Rumors of the University of California's decline seem to have been greatly exaggerated to judge by the results of a National Research Council study of doctoral programs in the United States, released in September.
Faculty and administrators who took a universitywide view were beaming with pride last month as they pored over the figures contained in the 740-page NRC study, meticulously constructed and four years in the making. Individual campuses and departments throughout the University had plenty to celebrate too, as 78 of UC's programs -- more than a third of those rated -- ranked in the top 10 in their fields and 119 ranked in the top 20. Moreover, this judgment came from a group whose opinion matters greatly: research faculty from across the country.
"The study clearly documents UC's standing as the nation's best comprehensive public university with strong programs across the breadth and depth of all research areas, said UC President Jack Peltason in commenting on the study's findings. "No other university system comes close to achieving [UC's] level of quality over such a wide range of disciplines over so many campuses."
The study contains a raft of objective measures of doctoral program quality: the number of citations and awards and grants received by program faculty, for example. But it was the faculty ratings that garnered the most attention, seemingly because, in the words of UC San Diego Vice-Chancellor for Research Richard Attiyeh, they provide a "holistic" summation of what faculty across the country think of a given program.
Plenty of questions could be asked about the meaning of the survey: Whether its reputational component is measuring the past rather than the present; whether this is a particular limitation in UC's case, since the last survey respondents finished their ratings in the fall of 1993 (just as VERIP III was taking hold); and whether such reputational surveys are measuring something real in the first place. Whatever its limitations, however, all parties were agreed that the NRC study is the best of its kind and thus the most reliable guide that exists as to how the UC's doctoral programs stack up.
"The number of people rating each program was sufficiently large that this provides some reliability in terms of the reputations of the programs," says Attiyeh. In terms of UC after VERIP, he says, "I don't think the fall-off would be as great as you might think by looking at the number of people who've retired; a lot of those faculty are still involved in research at UC," he says, adding that UCSD, at least, has also done very well in recruiting in the last few years.
The NRC report surveyed 3,634 research-doctoral programs in 41 fields at 274 universities across the country. Almost 8,000 faculty rated programs along two lines: the "scholarly quality of program faculty" and "effectiveness in educating research scholars/scientists."
By almost any of the study's reputational measures, UC goes from one strength to another. Eight of its programs were rated number-one in the country on the "scholarly quality" dimension. (Chemistry, English, German, mathematics and statistics at Berkeley; neurosciences and oceanography at San Diego; and biochemistry/molecular biology at San Francisco.) Thirty-four UC programs ranked 2-5 in this measure, 37 ranked 6-10, and 41 ranked 11-20.
In terms of individual campuses, the surveys results suggested that Berkeley should perhaps have the word "mighty" placed in front of its official name: of the campus' 37 doctoral programs, 36 were ranked in the top 10. If number of programs in the top-10 is used as the ranking criterion, Berkeley is first in the nation. The average rating of its programs on the study's five-point reputational scale placed it just a shade behind MIT (and a shade ahead of Harvard) in the rank-order of all such universities in the country. Meanwhile, number-10 on this list was San Diego and number-12 was UCLA. When a ranking of this sort is limited to public universities, UC takes 5 of the top 20 slots, with Berkeley, San Diego being 1-2, UCLA tied for third with Michigan, Irvine 11th and Davis tied for 16th with Penn State.
Berkeley is accustomed to top rankings, but the results of the survey were a sign of a notable advance for San Diego, which now seems to be judged by faculty across the country as having arrived in the ranks of America's elite universities.