<p>“One additional question I had: how much do department rankings matter in terms of recruitment? I find it surprising that although Cal EECS is ranked a lot higher than similar programs at all the ivy schools, the engineering programs still have lower acceptance rates at the ivies (a berkeley prof told me EECS hovers around 10-15% while schools like Columbia are around 7%).”</p>
<p>@puzzled123 - Please forgive me for not having read if there are other replies to this, but there is an important demographic reason for the above. Around the same time that CS (and other “modern” STEM fields) were expanding the most quickly, there were still quotas on Jewish and Asian faculty at a lot of the ivies/privates. This led to excellent Jewish/Asian faculty being snapped up by (and going to) some of the state schools, including some of the Big Ten and of course, the UCs, in particular, Berkeley.</p>