<p>
Your decision is easy. UCLA. If you don’t then you’ll end up regretting it, waking up each morning and dreaming of all the things you would have been doing if you were in LA. And I’d say exactly the same thing (follow your dreams) if you preferred Cal, or Davis, etc. One thing that make this easier to say is that engineering education is standardized by ABET. Unlike English or History or many other majors where what you learn is at the whim of the college you attend, the classes you’ll take to get an engineering degree are pretty much the same at every ABET school. Schools differ in rigor and the type of student they enroll; employers might have a preference for those attending a college in a higher tier (broadly viewed). But anybody in industry is going to put UCLA and Cal into the same broad tier for undergrad education.</p>
<p>I have to laugh when I read comments like “I think the disparate rankings should be enough for you to go to Cal, hands-down”. Of course posters like that can’t tell you how the rankings were done – what factors were used, how much weight was given to each factor,etc. Nor can they tell you what difference it will make in your experience to go to a higher-ranked school. Nonetheless they are certain – just go to the higher ranked school even if it differs by a few places in the rankings, it is certain to be better for every possible student under every possible circumstance.</p>