UCLA, USC tied again in magazine ranks

UCLA and USC were tied for the third time in four years in the closely watched rankings of national universities compiled by U.S. News & World Report.

The two Los Angeles campuses were in a threeway tie at 23rd with Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, according to the listing released Wednesday. Last year, UCLA was at 23rd with the University of Virginia, and USC was at 25th with Carnegie-Mellon. The year before that, they were in a five-way tie for the 23rd spot, and in 2012 they were among three ranked 24th.

The UC system had six campuses among the top 50 national universities, public or private, this year:

UC Berkeley came in 20th, UC Santa Barbara was tied at 37th with Case Western Reserve of Ohio, UC Irvine and UC San Diego shared the 39th spot, and UC Davis was tied for 41st with five other universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Boston University.

Berkeley also was listed as the top public university in the U.S., a title it has often achieved, and UCLA was second, followed by the University of Virginia, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Princeton University was listed as the best university in the nation, followed by Harvard and Yale; Columbia, Stanford and the University of Chicago, tied for fourth; then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania; and a tie for 10th between Caltech and Johns Hopkins.

In a separate list, five schools in the Claremont Colleges consortium were ranked among the top 40 liberal arts colleges that draw a national base: Pomona College, tied at fourth with Bowdoin, Middlebury and Wellesley; Claremont McKenna, tied for ninth with Davidson and the U.S. Naval Academy; Harvey Mudd, tied for 14th with four other schools; Scripps, sharing 29th with two others; and Pitzer, at 36th.

The top national liberal arts colleges on the list were Williams in first place, followed by Amherst and Swarthmore. L.A.’s Occidental College shared 43rd with Trinity in Connecticut.

The listing uses such criteria as students’ SAT scores, admissions competitiveness, schools’ financial resources, alumni giving rates, graduation rates and student-faculty ratios. It has been criticized for giving too much credence to schools’ wealth and selectivity in admissions, and critics allege that the data can be manipulated by colleges.

Still, parents, students and school governing boards track it carefully.