Why is UCR always looked down upon?

Peppers
Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:06:43 +0000

Why are we taking PR rankings worth anything at all -_-;; The people that take surveys usually don’t like the school anyway, so it would just accumulate the ill feeling of an unrepresentative segment of the school’s population.

I don’t like Riverside because of the prejudices my parents instilled on me about school, but I’ve come to realize there is nothing wrong with a lot of schools. Riverside is relatively new, and rankings care way too much on a lot of things that it can’t possibly compete with. The US News Ranking system places emphasis on 2 things that I find highly unfair: endowment and name recognition. UCR can’t possibly compete with schools that have been established for many a decade or even many a century when it comes to endowments, and name recognition is grossly unfair since it’s directly related to the rankings themselves, thus perpetuating the supposed high ranking of some schools while preventing other schools from reaching the top.

But at the same time, I would have to agree that there is a large mentality that Riverside constitutes a back up of back up schools in most people’s perceptions. The high acceptance rate almost seems to speak for itself. My major dislike for the school is, however, the environment. We drove through the general area on Sunday and it smelled really bad. The prospect of going to school where LA smog empties out of the basin isn’t all that appealing…