The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher.
It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the exceptions of a few schools such as MIT and Stanford, areas such as Law/Medicine/Business/Finance/Liberal Arts are historically valued a lot more than science and engineering in this country.
That simply has to change if we want to lure more young people into going into those fields (which is what the future of this country needs). It's still unbelievable how many high school kids (remember, most people don't live in SV) think accountants are these powerful people in suits making six figures straight out of school and engineers are nerdy people who work in a basement and gets no money/respect.
As a current grad student here: it's a fantastic research university and a beautiful campus, but the undergraduate experience is terrible. Classes are giant and there's very little faculty/student interaction, because the focus of the faculty is, for better or for worse, not on undergraduate education. Yes, there are some incredible undergrads and some great opportunities for the 0.1% of them who really stand out, and of course the grad programs are great -- if you look at the US News grad program rankings, Berkeley is top 5 in almost every discipline -- but overall the undergrad program is ranked just about where it belongs.
Current CS undergrad at Berkeley. This is the main problem I have with Berkeley. You can interact with the faculty plenty (at least in my experience), especially when you get to your upper division classes. I don't really do that much anyway and care more about how well professor's lecture than anything else.
The problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get into the upper division classes you're interested in. There are just too many people and not enough space. My smallest class is 30 people, but it's a graduate level course, while my other two upper division CS classes have 400 people and 315 with 75 on the waitlist. I thought my classes would get smaller as the semesters went on, but that has not been the case.
The US News rankings have a very negative incentivization for schools also. One of the things that my alma mater, Virginia Tech, used to do to (and I'm sure still does) is lure top tier students into their (admittedly great) engineering program. However, they then use a bootcamp style, much harder than necessary first year "weed out" program for the freshman engineering students. The effect is that 50% of the incoming engineering students fail out or are forced to transfer to the school's less prestigous programs, particularly business. The relatively high SAT scores of these students then allow these other schools to inflate their rankings with US News. By the way, I know for a fact that Perdue and a few other state schools with good engineering programs do the same thing.
The first time I saw videos of top tier freshman engineering, math, and comp sci courses, I was schocked. The problems were manageable, the pace was reasonable, the teachers were engaging..... and when I saw the course material and realized the tests were easier than the ones I took at my much lower ranked school, I realized I'd been had.
The worst, most socially irresponsible aspect of this practice of "funneling" and "trapping" your students into less desirable majors is that students who otherwise would have been engineers end up learning less useful things. Virginia Tech, and schools like it, are responsible for making the world have less engineers than it should.
But its usually just the door that is hard to get into, once through the door its usually smooth sailing. Actually, this occurs in many exclusive programs/institutions over and over again. But in reality, they have to be selective: the world doesn't need that many engineers, especially ones that aren't that smart, just like we really don't need that many doctors (especially ones that aren't that smart). Computer science is the same: sure you could double or triple the size of your program to except just anyone that wants to program, but then you would flood the market with substandard talent and your reputation goes into the trashbin!
Now, would we prefer a hard program where students would fail out instead of being stopped at the door? This also seems like a waste of resources, but it could work given the right technology (e.g. online courses).
Did you continue with engineering after the freshman classes? I also went to VT, and my classes got harder every year, except for maybe senior year but then I was expected to do a senior design project on top of regular classes. But talking to my other engineering friends, it was very dependent on the major. For Civil engineering freshman year was the weed out year, for Aerospace senior year is the weed out year.
The US News rankings have a very negative incentivization for schools also. One of the things that my alma mater, Virginia Tech, used to do to (and I'm sure still does) is lure top tier students into their (admittedly great) engineering program. However, they then use a bootcamp style, much harder than necessary first year "weed out" program for the freshman engineering students. The effect is that 50% of the incoming engineering students fail out or are forced to transfer to the school's less prestigous programs, particularly business. The relatively high SAT scores of these students then allow these other schools to inflate their rankings with US News. By the way, I know for a fact that Perdue and a few other state schools with good engineering programs do the same thing.
