Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:UVA has held extraordinarily steady in the US News rankings for years and years and years despite all of the changes in its methodology. It can’t really get much higher as a practical matter because it’s a public school already nipping at the heels of top privates. Competing with the CA schools is daunting. UC-Berkeley and UCLA are the flagship universities of the state with by far the largest population—5 times as many people as Virginia—and Michigan is an outlier.
Every year when the rankings come out posters predict UVA’s imminent demise but every year the ranking is basically the same.
UCLA and Berkeley (and other UCs) rose recently with the recent change in metodology. They have a relatively high percentage of Pell recipient (California has one of the highest poverty rates) and very high research. These replaced criteria where the UCs lagged like student faculty ratios and alumni giving rates. They have relatively high faculty salaries, but if you factor that the cost of living in California is 150% of the national average it is not as good, particularly for younger faculty.