While most of the time being told you’re the best at something is an accomplishment to be proud of, it’s hard to be happy about the hollow meaning behind UC Berkeley’s position in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings.
Yet again, U.S. News awarded UC Berkeley the distinction of being the best public university in the United States. And proud as one might be of this achievement, the U.S. News rankings are really meaningless distinctions that primarily affirm northeast private universities’ status as the upper crust of American higher education.
While there is no doubt that UC Berkeley as well as Harvard, Princeton and so on are elite institutions, we don’t need an arbitrary metric to prove that’s the case. The inane numbers game U.S. News is playing serves only to devalue what makes these universities great. The diverse opportunities available to anyone and a commitment to building a healthy campus community inclusive of a wide variety of students are what create a meaningful college experience. Treating these colleges as prestige factories that are worth only as much as the degrees they award has noxious side effects, and it explains part of what makes applying to college such a universally loathed experience.
And U.S. News apparently has no illusions about this either.
Its methodology barely addresses affordability as a measure of a college’s worth, and subjective values such as average class size and SAT/ACT scores are given excessive weight. The size of a lecture hall doesn’t diminish the quality of the professor delivering the lecture, and lack of access to pricey standardized-test tutors doesn’t mean those students are any less bright. These are not measures designed to gauge the quality of an education but rather to build boxes in which to sort certain kinds of schools and the social status attached to them.
What makes UC Berkeley truly great — its high number of Pell Grant recipients and its commitment to providing a low-cost public education, to name a couple of reasons — invariably gets lost in the U.S. News metric that marks alumni giving and per-pupil spending among the most critical factors in the creation of a “top university.”
UC Berkeley’s recognition as a top public school is deserved, but the grounds on and manner by which U.S. News comes to this conclusion are faulty.