That's not a specific university. That's engineering schools in general. "We'll throw you head-first into the ocean, and see if you survive. If you do, congratulations, you've learned to swim!"
The undergraduate computer science program is fucking awful.
1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.
2. Inadequate preparation. Similar classes in other departments have more prerequisites. I'm currently attending a machine learning class where more than half the class is probability-illiterate. Take a look at how the core math curriculum is taught (algebra, analysis)
3. Professors and graduate students are out of sync about the material and assignments, which leads to situations where nobody can answer your questions. See cs162, cs61c. I've heard similar rumors about 161.
4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.
5. Less treatment of the fundamentals. Our systems class no longer goes into any depth about malloc. They've replaced it with a section on map reduce. Similar situation with the operating systems class and I believe the security class.
6. The people who rise to the top are the people who were probably going to be successful anyway. That's just my experience/bias though.
//1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.//
As someone who is an undergraduate TA (for computer science), this doesn't terrify me any more than overworked and underpaid graduate students grading assignments, or overworked research faculty who don't have any incentive to grade well. My anecdotal experience has been that it's generally the top 1-3% of undergrads who end up TAing or grading (in CS, at UVa; mileage elsewhere may vary), and those who do take it pretty seriously (here, at least, we're paid and it's a job). Most of the people I've TA'd with (and myself) take at least one graduate course and actually know the material better than most graduate students (since we've taken the course and universally done very well in it). UVa also rotates graduate TAs out after a year (to research or other things), whereas undergraduate TAs can stay on the same course for two or three years, which offers much more continuity for the professor and fewer TAs who are completely lost. I might be biased (see also: I get paid to do exactly what terrifies you), but I think that if the undergraduates aren't just unpaid volunteers, you get better results than using graduate students for the same things. Unpaid volunteers are much worse: you don't have to pay much, but paying someone for something makes it a job, which switches people's headspace from 'I can drop this' to 'This is my job, and I will do it well'.
4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.
I know of almost no university besides maybe MIT where there's no bias in the teaching and research towards certain fields and away from others. It's quite unfortunate, but you have to choose your educational institution based on what specialties you want to enter.
I went to UT Austin, which is a very similar school. All the negatives you mentioned are certainly valid, but U.S News's ranking isn't just an undergrad ranking, it's an overall university ranking.
And even for undergrad, career prospect for a CS undergrad from a UC school is probably SLIGHTLY better than a liberal arts grad from Vanderbilt.
Are you under the impression that Vanderbilt is a liberal arts school without a school of engineering? That's not the case.
I dont think it even has liberal arts major, heck they don't even have an undergrad business degree because they want you to actually pick something to major in.
Agree 100%. I went there as an undergrad and I hated it, except for my comp sci courses, which I loved. The department was young then, and it was a completely different experience being there during the rise of BSD.
I'm currently a student at a large (largest in the UC system) public research university, and I don't see any problem with excluding schools like UC Berkeley from the top 20. While we, like Berkeley, are a "research powerhouse," spend a little time as an undergraduate on campus and you will quickly realize how little the phrase "research powerhouse" really means to you. Professors are hired for research, not teaching, which means many are apathetic towards students while others clearly shouldn't be involved in the teaching process at all. There are some outstanding professors in terms of teaching, but the important caveat here is that at a large public research school teaching--which heavily affects the undergraduate experience is not a priority.
Some argue that being at a large research school offers, as the name implies, a large number research opportunities for undergraduates. That idea is a bit overly optimistic. When you have > 100 students in almost every upper division class, it is exceedingly difficult to build a relationship with professors where you may find a chance to gain some research experience. At least with my experience in the EE department, the number of professors who take undergraduate research students is countable on one hand and most of them refuse to accept anyone who is not a 3rd/4th year. I managed to claw my way into a few labs (not EE or CS related) merely because they needed someone who could write code.
