<p>For a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering, I was wondering which people would pick? Columbia, which is ranked lower (in EE), but nationally recognized or USC?</p>
<p>any thoughts??</p>
<p>Columbia of course, don’t care about the ranking.</p>
<p>But you didn’t tell us what your goal is…</p>
<p>I will quote from Mollie here, because it’s difficult to improve on what she previously stated:</p>
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<p>And don’t care about the prestige</p>
<p>Besides, USC is getting more and more prestigious: its undergrad program rose 350 points in the last decade (the highest rise on record), overtaking Berkeley and getting up to Stanford. Its graduate school is the next target of their largesse from the prodigious fundraising pace they’ve set.</p>
<p>I partially disagree with Aceflyer and Mollie, yes prestige is not always the key, but have you thought about why do certain schools carry the golden prestige? because they earned it, by having outstanding academic programs and faculty team, with the big plus of strong network.</p>
<p>That being said, Columbia is a much more prestigious school, yes its engineering ranking is not good as USC, but have you compared their size difference? (Columbia engineering enrollment=1433, USC=3945), If you compare their department faculty member count you will see the same trend, means each Columbia faculty member carries out much more weight than USC professor.</p>
<p>To use the job hunting logic by Mollie, a much better professor at Columbia (from lower ranking department) can get you better job than a regular professor at USC (from higher ranking department). Again, it depends on which professor you work with and what you you want to do with the degree. Also, I’m pretty sure Columbia is much more difficult to get in than USC. Might as well get some Ivy-touch to your life.</p>
<p>—did I hear someone said USC is overtaking UCB and getting up to Stanford? I hope you are joking GoodLiberal.</p>
<p>Get the average SAT scores for entering freshmen. It’s there in black and white.</p>
<p>I’m not sure with programs that big whether you can ask for placement records? Or ask individual professors for the kind of places where their students have wound up? As long as you are polite, there is no harm in asking.</p>
<p>Also, on prestige… I think that is certainly true for undergrad, but much less obviously so for grad school. Indeed, professors in their fields will discount it and go on program. Say that you have an IR PhD from Rochester- this impresses a lot more faculty searches than one from, say, the University of Pennsylvania. The latter is a great school, but it’s pol sci department is nowhere close to the ranking that Rochester has.</p>
<p>This matters less for Masters programs, but it still matters to a degree. PhD programs will not be blinded by school rep in the slightest.</p>
<p>"The USC Gould School of Law has given us a new bragging point. Many people know that I am proud of USC’s SAT scores, and have often heard me say that our scores are higher than those of UCLA or Berkeley. But I recently learned that USC’s law school graduates now pass the bar exam at a higher rate than both UCLA and Berkeley.</p>
<p>USC is also making a strong commitment to its graduate and professional students. The provost has put together a war chest of $15 million per year which will allow USC to compete head-to-head with any other university for the country’s best Ph.D. students.</p>
<p>Provost Nikias has also set aside some funds to advance scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This program allows faculty in these disciplines to pursue important research that they would not be able to do otherwise, due to the paucity of research funding nationally in these areas. "
from [USC</a> President - Speeches and Articles - 2008 - Faculty Address](<a href=“http://www.usc.edu/president/speeches/2008/faculty_address.html]USC”>http://www.usc.edu/president/speeches/2008/faculty_address.html)
3/4s of the way down.</p>
<p>I do not know anything about the program at Columbia, however the EE program at SC is excellent. I did my master’s there in ME but I took an EE class and knew some of the students in the program.<br>
The size of the program however is larger than most and the majority of the students do coursework degrees. There are also courses available remotely, there are people living in NY who graduate from the program. But, the courses for that option may be limited.<br>
However if you would rather live in NYC I could understand choosing that program. As far as rankings are concerned, I think you should rely more on how you fit at that particular school.</p>
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But programs plural don’t matter for graduate school. The particular program in your area of interest, and more specifically the advisor under whom you do your research, is what matters. It doesn’t help a chemist if Super-Prestigious School X has fabulous programs in medieval literature and mechanical engineering; it helps the chemist if Super-Prestigious School X has a fabulous program in chemistry, and specifically if it has fabulous professors doing fabulous work in the particular subfield in which the chemist would like to do his graduate degree.</p>
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Yes, this is absolutely true. But there are likely to be more great faculty members in a highly-ranked program, and absent specific people with whom the OP would like to work in the lower-ranked program, the higher-ranked program is likely to be a surer bet.</p>
<p>I would like to note, also, that being a graduate student at a generally prestigious school is nothing like being an undergraduate at a generally prestigious school. Most people don’t have a strong allegiance to their graduate university – I don’t, for example, get dressed up in crimson and bellow at the Harvard-Yale game. Your undergraduate school will almost certainly have a much stronger impact on your viewpoints and attitudes than your graduate school will. </p>
<p>And although impressing people in bars may sound like more fun to you than it does to me, it’s really not a fun conversation to have, because after you say where you go to school, the next comment is, “Wow, you must be smart.” And what can you possibly say to that? It’s a conversation-ender.</p>
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<p>Once you’ve hit that point: you know you are going home, all by yourself. Looks like someone needs to work on their game, cough prestige sackriders cough.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any comments about the USC Neuroscience program and how it compares to the top programs?</p>