually ranked higher than Cal (though there are a few exceptions like marine science at UCSD).</p>
<p>UC Davis is ranked higher in Biological Engineering
UC San Diego is ranked higher in Biomedical / BioEngineering</p>
<p>alumni giving for Ivies are pretty bad </p>
<p>Illiquid and capital calls…</p>
<p>Gonzalo Raffo InfoNews: THE BIG SQUEEZE / BARRON´S </p>
<p>"The outlook is challenging for the big Ivy League endowments because many of their investments are in illiquid private- equity and real-estate funds or commodity-related assets such as timberland, whose estimated value might not reflect today’s steeply discounted market prices. Yale and Princeton, for instance, have invested roughly half their endowment assets in private-equity deals, real estate and commodities, a far cry from the 65%-to-35% blend of stocks and bonds favored by many individuals. If the three Ivies valued such assets at market-clearing prices, their endowment losses for fiscal 2008-09 could approach 35%.</p>
<p>USNews’ critieria tends to favor colleges that serve more wealthy student bodies, which have higher test scores, higher retention rates, higher graduation rates, and a trust fund from which to donate on an annual basis. While purposely giving Pell Grantees a big tip in admissions is a good public policy for the state, it tends to depress test scores on average (if you can believe CB’s self-reported data). In contrast, ~50% of HYPS students are full pay and thus in the top 5% of income bracket in the country.</p>
<p>OP, </p>
<p>I tried rearranging the USNews data/ranking and incorporated some important data from other ranking table and it came out that Berkeley should have been #6 overall. It turned out the USNews manipulated the assigning of weights on the criteria to favor private schools.</p>
<p>Here’s what I did - <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/780850-best-us-colleges.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/780850-best-us-colleges.html</a></p>
<p>98.00 Stanford
97.15 Harvard
96.80 Princeton
96.30 Yale
96.30 MIT</p>
<ul>
<li>huge drop -</li>
</ul>
<p>90.60 Berkeley
90.25 Penn
90.00 Columbia
89.85 Chicago
89.70 Duke
89.45 Caltech
88.15 Dartmouth
88.05 Cornell
87.00 Brown</p>
<ul>
<li>huge drop -</li>
</ul>
<p>85.50 JHU
85.10 Michigan
84.65 Northwestern</p>
<ul>
<li>drop -</li>
</ul>
<p>83.25 UCLA
82.00 Notre Dame
81.20 Washington USL</p>
<ul>
<li>drop -</li>
</ul>
<p>80.75 Rice
80.45 Uva
80.10 CMU
80.00 Vanderbilt
79.60 Georgetown
79.40 Emory</p>
<ul>
<li>drop -</li>
</ul>
<p>78.20 USC
77.60 UNC
76.30 Tufts
75.60 NYU
73.70 Wake Forest</p>
<p>I remember seeing a site with historical US news rankings (which I can’t find after searching). US news had a lot of top publics in the top 15-20 in the 80’s then one year they all simultaneously dropped into the 20-30’s. You could definitely see that that year was the year they changed their methodology.</p>