US News and World’s Report College Rankings, 2015, separates a list of public universities. Here are California Universities in the rankings.
Since rankings don’t really give the relative strengths in the criteria used, I also include in parentheses the overall score for each University.
1 UC Berkeley (79)
2 tie UCLA with U. Virginia (76)
8 UC San Diego (65)
9 UC Davis (64)
10 UC Santa Barbara (63)
11 tie UC Irvine with U. Illinois – Urbana-Champaign (62)
35 tie UC Santa Cruz (49)
55 tie UC Riverside (43)
78 tie San Diego State University (34)
Another way to say this is that UC takes one and two. Also 5 of the top 10 are UC campuses, and UC Irvine is tied for eleventh.
The overall score of UCLA is close to that of UCB. The overall scores of the next four UC campuses are also sequential in overall scores.
The student to teacher ratio for the UC campuses is mostly quoted as 17:1. That for San Diego State University is 28:1, but tuition is about half the cost of the UC campuses.