Which US universities are comparable to UCLA?

drax12 · July 18, 2012, 2:36am

For Bill73:

UCLA is a pre-professional beast. The U produces more attys than Cal and is tops in the state of CA, and just as many if not more MD’s. UCLA sends numerous grads to MBA programs. Illinois couldn’t hold UCLA’s jock wrt these professions in conversion from BA’s/BS’s to MD’s or JD’s or MBA’s. But Illinois’ CS and engineering programs are better, certainly.

Wrt SAT’s and ACT’s, UCLA desires to under-report scores so as not to dissuade poorer kids in applying to the U. Once applied, UCLA uses holistics to admit a good no. of URM’s with low scores, but high grades and potential, along with having a top-notch academic services program to get these kids up to speed. UCLA will reject many 3.8/4.4/2100+ students for the sake of a URM’s with 3.75/4.10/1700. I can’t foresee Illinois doing any of this, primarily rejecting top-notch applicants with formerly stated stats. In other words, UCLA doesn’t try to maximize high quality students from within its applicant pool. There’s no way Illinois would engage in this admissions practice.

Wrt the act of purposely under-reporting scores … UCLA reports redundant scores for individual students, besides not superscoring. Someone posted his/her stats on the UCLA board as being 1700 SAT and 31 ACT. The ACT helped gain this student admittance, but UCLA reports both the 1700 and 31 on its CDS.

But with this said, the average uw gpa to UCLA is an extremely high 3.81, with final uncapped wgpa being, ~ 4.3+. I realize Illinois also probably doesn’t superscore, but as far as reporting redundant scores, it’d be hard to guess.

There are plenty of UCLA students who are admitted from the top-notch public hss in the state, the top feeders to the U, so there is a good amount of wealth in the student body also because of their somewhat unnaturally high stats (at least wrt those of poorer background) (some grade inflation along with $$'s spent on SAT preps and numerous retakes), besides the U having 35%+ Pell grantees. It appears that middle class students are being pushed out.

Generally, UCLA students tend to strive for higher professions, and doubtlessly send a higher proportion to elite grad schools, in addition to the state of CA having a deeper professional base for which the U feeds. Illinois is a great school though.

beyphy · July 18, 2012, 2:47am

I’m not sure why you keep using one criteria as the sole metric for the ranking. Just because i don’t believe that the one criteria for rankings should be test scores doesn’t mean that i believe that the one criteria should be endowment. (in fact, i believe there should be no one single criteria.) I said scores aren’t ‘everything.’ Endowments aren’t everything either.

For example, quality of faculty is important too. And what faculty attend a particular institution is determined by a number of things as well, which include pay, location, the prestige of the university, colleagues, and resources. These quality of the faculty, in turn, influence the quality of the research, which influences peer assessment, and so on. There’s no one simple metric (and i don’t think there should be.)

He said that his use of the mediocre represented “ordinary.” I think a better word which represents what he meant, with regard to departments, is unimpressive (correct me if i’m wrong phantasmagoric.)

Bill73 · July 18, 2012, 2:50am

“Illinois couldn’t hold UCLA’s jock wrt these professions in conversion from BA’s/BS’s to MD’s or JD’s or MBA’s”

Source? As Ronny Reagan used to say, trust, but verify. :-)

rjkofnovi · July 18, 2012, 5:22am

“Maybe phanta meant top 25 as being mediocre. Some schools are top 10 in all disciplines.”…that don’t include medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, a conservatory quality level of music, theater, dance, etc… :-)

phantasmagoric · July 18, 2012, 5:34am

g0ld3n, when I said “snide,” it was in reference to your post #23, which I ignored for its uncivil/faux-polite tone. Try to keep up, please.

beyphy, thank you for not assuming bad faith on my part. But I’m not sure how that implies the former definition of ‘mediocre’ - I see ‘decent’ as ‘above average.’ I wouldn’t say there are any ‘poor’ programs at UCLA, which is why I didn’t say such in the post you’re referring to. Are you assuming that I was indicating ‘mediocre’ was the lowest on the scale?

Yes, that’s closer to my intent, but adds an additional unsavory connotation. Another way to say this is that many departments simply haven’t distinguished themselves from [read: are the same quality as] the next ‘batch’ of schools that follow them in the rankings (and of course that doesn’t mean that this batch is at rock bottom; it’s likely that another batch of departments follows that batch).