The US College ranking done at U.S. news is meant to consider undergraduate teaching, and in this aspect large public schools fall far behind. If you want to see the value of research taken into account, look no further than the graduate school rankings. I don't mean to imply that the rankings are accurate, just that there is a valid reason for excluding large public schools from the top of the college rankings.
I am an undergraduate at UCSB and I have had a much different experience. For both my friends and I getting involved with research has been relatively easy, it just requires making the effort of interacting with the faculty outside of class, and pursuing research actively instead of waiting for it to fall into your lap. I think people forget that the faculty are often excited by having a very motivated undergraduate approach them, and show interest in the work they are doing. One of my friends started in his lab, as a second quarter Freshman, and most of my friends, including myself started second year(Note: I think this is really dependent on the kind of research, things like Data Mining have less barrier to entry then something that requires much more background like Abstract Interpretation).
I had a great research experience at UW in my Junior/Senior year. My work even made it into the New York Times (fuzz testing Java's bytecode verifier at the time to find security vulnerabilities). But it was something you definitely had to look for.
The USNWR college ranking is for colleges, not graduate schools. The law, medicine, business, etc, schools have their own rankings. Berkeley does very well in those graduate school rankings (indeed, Berkeley and Stanford probably get the most top-3 USNWR placements of any school).
At the undergraduate level, however, the rankings measure something different. Essentially, they measure: 1) the test scores and grades of the incoming freshman class; 2) the reputation of the undergraduate program; 3) how much money (directly or indirectly) the school spends on undergraduates. As a big state school, Berkeley can't measure up in these categories.
Incidentally, I'm not sure the USNWR rankings are totally senseless in what they measure. For undergrad, I went to a big state research university with very highly ranked graduate engineering programs. For law school, I went to a private university whose undergraduate program was ranked in the top 20. While the two situations weren't directly comparable, I have to say that there is something to what USNWR measures. The experience of being a student at the big state MRU was terrible. Enormous freshman weed out classes, professors and TA's that didn't speak English, outdated facilities, etc. The experience at the private university was wonderful. Very supportive administrators, great facilities, approachable professors, etc. My law department was about the same size as my undergraduate major school, yet I got more personal attention from professors in my first semester of law school than my entire time in engineering school.
That said, attempts to game the rankings creates terrible incentives for universities. Pretty much the whole ranking boils down to how much money you can spend. You can buy high SAT's by spending more on scholarships, you can buy smaller class sizes by spending more on professors, etc. That works fine for well-established private schools with enormous endowments, but not so much for state MRU's. Berkeley's $3 billion endowment supports 35,000 students. Duke's $7-8 billion endowment (depending on how you count) supports 15,000 students.
I agree with you that the USNWR rankings are not senseless. The fact that Berkeley has the most graduate departments in the top 5 of any University but an undergrad ranking outside the top 20 actually tells you a lot about the undergrad experience at the university. It is a research powerhouse where a top undergrad will meet exceptional professors, but you also risk getting lost in a sea of indifference.
That said, we should also keep in mind what the USNWR rankings don't measure. Washington Monthly did a raking that had UCSD on top, and almost all large public research institutions did very well
The clever angle they took was to ask the question "what have you done for us lately?" USNWR is good for an undergrad asking "what can you do for me?" Washington Monthly figured that since all universities receive massive amounts of government funding, tax exempt endowments, and subsidy for tuition through federal loan guarantees, we should ask what they are contributing back. They placed an emphasis on social mobility (percentage of low income students), research (placing an emphasis on science and engineering), and social service.
It does get to the heart of the matter - the things that harm Berkeley in the USNWR ratings (large numbers of undergrads and a relatively low tuition in spite of decreasing support from the state) also enable Berkeley to enroll more low income students than the entire ivy league combined. Berkeley gets dinged for all the negative aspects of enrolling so many low income students relative to Harvard, but gets no credit.
