WOW! USC has made a huge comeback in college rankings, beating University of Michigan, Could UCLA be next?

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It's interesting to me that people still put so much stock in college ranking these considering you really cannot do much with a BS/BA degree anymore. With the exception of a few fields (engineering, CS, and maybe accounting), one needs a graduate degree to get "high-end" jobs these days. Do not get me wrong, going to Harvard, MIT, or Princeton is great but not if it results in having one be down $100,000+ in student loan debt. To me, it is much better to go to a decent school, do well, and not break the piggy bank while doing it. Save the student loan debt for grad/professional school.
 
My perspective as a USC engineering student who attended in the 80s and returned to finish in the late 90s:

USC Engineering was always tough, but the GEs were a joke in the 80s.

sometime in the mid 90s USC revamped the GE currciulum after Harvard's. Consequently GE's are brutal. Whe I returned I had to study as much for a Philospophy class as I did for an Operating Systems class. No joke.

USC gives out many many partial and fullride academic merit scholarships, regardless of need. Stanford + Ivies only give need-based aid - no merit aid.

USC School of Engineering pulled in some huge donations, including $50 mil from co-found of Qualcomm (Andrew Viterbi) to name the school. He got his USC PhD working at JPL during the Apollo program.

US Military gave $$$ to USC for Integrated Multimedia Research Center.

USC still maintains internet DNS system at their Information Sciences Institute.

Dr. Adelman (the "A" in RSA) won the Turing award for DNA computers.

Mark Stevens of Sequoia Capital gave $25M for the first university-based Center for Technology Commercialization.

EVERY major tech company hires from USC, as their EE/CE/CS depts are top notch.

The social atmosphere provides a huge advantage in a corporate setting. I've seen this against my colleagues who went to State schools/Ivies/Stanford. This is perhaps the bigest value of USC -learning how to be a leader in the midst of a cutthroat social environment.

Incredible new 24 hr library + new residence halls have really boosted the undergrad experience. USC is a plush undergrad experience.

Resurgence of football helps but is mostly directed to older alumni.

When I worked a USC recruiting event in Boston a few years back we had a room at the hotel right next to Columbia's session. USC attracted more kids than Columbia to the info sessions which ran concurrently, and the vast majority of the USC session attendees were planning on majoring in CS/EE.



The classic advice I got from old fart USC grads in my neighborhood growing up in Pasadena still holds true: 4 out of eevry 5 women are attractive. The 5th goes to Stanford.
 
The difference between the top 14 and top 20 is pretty much irrelevant. Everyone has anedoctal evidence of somebody who attended College X and is a genius, and another person who attended College Y and is a buffoon, regardless of school rankings. YMMV certainly applies when it comes to educational experience. Whether its undergrad, grad, or particular programs, there's top tier, good schools, and everyone else. Everything else is just biases, imo.



I am not an alumnus of either and after reviewing/interviewing through countless hundreds of resumes from UCLA and USC in the past, quite frankly I pretty much view them equally. A top top tier univ gets you noticed. I would take a second look at any resume that said Harvard, Stanford, or a very specific program depending on the nature of the work. The rest of the good schools all fall into a batch I would certainly consider, but do not have a relative opinion amongst them. At that point, it's up to everything else on the resume <em>aside from the school</em>, i.e. relevant work experience, relevant coursework, or even simply how well your resume is presented. I can not imagine UCLA, USC, Cal, etc's of the world being <em>the</em> deciding factor.
 
[quote author="acpme" date=1253848852]The difference between the top 14 and top 20 is pretty much irrelevant. Everyone has anedoctal evidence of somebody who attended College X and is a genius, and another person who attended College Y and is a buffoon, regardless of school rankings. YMMV certainly applies when it comes to educational experience. Whether its undergrad, grad, or particular programs, there's top tier, good schools, and everyone else. Everything else is just biases, imo.



I am not an alumnus of either and after reviewing/interviewing through countless hundreds of resumes from UCLA and USC in the past, quite frankly I pretty much view them equally. A top top tier univ gets you noticed. I would take a second look at any resume that said Harvard, Stanford, or a very specific program depending on the nature of the work. The rest of the good schools all fall into a batch I would certainly consider, but do not have a relative opinion amongst them. At that point, it's up to everything else on the resume <em>aside from the school</em>, i.e. relevant work experience, relevant coursework, or even simply how well your resume is presented. I can not imagine UCLA, USC, Cal, etc's of the world being <em>the</em> deciding factor.</blockquote>


I agree. I thought a degree from Cal would impress employers, but I don't think it really makes much of a difference. A school like Harvard, I think that would stand out.



Also, I think people are really partial to their alma mater. I know a partner at a law firm where all the attorneys went to the same crappy law school. In fact, they prefer to hire people from their school, even though it's one of the lowest-ranked in California.
 
[quote author="Oxtail" date=1253707657]SoCal also has a few awesome liberal arts schools that nobody knows about. I know I didn't know anything about the Claremont Colleges when I was in high school and I don't know anyone who even applied. It's a shame because they're really good schools.</blockquote>


Indeed a very good campus in the Inland Empire.
 
Before my mom retired, she was head of HR for a large multi-national company. My mom's predecessor had a tradition of hiring Harvard MBAs and such. The high maintenance and elitist MBAs were a determent to the company in that their attitudes towards the rank and file employees destroyed moral and productivity. My mom changed course by hiring people with no formal higher education to the top positions. People that had work in crappy jobs for years slowly working their way to the top. Resumes of Ivy Leaguers were now only reviewed as a last resort. When I was a kid she always talked about how happy she was with all these "uneducated" people and what great things they did for the company. This change in staffing launched her company to it's greatest profitability. The company expanded overseas and was worth billions.