I can tiptoe through finer semantics - strong, good, decent, mediocre, ordinary, average, unimpressive - and qualify it ad nauseum, but I’m thinking that no matter what adjective I choose, if it isn’t “awesome,” I’m going to get bitten. :p

Alexandre, I just don’t see why such a cut-and-dry delineation is necessarily the case. You’re emphasizing relative quality, i.e. if it’s better than most, then it must be good. But what if most are really bad? I’m not saying that’s the case here, just posing an extreme case that could arise out of the inherent variability of fields (for some, that might be 25; it might be 42; it might be 14…).

The point is that absolute quality matters, though how that’s measured is another debate altogether. In this respect, #25 in one field is not the same (in absolute quality) as #25 in another, so we can’t really say, “every department ranked in the top X must be good.” And anyway, 25 seems like it was chosen for its ‘cleanness’ as a number. Reality is not that clean. Ranks flatten real distinctions, etc.

Here’s one particular case that I cite only because it’s well-acknowledged even if perhaps controversial: law schools. Why is there a [particular</a> focus](<a href=“http://www.top-law-schools.com/dissecting-the-rankings.html]particular”>Dissecting the Rankings: The “Top 14”) on the top 14 law schools (a.k.a. T14)? Why not 15? That’s a cleaner number. It’s because there are tangible differences after a certain point (e.g. in the ‘primary market’ described in the link). And unsurprisingly, USNWR law school rankings, among others, have picked up on this well-observed pattern. [edit: when I thought of using law as an example, it was purely for its peculiarity in T14 - I didn’t realize that UCLA law was currently at #15 in USNWR, though that does lend credence to my larger point.]

I think one could also make the case that USNWR grad school rankings are too simple and yield ‘fantastic’ results due to their reliance solely on blackbox peer assessment rather than hard data collected from each department. But that’s immaterial. More importantly, I notice you chose to focus only on the ranks in USNWR, which of course are based on PA scores that indicate an absolute value independent of the ranks. NRC rankings, on the other hand, don’t provide a single score and only offer ranks/ranges. USNWR proves my point on absolute quality. For example, in earth sciences, going from #1 to #17, where UCLA is, is a 23% reduction in PA score, with a 16-rank difference. The next 23% reduction, relative to UCLA’s score, doesn’t occur until #54, a 37-rank difference, and if you started from the #1 score for a combined 46% reduction, it’d be at #69, a 52-rank difference with UCLA. This isn’t a sudden dropoff that I hinted at before, but it doesn’t need to be, as it shows that the rate of decrease in quality down the ranks is variable. [In other words, you and I need to trade our respective advocacy of rankings, given our positions on absolute vs. relative quality. ;)]

tl;dr - departments ‘bunch up’ into clusters (along absolute lines) that supersede individual ranks and that provide a more accurate account of departmental quality.

barrons · July 18, 2012, 11:54am

I doubt there is any quantifiable difference between the #14 and #15 law school. It is just a method used by the hidebound and ultra-traditional large firm legal profession. They use it because they always have used it.

beyphy · July 18, 2012, 12:27pm

Yes i was. I guess i was looking more at the form than the semantics. But given mediocre’s alternative meaning, i think this gave some plausibility to my assumption.

Perhaps there isn’t now, but there probably was once. And impressions tend to change very slowly.

goldenboy8784 · July 18, 2012, 1:19pm

[how</a> is the lower spectrum of the t14?](<a href=“how is the lower spectrum of the t14? Forum - Page 2 - Top Law Schools”>how is the lower spectrum of the t14? Forum - Page 2 - Top Law Schools)

There’s a huge dropoff between Georgetown and UCLA in the legal arena even if they are ranked just one spot apart. Georgetown is a household name in the legal world with alums all over the world while UCLA Law graduates are just found for the most part in Southern California.

UCBChemEGrad · July 18, 2012, 1:31pm

^ The fact that you’re from the East Coast and live in Washington DC doesn’t somehow influence your viewpoint?

barrons · July 18, 2012, 2:04pm

I have found that most people from Cali prefer to remain there. DC weather today–99 degrees. LA 74.

beyphy · July 18, 2012, 2:41pm

Georgetown is hardly a household name. I’ve never heard anyone mention Georgetown, here (in California.) The way i heard about it was through Bill Clinton’s Wikipedia page IIRC.

