Top 10 public "ranking"?

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05/16/2026 19:40

Subject: Re:Top 10 public "ranking"?

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Anonymous

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Anonymous wrote:My kid is at Davis. Pleasantly surprised that that the faculty in Econ/poly sci have been fantastic. He’s liked the TAs. He’s had no problems registering or finding housing for sophomore year. He’s active in several orgs and made it onto a competitive academic team as a freshman. There is a wide gap academically between the Bay Area kids and other in state kids/OOS kids. International kids are more varied. Bay Area kids have to be tippy top to get in and therefore have an advantage in being able to navigate the research orientation of the UCs. He has a wide group of friends including a few OOS kids with low SATs. Once you are in college, you don’t need to only associate with people who scored over 1500 on the SAT. There will be plenty high scorers in upper division economics , animal science, engineering, bio, poly sci , chem etc etc.

Davis has been a top national level public school and globally recognized long before any methodology changes in the rankings. If it makes the anti UC poster feel better, his SAT was 1560, one sitting no super score.

CA public higher education is different from other states. UC is dedicated to research, graduate level studies and preparing undergraduates for graduate or professional level schools, scholarship and research. CA states are dedicated are dedicated to four year degrees with the exception being education. It is more vocational, applied and career focused. If you want to be an accountant, nurse, business administrator, teacher etc you would go to Cal State. This split has allowed the UCs to heavily invest in research heavy departments and influences the lack of hand holding or spoon feeding approach. It’s also allowed Cal States to focus more on teaching and doing.

Love it! UC Berkeley has also been viewed as a top university for many decades now - here in the U.S. and globally, too. Distractions like social mobility scores, FGLI, Pell Grant status, and whatever else critics have to offer cannot erase decades of rankings that didn’t rely on those factors.

We’re very fortunate to have one Stanford graduate, with another currently at Stanford and our youngest currently at UC Berkeley. Our UC “outlier” is a one-and-done 1600 kid who (I suspect) will end up vectoring well beyond the achievement arc of his older siblings.

Most of his friends, frat brothers, and club sport teammates are exceptional. In many respects, far more impressive than the friends and teammates we’ve met over the years through our other children at Stanford.

The anti-UC poster is apparently a disgruntled former TA from a UC campus. Whatever their experience may have been, their perseveration with amplifying their hostility toward the UC system is an unhealthy obsession, to be honest.

Times change...it's Test Blind now. Not great. Not sure how you don't see that. But keep living in the past.

Do you seriously think that Test Optional schools are not taking on fewer lower performers than coveted publics like those in the UC system?

At least with the test blind format, the UC system was forced (by its Regents) to develop an effective holistic review system that seeks to construct high quality classes of high achievers.

The rest of the country just buried their head in the sand with the test optional format, relying only on grade inflated applicants and knowing that low performers were getting in - and in abundant numbers.

I’ll put the Cal or UCLA cohorts up against any cohort from Cornell, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, any other public, and any SLAC … and they will blow every one of those schools away on any standardized test.

The fact that it’s not required doesn’t lead to the conclusion you think it does - in fact, PLENTY of 1600 and 36 scorers call the UC system home and I’d happily wager that the test optional format has littered the aforementioned schools with far more low performers.

Pure unadulterated speculation. The fact is you have zero data. Your screed is nothing but a fantasy.

Really? The absence of data didn’t seem to matter when you were asserting that UC students lack top test scores. Right?

You jumped from test blind to low performers pretty easily without data.

By the way, the research at UT (among all other data on the subject) is my basis for doubting that the test optional format is at least as flawed at the test blind format in weeding out low performers.

What’s your data-driven basis for doubting that the leader of the top publics in America is no longer Cal or UCLA. Remember, show data.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-12-14/uc-admissions-sat-standardized-tests

The exit data for the class of 2025 isn't available yet but by all accounts there were some speedbumps in getting the test blind students up to speed.

The MCAT/LSAT/GMAT/GRE data will become available at some point and by all accounts these classes are less talented than prior classes.