Should it? It's all a matter of perspective - the problem is that because many other major publications don't consider rankings to be useful, USNWR is an almost unanswered voice pushing a ranking system that rewards small, wealthy, private undergraduate programs with relatively few low income students, and they're broadcasting it through a bullhorn into a quiet room.
Rankings are broken. I looked into it as part of a startup idea and even memorized the U.S. News 2012 rankings. The 2012 rankings were super easy to memorize because the schools are almost exactly where you'd expect them ranked based simply on pop-culture guesses. This even happened when lawyers were asked to rank the best law schools. Consider this fun excerpt from the New Yorker where they ranked a law school that didn't exist:
Those lawyers put Penn State in the middle of the pack, even though every fact they thought they knew about Penn State’s law school was an illusion, because in their minds Penn State is a middle-of-the-pack brand. (Penn State does have a law school today, by the way.) —http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_...
At least 20 years ago, Penn State was in the top 4 for geography. It has definitely never been in the middle of the pack when it comes to Earth Sciences.
We all want to succeed. We all also want our friends and business partners to succeed. It's just that people who have lots of money and power are better at accomplishing that than the rest of us. We all help our friends out; only the scale is different.
That explains a lot actually. Powerful and simple explanation for the world we live in. However, pretty much the opposite of the so-called "trickle-down" mechanism... more like "trickle-up".
Comments
The currently most cited US college ranking is done by U.S News, which is heavily favored toward small private institutions from the east coast. I always find it irritating that a world renowned research power house such as UC Berkeley can't even make it into the top 20 ranking, where as schools such as Emory and Vanderbilt are ranked higher. It ALMOST feels like an east coast old money circle-jerk. I guess with the exceptions of a few schools such as MIT and Stanford, areas such as Law/Medicine/Business/Finance/Liberal Arts are historically valued a lot more than science and engineering in this country.
That simply has to change if we want to lure more young people into going into those fields (which is what the future of this country needs). It's still unbelievable how many high school kids (remember, most people don't live in SV) think accountants are these powerful people in suits making six figures straight out of school and engineers are nerdy people who work in a basement and gets no money/respect.
Have you ever been to UC Berkeley?
As a current grad student here: it's a fantastic research university and a beautiful campus, but the undergraduate experience is terrible. Classes are giant and there's very little faculty/student interaction, because the focus of the faculty is, for better or for worse, not on undergraduate education. Yes, there are some incredible undergrads and some great opportunities for the 0.1% of them who really stand out, and of course the grad programs are great -- if you look at the US News grad program rankings, Berkeley is top 5 in almost every discipline -- but overall the undergrad program is ranked just about where it belongs.
> Classes are giant
Current CS undergrad at Berkeley. This is the main problem I have with Berkeley. You can interact with the faculty plenty (at least in my experience), especially when you get to your upper division classes. I don't really do that much anyway and care more about how well professor's lecture than anything else.
The problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get into the upper division classes you're interested in. There are just too many people and not enough space. My smallest class is 30 people, but it's a graduate level course, while my other two upper division CS classes have 400 people and 315 with 75 on the waitlist. I thought my classes would get smaller as the semesters went on, but that has not been the case.
The US News rankings have a very negative incentivization for schools also. One of the things that my alma mater, Virginia Tech, used to do to (and I'm sure still does) is lure top tier students into their (admittedly great) engineering program. However, they then use a bootcamp style, much harder than necessary first year "weed out" program for the freshman engineering students. The effect is that 50% of the incoming engineering students fail out or are forced to transfer to the school's less prestigous programs, particularly business. The relatively high SAT scores of these students then allow these other schools to inflate their rankings with US News. By the way, I know for a fact that Perdue and a few other state schools with good engineering programs do the same thing.
