<p>National</a> University Rankings | Top National Universities | US News Best Colleges</p>
<p>Wow, that stings. We DROPPED a spot? UCLA and UVA are great schools to be tied with and all but we were tied with Carnegie-Mellon last year. Ouch. Any guesses on why the slight drop? I’m guessing that the athletic scandals and the two Chinese students being murdered didn’t help in the reputation department. Will be curious to read the university spin tomorrow.</p>
<p>And to think I was curious about this for a few weeks. Ugh. Something to chew on for the next year…</p>
<p>This happened before we entered the top two dozen and has nothing to do with the recent incidents or the NCAA problems. What happened to Stanford, however, has to hurt. We have work to do but are headed in the right direction. USC has made it to the top 25 for three consecutive years which is something to be proud of. </p>
<p>Fight On!</p>
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<p>I don’t think anyone seriously considers UChicago to be a better ranked school than Stanford. The former is a genuine top 10 school, but generally not considered top 5.</p>
<p>Caltech would probably be hurting much more (from #5 to #10). But i doubt it is since anyone who knows about Caltech knows that its full of geniuses and steals the most cross-admits from Harvard (if memory serves.)</p>
<p>Thank god we can finally put an end to these “USC is better than UCLA because of the only list that matters in the universe: the Holy Grail that is USNews” BS. Actually probably not, there are many, many delusional people. I’m hoping someone comes along (docfreedaddy where are you??) that actually ends up spinning this as “this decrease in ranking just shows how afraid the established colleges are and just proves how threatening USC is in the eyes of nonbelievers.” I’m actually quite pleased that these two great institutions are both ranked **EQUAL<a href=“and%20not%20one%20higher%20than%20the%20other%20even%20if%20it%20were%20to%20be%20UCLA”>/b</a> in US News because they both are very very good and of similar caliber in undergrad education.</p>
<p>So hopefully this will kill the USC > UCLA insanity for at least a year (and hopefully replace it with USC=UCLA), but probably not because there are really funny people on these boards. </p>
<p>So now, the only thing left to be settled is left on the football field. 
And we finally are ranked, and as of today have a Heisman Trophy contender on ESPN’s Heisman watch.</p>
<p>Nice post and I agree to a point; however, this has little to do with UCLA. USC is truly a national school and is working hard to achieve elite status.</p>
<p>To all USC alumni and Trojan Family members: now more than ever, USC needs our financial support. Our students need financial aid, we need to increase our endowment and we need funds to develop our physical plant, the University Village and Coliseum. Give freely and liberally.</p>
<p>Fight On!</p>
<p>Any reason to worry SC’s 2-decades of rising trend has peaked in top-25,
and is now on the falling?</p>
<p>Nah, look at the year by year rankings since the 1990s and USC has had a few steps backwards or stationary. What is far more significant is that we have been in the top two dozen for a few years. We need to keep working on student retention, increasing our endowment and hiring stellar faculty, to name a few priorities. For example, this year’s admit rate of 18 percent is second only to Stanford in California (excluding Cal Tech) and will not be reflected until next year. I suspect the admit rate will fall further next year.</p>
<p>bad week for USC… dropped a spot in the US News rankings, dropped out of the top 10 undergrad business programs, and dropped 30 spots on the QS rankings (although its unreliable)…</p>
<p>i’m very disappointed…</p>
<p>but I still believe in Max</p>
<p>Hey, we’re the 5th most up and coming school…one point drop and we feel like failures. Come on Trojans, we’ve come too far to stop trying and achieving. When this ranking debuted in 1986, USC wasn’t even ranked and I was still a happy Trojan!</p>
<p>Fight On!</p>
<p>Emory’s school data fraud, but they still kept their top-20 rank…</p>
<p>Our real estate program’s up to #4, though.</p>
<p>As a side note, red_devils, did you use the same username for ITP-230x? I recognize it haha</p>
<p>1 point drop is nothing to cry about. We are maintaining our Top 25 title for 3 years now. </p>
<p>It’s going to get a lot tougher at this point to climb up the ranks, but everyone is taking note of USC. Thus the high up-and-coming ranking. </p>
<p>My only disappointment with the ranking, is that Emory should have went out of the Top 25.</p>
<p>Seriously? All this hand-wringing over being tied for 24th!?!</p>
<p>First of all, in order to move up someone has to get out of your way. It seems highly unlikely that any of the schools ahead of SC are suddenly going to stop working.</p>
