<p>A recent article quotes The UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal saying:</p>
<p>"One of the great ironies is that it is true that the University of California system is the worlds greatest public university. The master plan is still emulated throughout the world. There is not a state in the country or a nation in the world that wouldnt exchange their higher public education system for Californias. . ." Now</a> What? | Santa Cruz Good Times</p>
<p>I think that the UC is great but Blumenthal sounds pretty pretentious here to me. I was wondering what parents in other states thought about this. Is Blumentahal way off? Would you trade your state's higher public education system for California's?</p>
<p>I don’t think I’d rather finance the UCs than pay taxes to support schools like Oxford and Cambridge, or ETH Zurich, or Tokyo University, or free higher education in Denmark, France, Finland, etc., if given the choice.</p>
<p>If you go by the rankings, most of the top 10 public universities are in California.</p>
<p>What public university has as good a reputation as Berkeley or UCLA?</p>
<p>Maybe Michigan.</p>
<p>Maybe University of Virginia.</p>
<p>I have always found our “state system” to be strange. George Washington advocated a national university, where top students from all over the country would attend. It seems to me that if you happen to be born in a state without a good flagship state university, you are out of luck. (e.g., Idaho, North Dakota, Rhode Island, etc. etc.) Shouldn’t a brilliant potential doctor or engineer from North Dakota who is not rich have a chance to go to a Berkeley, rather than having to go to University of North Dakota?</p>
<p>No, I’ll stick with our system in Michigan. Financially sound (compared to California’s atleast) with a good flagship school, and still good options for students who aren’t as competitive. Community college is affordable and still good for a lot of different students. And we have enough room to fit the state’s needs unlike California.</p>
<p>Remember that California has a large population compared to other states, so a public post-secondary education system sized for California would need to be shrunk to fit other states. Where other states may have one flagship-level campus and a small number of other state universities, California has two or more that would be seen as “flagship” level in most other states and 32 total state universities that grant bachelor’s degrees. Such capacity is far greater than what most other states need.</p>
<p>However, the small population of some states means that they may not be able to offer schools to cover all of the various student interests and academic abilities. Theoretically, several states with a combined population like that of California could try to build a regional university system, though it has not happened.</p>
<p>To get an idea of the size, here are approximate undergraduate enrollments:</p>
<p>University of California: 180,000
California State University: 350,000
Community Colleges: 2,900,000</p>
<p>There are several states that have flagship universities that can hold their own with the UCs - UVa, Michigan, UNC, et al. being the usual suspects. But where California blows most other states away is in depth. You can see it reflected in the USNews rankings. The UC system has SIX campuses ranked in the top 50 National Universities (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UC Davis, UCSB, and UC Irvine). No other state college system has more than one. </p>
<p>Whether they can continue to keep the quality up in the face of CA’s ongoing budget woes is a separate question.</p>
<p>California does have a large population that produces enough students to fill six high end universities. It also has relatively few high end private schools (Stanford, USC, and several tiny schools whose combined enrollment is small compared to the UC system enrollment) to draw away the top students (which is apparently why many of the northeast states do not have high end public universities).</p>
<p>For the population, Indiana has done a good job of building a university system that has two well-regarded schools that do not overlap one another in strengths. They have also worked to place the graduate health programs in near the largest population, benefiting the state even more. Both Purdue and IU are also still real values compared to the other Midwestern publics such as UIUC and Michigan.</p>
<p>Nope. W&M is not part of the UVa system. It’s a separate state school - in much the same way that Cal Poly SLO is an excellent state school in California but is not part of the UC system. A better example in Virginia would be UVa-Wise, a separate campus of the University of Virginia. The main UVa campus is the only one ranked in the top 50.</p>
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<p>Same issue. Plus, if you want to consider the top 100 then the UC system picks up a couple more campuses (UC Santa Cruz and UC Riverside). Every undergraduate UC campus except the newest one (Merced) is ranked in the top 100. And all nine of them are comprehensive, doctorate-granting research universities - which is why the UC system is so expensive.</p>
<p>In Illinois. I wouldn’t trade. And to be brutally honest, never really heard of any of the UCs beyond Berkeley and UCLA before coming to CC. (Why would I?) Not really sure what those others offer that is markedly superior to or different from a U of I.</p>
<p>The current UC and CAL state system is in dire straights. To a certain extent today’s ratings are based on previous years ratings. Will be interesting to see in 5 years where they line up.</p>
<p>If you use ARWU (which has an easier to navigate site so I chose it) Michigan public school system has 2 of the top 50 universities in the US and California public school system has 6. Per capita Michigan is better off. If you expand it to top 51 Texas also has 2.</p>
<p>Also, is UCLA supposed to be more prestigious than UCSD? I always thought the ranking was Berkeley > UCSD > Rest which were all about the same, but apparently UCLA has higher rankings than the others.</p>