The first time I saw videos of top tier freshman engineering, math, and comp sci courses, I was schocked. The problems were manageable, the pace was reasonable, the teachers were engaging..... and when I saw the course material and realized the tests were easier than the ones I took at my much lower ranked school, I realized I'd been had.
The worst, most socially irresponsible aspect of this practice of "funneling" and "trapping" your students into less desirable majors is that students who otherwise would have been engineers end up learning less useful things. Virginia Tech, and schools like it, are responsible for making the world have less engineers than it should.
But its usually just the door that is hard to get into, once through the door its usually smooth sailing. Actually, this occurs in many exclusive programs/institutions over and over again. But in reality, they have to be selective: the world doesn't need that many engineers, especially ones that aren't that smart, just like we really don't need that many doctors (especially ones that aren't that smart). Computer science is the same: sure you could double or triple the size of your program to except just anyone that wants to program, but then you would flood the market with substandard talent and your reputation goes into the trashbin!
Now, would we prefer a hard program where students would fail out instead of being stopped at the door? This also seems like a waste of resources, but it could work given the right technology (e.g. online courses).
Did you continue with engineering after the freshman classes? I also went to VT, and my classes got harder every year, except for maybe senior year but then I was expected to do a senior design project on top of regular classes. But talking to my other engineering friends, it was very dependent on the major. For Civil engineering freshman year was the weed out year, for Aerospace senior year is the weed out year.
The US News rankings have a very negative incentivization for schools also. One of the things that my alma mater, Virginia Tech, used to do to (and I'm sure still does) is lure top tier students into their (admittedly great) engineering program. However, they then use a bootcamp style, much harder than necessary first year "weed out" program for the freshman engineering students. The effect is that 50% of the incoming engineering students fail out or are forced to transfer to the school's less prestigous programs, particularly business. The relatively high SAT scores of these students then allow these other schools to inflate their rankings with US News. By the way, I know for a fact that Perdue and a few other state schools with good engineering programs do the same thing.
That's not a specific university. That's engineering schools in general. "We'll throw you head-first into the ocean, and see if you survive. If you do, congratulations, you've learned to swim!"
The undergraduate computer science program is fucking awful.
1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.
2. Inadequate preparation. Similar classes in other departments have more prerequisites. I'm currently attending a machine learning class where more than half the class is probability-illiterate. Take a look at how the core math curriculum is taught (algebra, analysis)
3. Professors and graduate students are out of sync about the material and assignments, which leads to situations where nobody can answer your questions. See cs162, cs61c. I've heard similar rumors about 161.
4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.
5. Less treatment of the fundamentals. Our systems class no longer goes into any depth about malloc. They've replaced it with a section on map reduce. Similar situation with the operating systems class and I believe the security class.
6. The people who rise to the top are the people who were probably going to be successful anyway. That's just my experience/bias though.
//1. As you say, the introductory classes are enormous. For the math classes this means less feedback on your assignments. What this also means is that you have other undergrads grading your work. If that doesn't terrify you, then it should.//
As someone who is an undergraduate TA (for computer science), this doesn't terrify me any more than overworked and underpaid graduate students grading assignments, or overworked research faculty who don't have any incentive to grade well. My anecdotal experience has been that it's generally the top 1-3% of undergrads who end up TAing or grading (in CS, at UVa; mileage elsewhere may vary), and those who do take it pretty seriously (here, at least, we're paid and it's a job). Most of the people I've TA'd with (and myself) take at least one graduate course and actually know the material better than most graduate students (since we've taken the course and universally done very well in it). UVa also rotates graduate TAs out after a year (to research or other things), whereas undergraduate TAs can stay on the same course for two or three years, which offers much more continuity for the professor and fewer TAs who are completely lost. I might be biased (see also: I get paid to do exactly what terrifies you), but I think that if the undergraduates aren't just unpaid volunteers, you get better results than using graduate students for the same things. Unpaid volunteers are much worse: you don't have to pay much, but paying someone for something makes it a job, which switches people's headspace from 'I can drop this' to 'This is my job, and I will do it well'.
