Here's the link for the World's Best Universities: World's Best Universities: Top 400 - US News and World Report
I've got two comments. The first is that I would have guessed that Berkeley would have scored a bit higher - maybe not top 10 but possibly top 20. The second is that I was interested to see a bunch of Asian universities in the top 50. We don't talk very much about Asisn schools and so I might need to do a bit of research on those listed. I didn't check out the criteria used for establishing the list. Did anything look off?
Berkeley can't really complain. Look at the subject specific rankings. #3 in Engineering, #4 in Arts and Humanities, and #5 in Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. Not bad. Berkeley drops to #28 on the general ranking, but it scores 100 (the highest possible score) on Academic Peer Review and Employer Review, and a very strong 97 on Citations per Faculty. International Faculty is 92, International Students is 40 and Student/Faculty ratio is 38. Personally, I think that academic and employer reviews and citation rankings are more important than having a higher percentage of foreign students. Student-faculty ratio probably doesn't impact graduate students very much.
How come I don't see University of Phoenix on the list. I see University of Phoenix everywhere on the Internet.
One thing that looked off to me was the relative weakness of European universities, apart from the UK. The UK, on the other hand, looks like it might have received some favoritism. Everyone knows that Britain has world-class universities, but head and shoulders above all the rest of Europe? Somehow I doubt it. I also got the impression that Chinese universities might have received some favoritism. It looks like pretty much every university in Hong Kong was included the world's best 400 list, which I think might be a stretch. It seems that USNews is publicizing rankings originally produced by a London/Singapore company called 'QS'. I get the impression that it's aimed at attracting international students, particularly from Asia where comparative rankings are very big deal. All in all, I think that I agree with Lukeness and don't take it very seriously. QS: The world's leading network for top careers and education