This is true. Even if people travel for a few years and leave it, California is still home. And that’s ultimately where most would want to settle down.

e.g. [The</a> Daily Bruin :: Psychology professor Daniel Oppenheimer leaves Princeton to teach at UCLA](<a href=“http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/06/psychology_professor_daniel_oppenheimer_leaves_princeton_to_teach_at_ucla]The”>http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/06/psychology_professor_daniel_oppenheimer_leaves_princeton_to_teach_at_ucla)

RML · July 18, 2012, 9:37pm

In most parts of Europe and Asia, UCLA is a more resounding name than is Georgetown. At least, that is the impression I got.

drax12 · July 19, 2012, 10:36pm

This would be extremely very hard to verify, which is obviously why you asked for me to do so. I wouldn’t have a lot of information really to go on, so I would probably have to approach things often in an indirect manner.

Medicine:

Here’s a list of u’s and their apps to m-school in 2011, including UCLA and some of its fellow UC’s, and Illinois and some of its like u’s in surrounding states:

UCLA 820, appeared to lead the nation in apps in ‘11.
Michigan 774
UCB 754
UCSD 541
Wisconsin 455
Illinois 449, ~ 55% of UCLA’s total

Here’s the [link](<a href=“https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/86042/table2.html”>https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/86042/table2.html</a>).

Obviously the no. of apps and who leads the nation varies from year to year, with UCLA or Cal typically leading, and with Michigan and Florida near the top also.

And obviously, acceptance rates for these apps would be important given these numbers. Could Illinois have a higher acceptance rate? Absolutely, especially given that UCLA grads probably desire admission to one of CA’s eight med schools just about first and foremost, but with this state’s set of m-schools undoubtedly the hardest in which to gain admission of any other states’ set/group of m’s.

This wouldn’t be a question of enrollment adjustments, with both having similar undergrad nos., with Illinois having ~ 5k more students.

It appears that Illinois is third in its peer rankings of apps, with a total less than the third best UC, SD’s 541.

UCLA"s acceptance rates to m-school would have to be abhorrently bad for Illinois to be even close.

And in fact, UCLA probably has more accepted students to m-school, than Illinois has applicants in a typical year, including 2011.

Law

Here are [Calbar’s](<a href=“Attorney Demographics”>http://members.calbar.ca.gov/search/demographics.aspx</a>)numbers:

1 Univ of California at Los Angeles; CA 20,636 8.66 %
2 Univ of California Berkeley; Berkeley CA 18,249 7.66 %
3 Univ of Southern Calif; Los Angeles CA 7,405 3.11 %
4 Univ of California Santa Barbara; CA 7,016 2.94 %
5 Stanford Univ; Stanford CA 6,964 2.92 %
6 Univ of California Davis; Davis CA 5,697 2.39 %
7 Univ of California San Diego; La Jolla CA 5,206 2.18 %
8 Univ of California Irvine; Irvine CA 4,329 1.82 %
9 San Diego State Univ; San Diego CA 3,420 1.43 %
10 California St Univ Northridge; CA 3,414 1.43 %

I don’t see demographic of undergrad representation from the Illinois Bar as in Calbar. So this would be hard to compare. Generally though, you’ll see Cal first and UCLA second wrt public-schools’ representation at some of the top l-schools in the nation, with Michigan and Uva somewhere near these two.

The reason Cal would be ahead of UCLA, though UCLA possibly/probably outpaces Cal in atty nos., is because UCLA”s will often stay locally at UCLA, USC, or even Loyola for l-school because they will be practicing locally in Century City, downtown or OC, anyway. For instance, I know of a Loyola Law grad who graduated Summa Cum Laude from UCLA, and could have had much more prestigious l–choices, but LMU’s downtown location and part-time sched really med her needs.

I would think Illinois certainly would be behind Michigan in pure atty nos, and maybe even Northwestern, despite thids u being significantly smaller. I would guess that only Michigan and Northwestern are really top-notch pre-atty factories within the Big 10 or 11 or how many the league has.