4. Only 5-10 upper division undergraduate cs classes. Interested in type theory? Practical encryption? Computer algebra? You're out of luck. Most other universities seem to offer a lot of variety.
I know of almost no university besides maybe MIT where there's no bias in the teaching and research towards certain fields and away from others. It's quite unfortunate, but you have to choose your educational institution based on what specialties you want to enter.
I went to UT Austin, which is a very similar school. All the negatives you mentioned are certainly valid, but U.S News's ranking isn't just an undergrad ranking, it's an overall university ranking. And even for undergrad, career prospect for a CS undergrad from a UC school is probably SLIGHTLY better than a liberal arts grad from Vanderbilt.
Are you under the impression that Vanderbilt is a liberal arts school without a school of engineering? That's not the case.
I dont think it even has liberal arts major, heck they don't even have an undergrad business degree because they want you to actually pick something to major in.
Disclosure- I'm a Vandy Engineering School grad
They have split ratings, schools that only provide an undergrad are in a separate category.
Agree 100%. I went there as an undergrad and I hated it, except for my comp sci courses, which I loved. The department was young then, and it was a completely different experience being there during the rise of BSD.
I'm currently a student at a large (largest in the UC system) public research university, and I don't see any problem with excluding schools like UC Berkeley from the top 20. While we, like Berkeley, are a "research powerhouse," spend a little time as an undergraduate on campus and you will quickly realize how little the phrase "research powerhouse" really means to you. Professors are hired for research, not teaching, which means many are apathetic towards students while others clearly shouldn't be involved in the teaching process at all. There are some outstanding professors in terms of teaching, but the important caveat here is that at a large public research school teaching--which heavily affects the undergraduate experience is not a priority. Some argue that being at a large research school offers, as the name implies, a large number research opportunities for undergraduates. That idea is a bit overly optimistic. When you have > 100 students in almost every upper division class, it is exceedingly difficult to build a relationship with professors where you may find a chance to gain some research experience. At least with my experience in the EE department, the number of professors who take undergraduate research students is countable on one hand and most of them refuse to accept anyone who is not a 3rd/4th year. I managed to claw my way into a few labs (not EE or CS related) merely because they needed someone who could write code. The US College ranking done at U.S. news is meant to consider undergraduate teaching, and in this aspect large public schools fall far behind. If you want to see the value of research taken into account, look no further than the graduate school rankings. I don't mean to imply that the rankings are accurate, just that there is a valid reason for excluding large public schools from the top of the college rankings.
I also went to UCLA and second all of this. My undergraduate experience didn't feel at all like I was at a research university.
I am an undergraduate at UCSB and I have had a much different experience. For both my friends and I getting involved with research has been relatively easy, it just requires making the effort of interacting with the faculty outside of class, and pursuing research actively instead of waiting for it to fall into your lap. I think people forget that the faculty are often excited by having a very motivated undergraduate approach them, and show interest in the work they are doing. One of my friends started in his lab, as a second quarter Freshman, and most of my friends, including myself started second year(Note: I think this is really dependent on the kind of research, things like Data Mining have less barrier to entry then something that requires much more background like Abstract Interpretation).
I had a great research experience at UW in my Junior/Senior year. My work even made it into the New York Times (fuzz testing Java's bytecode verifier at the time to find security vulnerabilities). But it was something you definitely had to look for.
The USNWR college ranking is for colleges, not graduate schools. The law, medicine, business, etc, schools have their own rankings. Berkeley does very well in those graduate school rankings (indeed, Berkeley and Stanford probably get the most top-3 USNWR placements of any school).
At the undergraduate level, however, the rankings measure something different. Essentially, they measure: 1) the test scores and grades of the incoming freshman class; 2) the reputation of the undergraduate program; 3) how much money (directly or indirectly) the school spends on undergraduates. As a big state school, Berkeley can't measure up in these categories.
