IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
UC Riverside ranked 121st among all colleges and universities in the United States, according to U.S. News and World Reports’ yearly ranking of U.S. colleges.
UC Riverside was tied with the University of Arizona in the overall category, and both schools tied at 58 among public universities.
In 2014, UC Riverside tied for 113th among all colleges and universities in the United States, so it dropped eight places, but Chancellor Kim Wilcox downplayed that drop off.
“We in the last several decades here in the United States have kind of gotten in the games of comparing institutions,” Wilcox said in a statement. “Unfortunately, so many of those measures have been widely described as backward looking.”
Schools are often ranked by the size of their endowment or the number of student applicants they turn away, neither one of which is necessarily a good way to jude a college or university, Wilcox believes.
“The size of your endowment is often times a matter of how long you’ve been around,” Wilcox said. “If you’ve been around for 100 years, you could save up a lot more money than a university like UCR.”
No UC schools made the top 10 of overall universities, but UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine and UC San Diego made the list of top 10 public universities.
