Membership in the National Academy of Sciences, 2011
Here's another measure of overall research university quality: membership in the National Academy of Sciences, whose election procedures appear to be somewhat less corrupt than those of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. But NAS membership is primarily a measure of distinction in the natural sciences, plus some aspects of the social sciences. Any campus with a medical school is at a big advantage, since there are several categories of membership that are largely filled by medical school faculty. (An example: UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas has even more NAS members than the entire UT Austin campus, which has no medical school. UC San Francisco is another example.) Universities without a medical school are marked with an * (as one can see, Harvard and Stanford lead Berkeley and MIT primarily because of the medical school difference). Universities with very top medical schools, besides Harvard, Stanford and UC San Francisco, include Washington/Seattle, Johns Hopkins, Penn, Duke, and Wash U/St. Louis.
1. Harvard University (168)
2. Stanford University (134)
*3. University of California, Berkeley (133)
*4. Massachussetts Institute of Technology (117)
*5. Princeton University (78)
*6. California Institute of Technology (71)
7. University of California, San Diego (69)
8. Yale University (60)
9. Columbia University (48)
10. University of Washington, Seattle (45)
