A friend’s daughter was just accepted to the following UC schools: UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UC San Diego. That she is seriously considering UC Irvine over Davis has thrown me for a loop, so I wonder if my own subjective ranking of the UC schools is, well, wrong. Here’s how I would rank them, based on my perspective of their national reputation.
Berkeley
UCLA
Davis/Santa Barbara (tie)
San Diego
Irvine
Santa Cruz
Riverside
Modesto (brand new!)
Anyone have a different view? Any particular reason?
First of all, to my knowledge, once you are accepted into one of the UC Schools and begin your time there, you can transfer within the UC system as you like. Many people use this as a way to get into their first-ranked UC school if they only get accepted to a lesser one.
Davis is usually seen as the fallback school for Berkely applicants. Those that don’t get into Berkely almost always find themselves accepted at Davis.
As far as personal experience goes, thats about all I can add.
Also, there is no UC Modesto. You are thinking of UC Merced, which is the brand new UC campus. It’s about 30-40 minutes south of Modesto, and IMHO is an even more shitty place for a UC Campus. But I’m from that area of CA, so I have a natural bias against it.
I tend to rank Davis lower in my mind, but probably because I’m from the Bay Area, and my friends who didn’t get into Berkeley went to Davis. I have no particular information about the actual quality of the school, though.
Doesn’t it kinda depend on what you want to study? I mean, I know that Davis has an agricultural emphasis: veterinary school, crops, etc. Also, the medical school is good. The UC Davis Medical Center is one of the best.
Don’t the other schools have their own area of specialty also? Wouldn’t you choose to attend the one with programs you were most interested in?
She doesn’t know - I’d say liberal arts, probably.
If it were writing, I know that the UCI writing program gets high marks.
For nuclear engineering or economics, Berkeley.
For film, I guess UCLA, right?
Wine making, Davis for sure.
Surfing - toss up between SB and SD, with Santa Cruz in third!
Really? I thought it was next to impossible to transfer between UCs. What I always heard was that it was much easier to transfer from a community college to UC Berkeley than to transfer from Harvard to, say, UC Merced.
I would rank the schools as follows:
UC Berkeley
UCLA
UC San Diego
UC Davis
UC Santa Cruz
UC Santa Barbara
UC Irvine
UC Riverside
UC Merced
Davis, UCSB, and UCSC are all pretty much close to tied in my mind. My opinion of UCSC is influenced by the fact that one of my best friends went there and got an excellent education–within our major (linguistics), probably better than mine at UC Berkeley.
1 - Tie between The People’s Republic of Berkeley and UC Stress Freak (UCSF is a very prestigious, ridiculously high-pressure med school)
2 - The Other San Diego School (for some reason people keep getting it mistaken for San Diego State)
3 - Cal Ag Extension (Davis used to be… well… Berkeley Ag Extension)
4 - Not-Quite-Cal (We take it on faith that UCLA has a bit of an inferiority complex. I couldn’t spend an afternoon there without wanting, very badly, to punch someone in the face, so I rank it relatively low. Not quite sure why.)
5 - University of Chinese Immigrants (UCI is almost 40% Asian)
6 - UC Banana Slug (bit of a party school, really cool mascot)
7 - University of Cheap Smokes and Beer (Also a party-school rep. I think they have a nuclear reactor, but having a banana-slug mascot is cooler unless you’re a nukee)
8 - University of Trained Chimps (I remember one of my teachers in high school claiming that he could get a trained chimp accepted to Riverside with a little work, so the association has stuck for me, sorry)
9 - UC Merced
Note: Intercampus transfers are treated something like transfers from the Cal State system: you have to apply, and it’s not quite a rubber-stamp process.
Having attended two of them, I would pretty much agree with tiltypig’s list. But it really does depend on her major and interests. Davis ranks above San Diego in some areas. You can get totally lost at UCLA and get a crap education in the process, or you can go to Santa Barbara and get an excellent one. It all depends on what you want to get out of it. But based on the schools she got accepted to, I’d go: Davis, Irvine, San Diego.
Based on the consensus of my daughter’s friends, who are freshmen this year, San Diego is significantly above Davis - but of course it depends on what you want to major in. I buy tiltypig’s list, except that Santa Barbara seemed to be ranked above Santa Cruz, especially because UCSC is pass fail, and thus not attractive to grad schools.
No seriously, I don’t think UCSC can be properly ranked. It’s focus is on alternative programs (though that is changing) and it provides a very different education than you’d find at another UC. For example, as a film student I found it preferable to UCLA- UCLA’s programs are focused on grad students and their undergrad program is to some degree an afterthought. At UCSC, our teachers would sometimes come work on our shoots over the weekends. It was a very small intense course of study with a large emphasis on critical writing and hand-on technical instruction.
On another note, though UCSC is certainly a great place to party, it doesn’t even have any real frats. It’s reputation as a “party school” isn’t really a good fit. It’s a great “let’s do some organic fair-trade feminist meditation” school, or more often a “let’s drop out and spend six years growing dreadlocks and wandering the backwoods of Peru” school, but not someplace that has great keggers.
On further reflection, I think that grad/undergrad thing is true of most of the UCs. Their “prestige” is based largely on their grad programs, research, and professor publications, not on the quality of undergrad education they provide. UC Berkeley is definitely special, and if you get in to there you should probably go there. But for a liberal art’s major one is probably better off choosing a school based on lifestyle appeal an how well you “click” than prestige. The chances of having life repercussions because you didn’t choose a school that suited your life and dropped out/transferered is much bigger than the chances of hanging lifelong repercussions because you chose UC Santa Barbara over UC Davis.
Alas, UCSC is (tragically IMHO) no longer pass/fail. But when it was, something like 85% of UCSC grad school applicants got in to their first choice for grad school. The only grad schools that had any problem were med schools. Everywhere else saw the half-page long evaluations provided for each class as letters of recommendation (or, on occasion, scathing critiques) and much fuller portraits of the student’s abilities than a simple letter grade.
UCSC changed over because of parental pressure, lazy teachers who hated writing the evals, and insecurity. Now sadly, it may well be on the road to being “a prettier UC Irvine” or “Goddamn it I didn’t get in to Berkeley” than the innovative and challenging place it was.
UC Riverside alum here! After reading all these posts bashing my alma matter… I felt like I have to defend it a bit and then give my $.02 in regards to the OP.
Yes UCR is ranked pretty low on all the college rankings but I loved loved loved UCR. I never once felt like the quality of education I was receiving was subpar than the other UC’s. It’s smaller than all the UC’s, so it’s easier to interact with your professors, the staff, and other fellow students.
Anyways, your friend’s daughter shouldn’t go to whichever school is ranked higher… there are a lot of other factors to consider such as location, faculty, the student body, etc. For a liberal arts degree, I’d say the UC’s are pretty even in terms of quality. If your friend’s daughter decides to go to grad school, that’s where the rankings really do matter!
My whole family except me (sibs, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles) are UC alums. Overall, I agree with tiltypig’s list.
Not me. I’d go San Diego, Davis, Irvine. That’s because of San Diego’s college system (my brother was in Revelle), and because of Davis’s friendly, small-town feel. UCI has always felt a bit cold to me. My two cents, as someone who’s never gone to school at a UC.
I went to UCLA. If I had to do it over, I’d be at UC Riverside. The quality of undergraduate education tends to vary proportionately to the amount of students on campus. My profs at UCLA, with a few wonderful exceptions, didn’t care all that much about undergraduates, and in the process a person can get very, very lost. On smaller campuses it’s a lot easier to find a mentor.