MBA’s:

In the last 1-20 ranking of MCAT scores by colleges’ undergrads, only Cal, UCLA, and Washington were the public u’s represented. I don’t know how reliable this source was, but it was forwarded undoubtedly with some sense of veracity and some data on hand to back up its claims. Harvard was on top and all or just about all Ivies were present, so there was a seeming pecking order wrt prestige.

Also, I would think that Illinois grads with a business bent would take degrees in Bus Administration and maybe even a specialty in Finance, which would cut down the nos. of those who aspire to MBA’s.

I don’t have a lot of info here, I agree, but the trends are such that UCLA grads obviously far outpace Illinois’ in pre-professions majors leading to these degrees. Generally public-u grads tend not to be as grad-school conscious, but UCLA’s certainly run counter to this notion. UCLA grads also place a lot of bac-degree holders in pharm & dentistry, also, which point to UCLA grads as being highly professionally driven. You can add BS’s to PHD’s in CS and engineering also, though Illinois would be well represented.

barrons · July 20, 2012, 11:33am

And Illinois beats UCLA in producing leading engineers and scientists with PhDs. Far different demographics.

<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/nsf08311.pdf[/url]”>http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/nsf08311.pdf</a>

beyphy · July 20, 2012, 12:05pm

There are three universities in California which are unarguably better than UCLA in the sciences (B,C, and S.) Illinois probably has a lot less competition with high-caliber universities in this respect.

wonderva · July 20, 2012, 12:23pm

^UCLA is not even the 2nd best UC in hard sciences/engineering.

UCSD is better than LA in most science/engineering fields and I think SB beats them in math and physics.

However, UCLA is better than SD in social sciences and of course athletics, which also accounts for LA’s ‘reputation/prestige’

beyphy · July 20, 2012, 1:29pm

In general, UCSD has a slight edge over UCLA in the hard sciences.

Chemistry: UCSD: 21; UCLA: 16
Physics: UCSD: 14; UCLA 19
Engineering: UCSD: 14; UCLA 16
Computer Science: Both 14

UCLA however, has a strong edge in law: UCSD: 61; UCLA: 15

Business: UCSD: not ranked (+100), UCLA: 15

a significantly better hospital (honor roll), and a generally much more significant edge in humanities (in general probably at least +15.) These things are what accounts for UCLA’s prestige.

Few universities are exceptional in all fields. UCSD can keep its slight edge in the hard sciences if it means that UCLA can keep its much larger edge in nearly anything else.

barrons · July 20, 2012, 1:41pm

Illinois faces much competition from around the midwest where there are many good science/eng schools–Mich, UW, Purdue, Minn, NU, and so on. This is comparing one to the other–not the UC System vs U I.

rjkofnovi · July 20, 2012, 1:46pm

“Few universities are exceptional in all fields.”

I can think of one off the top of my head. :-)

g0ld3n · July 20, 2012, 2:09pm

I think it’s pretty safe to say that UCLA is the second best UC. Sure, looking at different departments, there might be a couple places off here and there, but how do you tell the difference between 2-5 spots on a list of schools? You don’t. I used to have this feeling that UCSD was seriously going to beat UCLA in rankings and reputation in the long run (longer than schools would matter for me, like 30+ years from now), but UCSD’s existence seems to kind of be in danger due to USC stealing their top faculty such a their renown sciences chair, Dr. Kay. UCSD doesn’t have the endowment to fight big universities stealing professors out of San Diego. Department rankings are not the only factor that make a university better. Even if we exclude all the BS (sports, public image etc etc) there are many more worthy factors to consider like ability to retain faculty and % of faculty with NSA members and the like. It’s pretty apparent UCLA is the second best UC. SD is a pretty close third, but no one would really call them equals and at the rate the LA University landscape is changing (USC trying really hard to get some respect), I see UCSD losing the faculty battle with SC. I really hope that’s not the case, but it is what I think.

Also, SB doesn’t really compare to UCLA at all except in physics and maybe 1-2 random scattered departments I am missing:
Math: UCLA 8 UCSB 46
Physics: UCSB 10 UCLA 19

PS: Call me bias to UCLA, I am. But I had my pick at UCSB’s/UCSD’s (and Cal) honors programs and UCLA and the choice was very obvious.

rjkofnovi: Berkeley? ;)

Which US universities are comparable to UCLA?

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