If you want the best education and you are rich or are a non-Asian minority born with your heart outside of your body, go to Princeton. If you are Asian and rich, go to Caltech.

If you are none of the above, but still smart enough to get into a top school, U.C. Berkeley is the best place to be for the 17th straight year, according to US News  &  World Report rankings, which mean quite a lot to schools in the top 20 and little to anyone else. Berkeley again placed 20th overall and, since it is a public university, its tuition and fees are low compared to Caltech and Stanford, at least if you live in the state.

What does that say about US schools compared to colleges worldwide when Berkeley can be 20th? Quite a lot, actually. Texas alone has five times as many world-caliber universities as the entire country of France does. Education ain't cheap, that is the downside to Congress declaring a college education a 'right' over 20 years ago and giving out unlimited student loans which schools have happily cashed. As a result, we now spend 60% more to put each student through college than the average OECD country does but, like our medical care, quality outweighs cost unless you can't afford it.

US News refuses to disclose its secret sauce for these rankings, they only say their method “uses quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality, and it’s based on our researched view of what matters in education” - which means absolutely nothing to anyone, but if you are number one, the method doesn't matter.

Without magical rankings by a magazine, how else could we know Berkeley is a good school? The Cal football team consistently has the lowest graduation rate for athletes in its conference. Other colleges try to criticize that as a weakness - that Cal is letting in anyone who can play nose tackle on third and long situations (which happens a lot, if you watch their games) - but we know that isn't true or they wouldn't have started off 1-7 last season.  What the graduation rate really means is that Berkeley is not letting people slide just because they have an athletic scholarship.

Six other California public schools also placed quite highly, which shows us where all our tax dollars go - our education spending alone exceeds the GDP of the entire country of Bulgaria, and yet everyone in the system says they are underpaid.