<p>Second, let’s face it, any ranking you see basically has the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, CalTech and Duke dominating the top 12. (this year they all fit into the top 15); so unless they all turn into correspondence schools they’ve got the advantage of position. So everyone else is really playing for 13th.</p>
<p>To me it’s about four rankings tiers. There’s tier 1, the aforementioned Ivies + 4. Tier 2 is everyone else ranked up to 30 - if you can honestly tell me there’s a noticeable, quantifiable difference between Rice (17), Carnegie-Mellon (23) and Tufts (28) then please get me some of the Kool-Aid you’re drinking because it’s some powerful stuff. Tier 3 is 31 - 50. Tier 4 is everyone else.</p>
<p>USC is solidly in that second group with a lot of other very big dogs. So unless the Board decides to change the name of the school to HarvYaleStanPrince Tech we’re really just talking about rearranging deck chairs.</p>
<p>Michigan dropping to 29 is a big ouch.</p>
<p>This is what USNWR says about USC:</p>
<p>“Undergraduates study in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California, a private school based in Los Angeles. The USC Trojans compete in the NCAA Division I Pac-12 Conference and are particularly competitive in football.”</p>
<p>In other words, it’s still mostly known for football. USNWR has an east coast bias. Heh. </p>
<p>In fairness, they said pretty much the same thing about Notre Dame:
“The University of Notre Dame is a private, independent, Catholic institution in South Bend, Ind. Notre Dame’s athletic teams, known as the Fighting Irish, play in the NCAA Division I and are particularly competitive on the football field.”</p>
<p>No I didn’t… (and what is ITP-230x?) =)</p>
<p>Still think… Being a top-20 USN school,
Notre Dame’s way more extreme of “pure” football school than SC
(despite their recent decade’s lack of football success),
as comparable to xerox is to photocopying…</p>
<p>Until USC also has a Hollywood football movie
made for its “program”, then
we can talk again which of them is more football school than
the other…</p>
<p>Of course historically USC still vastly lags in grad research,
but is Notre Dame grad research really that much stronger either?</p>
<p>UCB, and your point is?..</p>
<p>Duke:
“Located in Durham, N.C., Duke University is a private institution that has liberal arts and engineering programs for undergraduates. The Duke Blue Devils sports teams have a fierce rivalry with the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill Tar Heels and are best known for their outstanding men’s basketball program.”</p>
<p>Hopkins:
“Johns Hopkins University is a private institution in Baltimore, Md. that offers a wide array of academic programs in the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences, and engineering disciplines. The Hopkins Blue Jays men’s lacrosse team is consistently dominant in the NCAA Division I; other sports teams at Hopkins compete at the Division III level.”</p>
<p>UCLA has the best athletic program in the country yet it gets no mention whatsoever:
“The University of California—Los Angeles is just five miles away from the Pacific Ocean. The public institution offers more than more than 3,000 courses and more than 130 majors to undergraduate students.”</p>
<p>No mention of Michigan either:
“Founded in 1817, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor is a public institution. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor follows a trimester-based academic calendar and its admissions are considered most selective.”</p>
<p>BTW I came across an early draft of the blurb for Berkeley. I’m curious what you think:</p>
<p>“The University of California, Berkeley is located on a sprawling campus in the East Bay area of San Francisco. Known as the Golden Bears, Cal’s teams compete in the Pac 12 and are not especially successful in anything. Cal is known worldwide for its academic excellence and large population of hippies who still live in town and have never accepted the fact that the 1960s ended over 40 years ago. Notable startups include several Bay Area tech companies and the South America compound known as Jonestown.”</p>
<p>Seems perfectly legit to me! ;)</p>
<p>Guess Michigan doesn’t matter, as they can always claim they’re public
school, then their name’s immune from this undergrad USN ranking drop. UM does
have top Ivy-level overall grad schools and grad business schools, that
USC does not.</p>
<p>Will be almost science-fiction to me if SC can take down any
of the 100yrs-traditional-Ivys from Top-15 in the closer future (could be
reality 30-50+ years from now), but if talking about Top15-20 don’t think
SC is really worse than top-20 private peers of Vandy, ND, Emory, or even
WUSTL, so not altogether impossible in the closer term…</p>