CWUR Global Rankings Came Out. Weighted heavily (though not entirely) towards faculty quality and research prowess, these are good indicators of where a school stands on the AAU pecking order.
UC is 204th but 79th in the USA and 47th among US publics. Since, however, eight medical/grad only public schools such as MD Anderson and UC-San Francisco are ranked separately and above UC, removing them would bump UC up to 71st among American comprehensive universities and 41st among publics.
Some comparisons. This includes leaving the med-only schools included. I'm not going to take the time to give public only rankings for all the schools since their formatting doesn't make that easy, and the overall and US public + private number is good enough to grasp where UC stands.
OHIO
OSU 40th/27th-US/12th Public
Case 142nd/61st/NA
UC 204th/79th/47th
Akron 677/170
KSU 687/173
BGSU UNRANKED
Miami 751/180
Toledo 765/183
Ohio 803/186
A couple of takeaways. UC is much closer to Case than most people would have guessed, but much further away from OSU also. Most importantly, there is clearly no other public university in Ohio other than UC in a position to assume the role of the second, comprehensive research university for the entire state. This backs up my contention that UC needs to not pursue Ono's illusory goal of being OSU's co-flagship and start focusing on separating itself fundamentally from all the universities in the system below it and that includes Chicago's safety school in the cornfields north of us.
How we stack up to the bottom publics in the AAU and the top contenders for an invitation.
Current Members
Missouri 190/73
UC 204th/79th/47th
Kansas 223/83/51
SUNY-Buffalo 273/97
Potential Members
Utah 83/48/27
North Carolina State 167/68
UCONN 193/75
UC 204th/79th/47th
Colorado State 244/86
UC-Riverside 245/87
Being better than the bottom AAU publics is clearly not good enough to merit an invite. Also, it's clear (and every other ranking backs this up) that Utah is obviously next one in with NCSU the likely second choice. Until Utah gets their invite, no other public in the country should be thinking that one's just around the corner for them. This latter fact, lays bare the degree to which Ono was talking **** to make himself look good when he said that we were knocking on the door and more importantly when he started making excuses around town that we didn't get in because OSU had all the Big Ten schools vote against us. We're not ready, and we need to do a lot more to get to where Utah is.