Yeah, so, I’m applying for transfer to a handful of UC and CSU campuses. The rub, though, is that applying to each one costs $50-60 ish, and I’m not particularly eligible for a fee waiver. I’m pretty sure I can get into any CSU and most UCs at this point, so I want to know where to spend my application money.
Well, you know how when you drive past a college that has a particularly high ranking in a certain degree program, they’ll flash on the big ugly LED screen, “SDSU RANKED #2 IN COMMUNICATIONS!”? I want that list, but specifically for linguistics programs, and only between UCs and CSUs. National rankings are OK too, as long as the list is long enough to include a fair number of those schools.
Any specific recommendations would be welcome, too, now that I think about it.
Rankings of higher education programs can be very subjective and variable. I don’t think there’s any one place you can go to that ranks only California programs. Instead, you might want to identify the professors whose work you’re interested in, and go to the school that has the most of those professors. That’s how I chose UCLA for my masters in applied linguistics, (I also took classes in the pure linguistics department). It worked out well for me. You can investigate different programs without officially applying and paying so much money. Hell, you can just call up the department directly and ask the person who handles applicants to describe the program for you.
You didn’t bother to mention whether you’re going to be in an undergraduate program or a graduate program. It’s important to know which in answering your question. It’s not quite as important that you attend a university with one of the top-rated programs in linguistics as an undergraduate. You want to graduate with good grades and have lots of courses in linguistics, of course. Graduating from a top-rated department will help you in your graduate applications, but it’s not necessary.
On the other hand, getting into a top-rated program is important in graduate study. For what it’s worth, it appears to me that the only conceivably top-rated graduate programs in California are Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, and maybe UC San Diego, and apparently you don’t want to consider private schools so Stanford is out. Limiting yourself to a university in one state is a terrible way to choose a grad school though. You should be considering grad schools all over the U.S., and you should be looking at the specific subfields of linguistics you are interested and which universities have professors covering those subfields.
I went to UC Berkeley for linguistics and one of my best friends went to UCSC and is now studying at UCLA.
It sounds to me like you’re looking at undergrad programs since you mention transferring–is that right? While I think my degree is far more useful in the job marketplace than my friend’s, ultimately I think her program was more structured than mine, and smaller (so she got more individual attention) so in the end she probably came out with a better basic theoretical grounding in the field than I did. She looked at grad schools all over the country and chose UCLA for phonetics.
Do you know what sub-field of linguistics you want to focus on? That might help in deciding.
Are you still considering computational linguistics or something related?
I know next to nothing about the US education system. At the department where I study and work Berkeley has the best overall reputation - possibly in the whole US. However the judgment certainly isn’t entirely unbiased because there are connections between departments.