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<p>If you live in California, UCLA and UCB share pretty much the same prestige.
I don't know what type of "top students" they are, but they turning up at UCLA instead of Berkeley or Princeton looks interesting to me. I am 100% sure that they would not have made it to Beida if they had stayed in China. They are at UCLA only because their parents are rich, and can afford them to send them aboard. I repeat, they would not have made it into the top unis like Beida, Tsinghua, Fudan etc if they had stayed in China.</p>
<p>Beida and Tsinghua is already ahead of HKU. I don't know how you rank a university as good. If you are ranking by, say, teaching and resource available to undegrads, then HKU would stand better. HKU have more money available to each students. But I believe that a more objective measure is by measuring research output and selectivity of the student population. In these two measures, Beida and Tsinghua wins University of Hong Kong hands down.</p>
<p>Finally, UC Berkeley has many top-notch researchers. I know UCLA has some, but Berkeley tends to have more. Also, Berkeley researchers are very highly cited.</p>
<p>Finally, the course-work at UCLA cannot be considered as extremely demanding, and the student population aren't that selective. Definitely, it is way behind universities like Berkeley (graduate), Stanford and of course, mad Caltech.</p>