I suspect the answer is: 1) funding. 2) funding, and 3) funding - whether public or private.
Because university rankings are total BS, and they only matter to people in the US.
Somehow Care Bear U did not make the list.
From the Newsweek link:
Yep, sure sounds like only Americans care about such things. (And in any case, are you saying that the methodologies are deliberately skewed to keep an American audience happy?)
My own Spanish “college” was officially owned by a Foundation, to which one can make donations. They put up a group of plaques with donor’s names on a wall while I was there; this was people or companies which have made special donations to the foundation (not just regular “partners”). I’m going by memory, but there were maybe 150 plaques, about the size of the ones you use to mark mailboxes in an apartment building. Almost 1/3 were blank, about 1/3 of the ones with names were “anonymous”.
Being a Science school, it charges more than a Letters or Art school (Art schools charge as much as Letters, but the expenses in materials are higher). Being private, it charges more than a public school. Still, one of the principles applied was “you break it, you pay for it,” and one of the sources of income was inflating the end-of-year materials bill. At least the inflation was sort of applied across the board and you did pay more if you’d broken more stuff 
The whole notion of having a sports pavillion named after a donor still feels funny. Heck, the notion of having a sports pavillion feels funny!
“Openness and diversity”? Well, Spanish universities don’t haved any kind of positive discrimination programs, certainly. Never saw the need for any; if your grade is high enough to make the cut, you’re in. The Spanish census does not distinguish people by color, ethnicity or national origin, it’s an alien notion. Alien as in “almost from outer space.”
The cut depends on class size, college and carrera and varies by year. Some majors are considered “self selective”: they’ll take in anybody who’s got his HS certificate, because they know that anybody who’s still there come February is going to stay, and often they’re not the ones with the best grades. Others have numerus clausus: there’s X spaces in first year, so the X applicants with the best GPA are in. Notice that there’s no discrimination about what courses you took: I was Chem Eng and one of my classmates was from the Pure Letters track (he’d planned on going to law school until he realized that all his elder cousins were doing exactly that). My own school is one of the few that keep the old system of having a “selective first year”; there’s 80 spaces in second year, you have two school years to pass first completely; if you don’t pass in two tries, you’re out (you can ask for a third try, which is granted on grounds of “hey, if you’re that much of a masochist, we got whips”); the first year class (half of which is 2nd-try students) is about 240.
My dissertation director went to the University of Pittsburgh and tells the following story: Pittsburgh succeeded, while he was there, in attracting a very big name in the field. When asked why he came to U of P when he was also being offered a position by Oxford, he replied, “Oh, there was the small matter of Pittsburgh offering me twice the salary of Oxford.” So again, it comes down to money. As a general rule, US universities have it in far larger piles than do non-US universities.
Woah hey now! I’m not saying US universities are “good” or “better” because there are foreigners–I’m aware that there are foreigners attending school in many nations around the world. I’m saying that, if you’re picking a country to go to school in, you don’t care about “x top schools per y million people”, you care about “USA x top schools, Canada y top schools, Switzerland z top schools”. In the United States you can complete each level of higher education under different instructors in extremely different environments while traveling an incredibly vast expanse of land without having to convert your degrees, learn a new language or (for the most part) retake classes you’ve already passed a handful of times at the college level. I’m not saying that’s “good” or “bad” or “better” or “worse” than anywhere else–what I’m saying is, if all of those things are important to you (as opposed to the affordable and equally desirable education offered by many European universities, or, for example, the multilingual immersive environment of studying in Catalonia or Jerusalem), as a package, you’re going to look for the place that offers that package and you may not give a damn if a much smaller country with a different system offers 17 world-class schools per man, woman, child and cat.
I put parentheses around “US” because I had no idea whether or not it was the case elsewhere. I was speaking from personal experience, not making the provincial statement you seemed to want me to say.
I think it’s fair to say that Hebrew University in Jerusalem (beautiful campus, BTW) is still reaping the benefits, at least.
fetus, I’m having problems understanding your first paragraph, perhaps because the Spanish way of choosing a university is so different from the US way.
In Spain there’s two basic ways of choosing a university, “by major” or “must stay at home.” In the US, since it’s generally seen as “socially unacceptable” to live with your parents while in college, the second option doesn’t have the huge economic weight it has in Spain.
By major: you choose what major you want. Then you find out which places offer it. Then you figure out to which may you be able to get in with your GPA. If the answer is “look up ‘snowball in hell’,” take a look at similar majors; if no snowballs are involved, that’s when you start looking for stuff like “do I have relatives with whom I could stay for the first year” and “best reputations for this particular major.” There’s some majors you can study in only one place in the whole country, making the whole “best school” point moot. I’m Chem Eng: from 1914 to 1992, the only place where you could study Chem Eng was— my school. So our rivalry wasn’t with other schools, it was with them reg’lar Chemists and with Industrial Engineers (we’re natural allies of Physicists, on grounds of having the same two natural enemies).
By stay at home: self-evident. Pray that there’s something you like offered in the uni or unis you have handy. Quality doesn’t matter; if you’re from Zaragoza, you want to study Business Law and your parents say “we can’t send you to college out of town,” then you will by Jove be studying Business Law in Zaragoza and claiming that those guys from Deusto are just a bunch of snobs.
Right now I’m looking at getting a Licenciatura in Translation and Interpretation. I’ve choosen which school to apply to based on where it’s located, first; two of the five unis in that town offer that major; I intend to apply to the uni which doesn’t have a bad rap based on politics.
Ok I think the Newsweek rankings are total BS too but I think diversity is really important in choosing a college.
I am a minority and I would feel uneasy about going to a university that is 99% white. I consciously chose a diverse campus because I grew up in affluent, upper class suburbia and I knew there more to life than country clubs and SUV’s. It was in college that I was able to meet lots of people from different cultures and it really opened my eyes. Through college, I made my first Muslim friends, my first Japanese friends, my first foreign-born friends, and I’m sure many others I fail to remember.