Incidentally, I'm not sure the USNWR rankings are totally senseless in what they measure. For undergrad, I went to a big state research university with very highly ranked graduate engineering programs. For law school, I went to a private university whose undergraduate program was ranked in the top 20. While the two situations weren't directly comparable, I have to say that there is something to what USNWR measures. The experience of being a student at the big state MRU was terrible. Enormous freshman weed out classes, professors and TA's that didn't speak English, outdated facilities, etc. The experience at the private university was wonderful. Very supportive administrators, great facilities, approachable professors, etc. My law department was about the same size as my undergraduate major school, yet I got more personal attention from professors in my first semester of law school than my entire time in engineering school.
That said, attempts to game the rankings creates terrible incentives for universities. Pretty much the whole ranking boils down to how much money you can spend. You can buy high SAT's by spending more on scholarships, you can buy smaller class sizes by spending more on professors, etc. That works fine for well-established private schools with enormous endowments, but not so much for state MRU's. Berkeley's $3 billion endowment supports 35,000 students. Duke's $7-8 billion endowment (depending on how you count) supports 15,000 students.
I agree with you that the USNWR rankings are not senseless. The fact that Berkeley has the most graduate departments in the top 5 of any University but an undergrad ranking outside the top 20 actually tells you a lot about the undergrad experience at the university. It is a research powerhouse where a top undergrad will meet exceptional professors, but you also risk getting lost in a sea of indifference.
That said, we should also keep in mind what the USNWR rankings don't measure. Washington Monthly did a raking that had UCSD on top, and almost all large public research institutions did very well
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/intro...
The clever angle they took was to ask the question "what have you done for us lately?" USNWR is good for an undergrad asking "what can you do for me?" Washington Monthly figured that since all universities receive massive amounts of government funding, tax exempt endowments, and subsidy for tuition through federal loan guarantees, we should ask what they are contributing back. They placed an emphasis on social mobility (percentage of low income students), research (placing an emphasis on science and engineering), and social service.
It does get to the heart of the matter - the things that harm Berkeley in the USNWR ratings (large numbers of undergrads and a relatively low tuition in spite of decreasing support from the state) also enable Berkeley to enroll more low income students than the entire ivy league combined. Berkeley gets dinged for all the negative aspects of enrolling so many low income students relative to Harvard, but gets no credit.
Should it? It's all a matter of perspective - the problem is that because many other major publications don't consider rankings to be useful, USNWR is an almost unanswered voice pushing a ranking system that rewards small, wealthy, private undergraduate programs with relatively few low income students, and they're broadcasting it through a bullhorn into a quiet room.
Rankings are broken. I looked into it as part of a startup idea and even memorized the U.S. News 2012 rankings. The 2012 rankings were super easy to memorize because the schools are almost exactly where you'd expect them ranked based simply on pop-culture guesses. This even happened when lawyers were asked to rank the best law schools. Consider this fun excerpt from the New Yorker where they ranked a law school that didn't exist:
Those lawyers put Penn State in the middle of the pack, even though every fact they thought they knew about Penn State’s law school was an illusion, because in their minds Penn State is a middle-of-the-pack brand. (Penn State does have a law school today, by the way.) —http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_...
At least 20 years ago, Penn State was in the top 4 for geography. It has definitely never been in the middle of the pack when it comes to Earth Sciences.
Come on... it IS an east coast old money circle-jerk. And everyone knows it.
Why does the stench of power always smell the same?
It's all so predictable.
We all want to succeed. We all also want our friends and business partners to succeed. It's just that people who have lots of money and power are better at accomplishing that than the rest of us. We all help our friends out; only the scale is different.
That explains a lot actually. Powerful and simple explanation for the world we live in. However, pretty much the opposite of the so-called "trickle-down" mechanism... more like "trickle-up".