I am a senior student in Electrical Engineering and I have applied to some schools in the US for M.Sc. degree.
UCLA is one such school that I want to get some information about. When I compared UCLA with other schools like Gatech, Michigan, UIUC etc. I found some posts in this site stating that UCLA is not in the “same league” as the mentioned schools, but these posts were from 2010, which is quite old. The rankings from that time was also in agreement with these. UCLA was 13-14ish in most of the rankings, below the mentioned schools.
Now though, on the Internet there are some conflicting rankings. I try to rely on the opinions of people, not the rankings, as the former gives much reliable information. Nevertheless, on the official site of UCLA, there is such a post:
According to this ranking, UCLA is above Michigan, UIUC, Gatech and so on, yet on the US News, UCLA is still below them.
So, instead of relying on these conflicting results, I want to ask for your opinion.
What has changed over the last 7 years (if any)? How do you compare UCLA to schools like Gatech, Michigan, UIUC, Princeton, Purdue and so on? Is UCLA still not on the “same league” as these schools or has it improved since 2010 ?
QS World (like some other international rankings) uses bibliometric data (number of publications/citations per faculty member). Even if the criteria/weights remain stable, a spike/drop in the number of publications by a few professors could affect rankings (I would think), even though the instructional quality hasn’t changed much.
Or … perhaps UCLA really has improved in recent years due to staffing changes. Prominent faculty occasionally come and go (sometimes at the expense of competing programs). Your own professors might have insights into who’s doing what research, where, on subjects that interest you.
Thank you for the reply. I checked the professors of UCLA. After 2013, some very successful professors (one being my faculty interest) joined UCLA. Maybe that’s the reason why it moved upwards.
My question is still valid though: I would like to know the opinion of people about UCLA versus Michigan, UIUC, Gatech, Carnegie Mellon in Electrical Engineering.
Each ranking is different. As a rule, a field as broad and as deep as EE, the top 20 or so departments are all excellent, so you are likely to get wildly different outcomes depending on the methodology. As tk21769 points out, the QS focuses mostly on bibliometric data. But whether it is ranked #5 or #15 is immaterial, since the difference between the top 20 departments is truly insignificant.
^ Or, although there may be differences among the top 20 departments that matter to you, the specific areas of strength won’t necessarily line up consistently with this or that overall ranking. You might want to talk to your own professors about your goals, your interests, and where you can best develop them.
I’d say that even in U.S. News, the schools mentioned here would not necessarily represent the top five for undergraduate EE, since purely undergraduate-focused colleges such as RHIT and Olin rate competively in a parallel category.
@Alexandre Okay, I got your point and I cannot say you are wrong, but I think we can all agree that even in the first 20, there are different groups. I mean both Stanford and UCSB are incredible schools, no problem with that, but there is a considerable margin between the two, we cannot deny that. I wonder if such a margin exists between UCLA and Michigan, UIUC, Gatech, Carnegie Mellon, which are the other schools I applied.