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FWIW, prestige doesn’t change year to year, and especially doesn’t change due to incremental fluctuations in the highly flawed US News rankings. It’ll take much, much longer for SC to pass Cal in terms of prestige, if it ever does (which I highly doubt). Cal is pretty much second only to Stanford in terms of Graduate Schools, and a lot of this trickles down to the undergraduate level.</p>
<p>Peer Assessment ratings give credence to that, and there’s a reason why schools like UVa, UNC, Michigan and Berkeley all have much higher peer assessment ratings that schools like SC, despite the fact that they may be ranked lower in the US News rankings (but much higher in all the other world rankings).</p>