Some of the top US universities do take far more students, they just don't show up at the top of US News rankings. UC Berkeley, for example, enrolls 30,853 unde

Some of the top US universities do take far more students, they just don't show up at the top of US News rankings. UC Berkeley, for example, enrolls 30,853 undergraduates and 11,666 graduate students[1], but isn't in the top 20 on the USnoozeAndWorldDistort rankings. https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers https://www.berkeley.edu/about/bythenumbers Interestingly, the elite research universities on your list above do enroll comparable numbers of graduate students to Berkeley (or Michigan, UCLA). The big difference is in the undergraduate enrollment. Also interesting is the way the list shuffles up when you consider top PhD programs or top science and engineering programs. Many of the schools in the top 10 on the US News List are replaced by top-50 schools with a much larger representation of public universities. Berkeley, for instance, by many measurements, has more top-5 PhD programs (a good representation of department strength in research) than any other university, including Harvard and Stanford. Michigan isn't far behind (and keep in mind, Berkeley's med school is split off into UCSF). Even US News's engineering school rankings, which I do think overwhelmingly favor very small private universities with large endowments, show this trend. https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering... There are privates on there (Stanford, MIT, Columbia), but now you have Berkeley, Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue, University of Illinois, and UC San Diego and Texas at Austin at the 11th spot. One thing the US News report rankings don't do is reward scale, but scale does matter. UCLA, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire Ivy League combined. Until recently, this was true of Berkeley as well, and numbers are still much much higher there - not just as a percentage, but in absolute numbers. Private universities receive a lot of subsidies and favorable tax treatment on the grounds that they provide a public good - personally, I'm not enthusiastic about providing this subsidy to universities with massive endowments that enroll a tiny number of students.