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Also, the California schools all vote for eachother (yes, that's how this shite works). I heard this straight from a dude who taught at one of the UC campuses. He says they're not bad schools and all, but aside from Berkely and UCLA, they're pretty average. From what I can tell, there are only a handful of public schools that can really call themselves "elite" regarding educational quality and opportunities (big emphasis on the latter). Those schools would be, in no particular order: Berkely, UVA, Michigan, Texas, Florida, and UCLA with a few schools like Georgia, Wisconsin, TAMU, and others hanging in there as "bottom of the top."

Worth noting that on the whole the UC system is in a slow decline while the SEC schools (especially the Eastern division schools and Bama) are gradually on the rise in terms of academic quality. Bama and Auburn offer by far the most generous pure merit-aid packages, and more importantly they only use statistics instead of the arbitrary "soft factors" that UGA, UF, and Vandy offer.

Someone pointed out that the "averages" arn't so important and I think there's a lot to be said for that. A quick glance at the numbers would indicate that UGA, UF, and Vandy are light years ahead of the rest w/ respect to test scores... in reality, their averages are skewed way to the right by Honors programs. I think the reason Bama has jumped so much in the academic rankings is because of its emphasis on attracting kids to their two Honors programs.