<p>You’re nothing if not predictable. Same spiel over and over about ranking of faculty.</p>
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<p>I don’t think there’s anyone here who questioned whether Cal had the better engineering school of the three, more reputable, etc.</p>
<p>But again, even in engineering, in addition to my humanities/social-science example above, I don’t see what significance there would be in having more academy members related to the undergrad world. </p>
<p>The engineering students I knew were always taught from textbooks. These textbooks made their rounds at the various universities. This generally means that the material conveyed to the undergrads is recycled over and over because the material is so elementary in the field, in addition to helping the student in a step-by-step basis of foundational learning. </p>
<p>But these more complex concepts in the field for undergrads are still elementary in relation to the higher, more cutting-edge concepts in this field, which these academy members might promote. For these academy members to introduce these concepts to undergrads would be useless because the cutting edge would be beyond the students’ scope of learning. </p>
<p>Of course these don’t apply to the stars who are readily discernable by faculty even early on as undergrads. Ronald Sugar, who just retired as head of Northrup-Grumman, was one of these stars even as a community-college student at, I think it was, El Camino College. His star status wasn’t at all deterred by attending a ‘lower-tiered’ engineering school at UCLA, or even worse a community college before.</p>
<p>But then you said yourself, that there’s little difference in the quality of students who choose among the three. And most of the e-grads at these schools are your typical unimaginative grunts who were taught from textbooks. But if you’re counting stars, people who’ve started their own chip firms or headed large publicly-held companies, UCLA has done pretty well.</p>