<p>UCLA is one of America’s great universities, maybe one of the top 10 research universities in the country. The problem is that outside of California (especially the further East you go), people tend to think of it as a ‘jock school’ or even a party school with mediocre academics. This is very far from the truth, as can be seen from looking at graduate school rankings. In the areas of law, business, medicine, social sciences, humanities and sciences, UCLA is always ranked at least in the top 15, with a 2 or 3 exceptions. If you look back at the NRC study, UCLA’s history department is ranked 6th, sociology is ranked 5th and linguistics is ranked 3rd. And of course, the undergrad program is ranked 25th in the country (probably underrated). This is no small feat for a university that was established in 1919 as the ‘southern branch’ of Berkeley.</p>