And the Winner is . . .

UC Berkeley Sather Tower

So my elitest tendencies are going to be assuaged.  My daughter has been admitted to and will attend the University of California  at  Berkeley.  UC Berkeley is ranked number 2 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, surpassed only by Harvard.

ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published on the web.

The old war horse, US News and World Report,  ranks Berkeley number 1 in national public universities, number 6 in undergrad education and 22 overall of national universities, based on a complicated methodology that you can find here (for world universities) and here  (for colleges) but which includes quality of the faculty in terms of prestige of PhDs, selectivity, assessment by peers at comparable institutions, class size and graduation rate.

Not too shabby for a public university.  All for roughly $12,000 in tuition a year. (assuming an 8% hike from 2010 tuition.) Kudos to my lovely daughter for her accomplishments (and to her boyfriend who also was admitted with  his own stellar record!)