UCLA beats out Cal for top spot in public college rankings
Five of 10 highest-ranked public schools in nation are located in California
After drawing even last year, UCLA dethroned UC Berkeley in the latest US News & World Report rankings as the best public university in the country.
The rankings — released Monday and widely watched by prospective students, their families and the colleges themselves — consider factors like graduation rate and test scores. This year, they also considered how well schools do when it comes to graduating high proportions of low-income students, a measure that helped boost the University of California’s overall standing. Highly competitive, the elite system does a better job than many of its competitors when it comes to enrolling and serving the state’s poorer students.
Of the top 10 best public schools, five are located in California. Cal came in second after UCLA. The University of Virginia ranks third, the Uni-
versity of Michigan-Ann Arbor ranks fourth, and UC Santa Barbara and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill are tied for fifth. UC Irvine and UC
Davis also make the top 10. UC Santa Cruz takes the 26th spot.
Schools have long heralded low acceptance rates that in recent years have creeped below 5 percent at the nation’s most selective colleges. But this year, U.S. News & World Report eliminated acceptance rate
as a factor and reduced the weight given to test scores in favor of focusing more on student outcomes. The shift comes as families and even government officials have questioned the value of higher education in recent years, years that have been marked by both ballooning student debt and
tuition hikes. (For the second year, the report includes postgraduate salary information drawn from PayScale, but the data is not a factor in the rankings themselves.)
Overall, East Coast schools continue to dominate the list of best national universities, with Princeton once again taking the top spot. Harvard ranks second, while Columbia, MIT, the University of Chicago and Yale tie for third. Stanford, which last year tied for fifth, fell two spots to seventh. (UCLA ties Washington
University in St. Louis for spot 19 on that list, while UC Berkeley joins Georgetown and the University of Southern California at spot 22.)
Despite the slip, the ranking still makes Stanford the highest-rated West Coast school on the list, and the university has also been honored as the fifth most innovative school.
Locally, several other universities performed well in the report’s various rankings. For the first time in 15 years, Santa Clara University takes the top spot among regional universities in the western U.S., earning points for small classes and a high graduation rate. Mills College in Oakland, which has undergone significant restructuring in recent years, comes in at seven on the same list, just ahead of St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga, which ties for eighth. San Jose State University ranks 33rd among regional universities in the west, and 18th among the best colleges for veterans.
Stanford, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University and the University of the Pacific in Stockton garnered notice in the rankings for having high levels of campus ethnic diversity.