<p>yeah215,</p>
<p>Actually, no, USC isn’t having a major giving campaign like UCSD is; that concluded quite awhile ago. Further, alumni giving plays a small role in the US News Rankings - 5% for crying out loud - yet despite the fact that UCSD has a major campaign underway while USC does not, USC still demolished UCSD in the alumni giving category according to US News. And quite frankly, when are we going to surpass our childish tendencies to call any sort of methodology that spouts unfavorable results as biased? Oh, US News places a whopping 5% weight on alumni giving, a very important factor considering a university needs money to buy the best professors and facilities, and suddenly they’re biased against public schools?</p>
<p>No, US News looks unfavorably on public schools because of public school tendencies. Look at your four year graduation rates. I have friends at UCLA and UCSD and they never stop lamenting about what classes they couldn’t get into to fulfill their major requirements. Look at your student to faculty ratio. Look at your % of classes under 30. Look at your endowment. Look at your budget cuts. I’ll be a junior at USC and the upcoming semester is the FIRST ever that I will have to sign up on a waitlist! And only because I decided to register for that class today, 4 days before classes begin. They never stop lamenting about the bureaucracy either. A friend tried to meet with his advisor because despite him taking 3 classes and having a 3.3 GPA, he erroneously got a letter saying he wasn’t making satisfactory progress. Upon trying to meet with the advisor, he was referred to another office to complete paperwork first. You know what happened when I needed to meet with my advisor today (to register for the aforementioned class)? I waited 5 minutes and had cookies in the waiting room. Oatmeal chocolate-chip no less.</p>
<p>Perhaps sitting in a 300-person lecture hall isn’t a problem to you but to the statisticians behind the US News rankings they do matter. It’s not a bias; it’s merely a specific methodological contruction. </p>
<p>Simply blaming the fact that USC is ranked higher on some sort of ever-present, “the system hates us” bias is hardly logically sound. Other than research output and number of nobel laureates, I challenge you to point out quantifiable (even non-quantifiable if you want!) categories where UCSD excels and why, from a comprehensive standpoint, it should be ranked higher than USC. Admissions? USC’s tougher to get in to and its students have much better stats. Departmental rankings? USC has more top 10 and top 20 programs. Fiscal resources? No competition. The list goes on.</p>
<p>You can’t seriously, objectively look at the data and say UCSD is a better school. So you’ve resorted to blaming it on some phantom, abstract notion. Tell me yeah215, were those stats and rhetoric classes closed the last time you tried registering?</p>