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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

These three are clearly at the same academic level. Way below Stanford and Caltech though.

19: UCLA 22: Berkeley (tie) 22: USC (tie)

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...

Just so you know, no one takes USNWR rankings seriously -- it's well-known that public schools are dinged due to lower endowments and higher student counts. To wit, the idea that Berkeley is academically comparable to USC is a joke.

Feel free to share whatever ranking validates you.

Regardless of rankings, I'm definitely jealous of USC's alumni network. It's leagues above UCLA/Berkeley (rivaled probably only by Stanford).

Maybe at the graduate level Berkeley should be ranked higher but how are public schools dinged? UCLA has an endowment almost as high as USC’s with comparable student body size. Thinking public schools are dinged because they’re poor is factually wrong.

Also, Berkeley is about where it would be given its acceptance standards and standardized scores outside of EECS are among the lowest in the top 25. The only school where it’s actually getting easier to be accepted year after year.

The student bodies aren't all that comparable. Although they both have 45k students, USC has twice as many graduate students as UCLA and they even outnumber the undergrads.

But really, its pretty foolish to compare an entire school to another. A given program against another given program? Sure. There are fields that USC and UCLA each might be at the top of, and there are fields where they are going to be much worse. That's the real rub with these rankings, combining and binning aspects of schools that aren't related at all. The only thing that's worth looking at is the rigor or research output of a specific program.

All are top 10 in engineering: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering...

This jives with engineering industries, where USC is a consistent producer of aerospace/mechanical and tech talent. USC is considered a top school in many other research fields as well.

I think it's more likely that you actually know very little about academics at these institutions.

Disclaimer: I work at UPenn (doing research!) and went to USC.

As far as ranking the quality of colleges, USNews is about as garbage as you can get. Anybody with any shred of awareness of what those three schools are would not rank them anywhere near each other.

I love posts like this, "I don't like your data, it is bad, and I have none"

All lists are lame, do you like Niche? UCLA is 29, USC is 20. UCLA has an acceptance rate of 16%, USC 17%. USC SAT range is 1300-1500, UCLA is 1220-1450

I was responding to the poster who said the schools weren't academically comparable. they obviously are shockingly similar. Don't know or care which is "better". But only a radical partisan would argue they aren't similar.

If you want to get into data then at least cite the most recent numbers. I'm not going to bother doing the due diligence you should have done on your numbers, but at least for the USC acceptance rank, the most recent figure is 11%.

Hey, that's a great number, thanks for sharing it. It helps make my point. USC acceptance rate is now better than UCLA, so it is ludicrous to say it is not comparable to schools like UCLA.

How much due diligence do I you think I owe you in a comment on HN? If you google USC acceptance rate, the primary result is 16.6%. I was referring to Niche rankings, which says 17%. I think having a source and an accurate (albeit a couple years old) number is better than 99% of comments. So maybe you believe you are entitled to more, but if so, then maybe you should lead by example and share more data yourself instead of just sniping.

That’s measuring the quality of applicants, not the quality of the school. The subjects you are measuring the school by haven’t even spent their first day in class. A little premature to judge the quality of a product that has yet to be delivered.

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