The founder eventually sold the company to a bunch of Harvard MBAs. My mom lasted two years after the change in ownership. They worked to reverse everything she had created. They were cut throat and boasted about taking from the people below them to give to themselves. The new owners suffered great financial loss as the company deteirated as they were too dumb to realize "the non-pedigrees" had made the company so great.



This was a great lesson to me.



I went to community college and eventually graduated from a Cal State. There was more than enough resources at school for me to launch my career.



Teachers always had free tickets to professional conferences. I went to almost all of them. I pried information out of everybody and anybody I could. So many of my classmates blew this stuff off so most of the professionals were happy to be getting attention.



I made it a point to walk my professors to their cars. Even if I was park clear on the other side of campus. I found I got the best and most honest advice from them in casual settings. I tried hard to connect with my teachers and in turn they were willing to go out of their way to help me.



I joined a professional organization of which I was 1 out of 3 students that attended the meetings. It was a gold mine of future employers. Many acted like they hadn't seen a person under 30 at one of these meetings in decades. I was happy to find the experts were just as interested in talking to me as I was interested in them.



I cold called small business owners my senior year. If the owner wouldn't give me a informational interview I'd ask for one with their secretary. Secretaries probably know more about the workings of a business than anyone. They are the gate keepers. Make them feel special and your in.



I was very proud of myself when I worked my way into a private tour of Pimco's trading floor given by Bill Gross himself.



My first job out of college was at a company solely of MBAs. They actually had a policy of not hiring anyone that didn't have one. The position I got was really out of my league and I hadn't a clue how to do the job I was hired to do when I first started. I spent many nights & weekends researching and asking people how to my job. At my 3 month review I was convinced I was going to be fired. My boss ended up giving me a 50% raise.



I never submitted a resume to get my first job. There was no job opening or advertisement either. I got it through all this running around while in school.
 
that's a great story... two things jump out at me though... the first was probably unintended and contrary to what i think you're getting at - but you said your company was comprised almost completely of MBAs. therefore it does suggest that your best odds of getting your foot in the door is having a similar pedigree. 99 out of 100 guys at goldman sachs got a Harvard MBA, one guy came from the mailroom and became a managing director. it's not really an advertisement for NOT going to HBS.



however the more important point is that, ultimately, your education experience is about what you make of it. it's NEVER about just what goes on in the classroom. if you spend 4 yrs of college in your room playing worlds of warcraft, it doesn't really matter where you went to school.



to back up your point, the last person we hired was just a graduating UC senior even though we were looking for an MBA candidate. the person distanced himself from other applicants based on work he had done with a several professors we were familiar with, all of whom gave a thumbs up recommendation. it's takes a proactive and intellectually curious person to want work with a professor outside of class. personal distinguishment to their teachers, esp at a UC where there might be thousands in the same program, carried more weight than distinguishment by grades or the school's prestige.



pedigree only provides certain opportunities. its up to individuals to take advantage of them, otherwise you're no better than someone else with more motivation and overall smarts. that is exactly the problem i have with how the stereotypical overbearing OC parents. uni high --> sat prep --> prestigious college --> profession in one of the "approved" industries (medicine, engineering, law, finance), etc. it's what they believe to be the path of least resistance, although still very different than actually preparing kids for successful, happy, fulfilling lives.
 
acpme, thank you for your thoughtful reply.



My point in sharing my story really wasn't to knock higher education or discourage people from getting MBAs. I just hate when I hear people say Bachelors degrees are useless now or you have to to XYZ school to get ahead, or regurgitate all the other notions heard but never experienced. I, like you, realize the flaws being fixated on college rankings, API scores, etc. Universities are businesses trying to boost sales and make a buck just like everyone else. They have been very successful in their marketing efforts to create a 'must have' product.



I'm aware a lot of companies hire XYZ candidate over and over again. I got past the protocol with my first job out of college because I figure a way around it. I believe many more people can do it but don't. I saw so many lost opportunities when I was in school. I received every scholarship I applied to not out merit but default from no one else applying.



I guess it probably has something to do with the majority of people being risk adverse. They want the guaranteed path.
 
UCI's admission selectivitiy is "inflated" due to the large portion of students whose parents want them to remain close to home. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since this means undergrad students which might normally shoot for UC Berkeley, UCSD, or an east coast school, end up attending UCI instead, and benefiting UCI's prestige. The same thing happened with UCLA vs UCB back in the 1990s. Despite UCB being ranked significantly ahead in their undegrad engineering department, admission-rate (and student stats) reached parity. I encountered a lot of Asian kids at UCI, who were pressured by parents to stay close to home, includign some who were admitted to UCB/UCLA (yet for some inexplicable reason, were pressured into attending UCI?!?)



Now that the UC tuition has gone up so much (I paid ~$4000 per fulltime academic yr 11 years ago), I can only assume the UC system as a whole is relatively less attractive to other universities whose costs held relatively constant (or went down.) It always hurts to see one's alma mater go down (rather than up) :(



And speaking of attractiveness, UCLA is much MUCH better place than UCB, according to firsthand accounts from my male classmates .... wink, wink (though I'm willing to concede USC outranks UCLA. Rich+pretty > pretty.)
 
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