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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Berkeley
Michigan
UCLA
UVA
UNC CH
UCSD
Wisconsin
Illinois
U Washington
College of W&M[/quote]

If you are an undergraduate, though, you should probably consider how much the school is committed to undergraduate education and experience.  If you re-rank these schools by Niche undergraduate alumni ratings of "did I get my money's worth?", it looks like this:

College of W&M
UNC CH
Michigan
Wisconsin
UVA
Illinois
UCLA
UCSD
Berkeley
U Washington

Public universities have limited resources, so even for a school like Berkeley, it is difficult to be great at everything.  
[/quote]

Michigan has over a 12 billion dollar endowment, plus state funding. It is not lacking for resources.   Michigan is considered great at just about everything they offer academically.  Among privates; only Stanford and perhaps MIT, Princeton, and Cornell can say that. [/quote]

Nearly a third of Michigan's endowment belongs to the healthcare system and has nothing to do with undergraduate education.  For the remaining part, a significant chunk is going to belong to the Law School, Ross, etc.  They don't share with undergraduate programs.  It is an unfair comparison, but if you compare Michigan to Princeton, as you did, you will see that Princeton has an endowment of $27B with no medical system, no law school or business school, and only 8,600 students.  Michigan has 46,000 students.  So Princeton's endowment is 12X as large as Michigan's on a per student basis, and if you factor the points I made above, the difference is even more significant than that.

Universities can and do divert money from undergraduates to fund research and graduate education (or from humanities programs to STEM programs, etc.).  You are assuming resources are evenly allocated and they are not.[/quote]

Considering the fact that Michigan is  strong to excellent across all disciplines that it offers, it makes it even more impressive that ONLY 8 billion is reserved for those areas. I wasn’t comparing the size of Michigan’s endowment compared to Princeton’s endowment.   More the fact that it does so many things so well.  Perhaps Princeton was a bad example as the school’s offerings are much more limited.[/quote]

The point in question was whether Michigan lacks comparable resources compared to the private schools cited.  It might come close with Cornell, but it would not be close compared to MIT, Princeton, and Stanford.  The "ONLY $8 billion" endowment you cite is spread across 46,000 students, and it is probably unevenly very unevenly distributed across them since the majority of endowment funds are restricted by the donor as to purpose.  On a per student basis, that is far below what top private schools have.

I am not disputing that Michigan is relatively strong across the board.   [/quote]

MIT, Princeton, and Stanford are among the five best colleges in the US. That is not the point. My point was that Michigan does more with less than most top private universities. [/quote]

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