With Blue and Gold Week fast approaching, UCLA and USC will be pitted against each other, as the campuses are transformed from placid research and knowledge factories into mobs of alternating pride and hate.
But what makes the rivalry with USC so great isn’t the legacies of our respective athletic programs, but rather the budding institutional rivalry that has only recently achieved parity.
Unlike other rivals, USC and UCLA are annually competitive in institutional terms, if not in the athletic arena.
Before launching into this comparison of two fundamentally different ““ and some would argue incomparable ““ institutions, let’s note that the most important criteria, academic quality, varies by school and department and is too exhaustive to be undertaken here. It is methodologically dubious to standardize public and private universities as many rankings do.
Using these flawed metrics however, we’re left with a scenario that even the most loyal Bruins should be deeply concerned about: USC will surpass UCLA in university rankings in the next five years. Guaranteed.
Any researcher or scholar will admonish the fact I’m invoking U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings to make this point ““ this is, after all, the same ranking system that favors private universities and has an irregular methodology.
It is also the metric that means more to prospective students than any other institutional bragging rights out there, and it’s one where UCLA rests stagnant, a mere two mere spots above a rapidly ascending USC.
USC has experienced a meteoric rise in student applicant quality and selectivity.
Their alumni donations, student-to-faculty ratio and average class size are far better than almost any public university.
USC has also embarked on an aggressive faculty-recruitment campaign, pouring newfound millions into stealing top faculty from around the country.
They’re involved in an aggressive local landgrab in pushing for de facto campus expansion and propping up beautiful new facilities like the Galen Center. Just about everything they’re doing is aggressive.
UCLA has enjoyed a decisive geographic advantage. Our hilly campus in upscale Westwood dwarfs theirs in terms of acreage and usable recreation space per student, our libraries house more volumes, and we house more students on our campus.
But USC is preparing to catch the wave of gentrification and investment pouring into downtown’s Grand Avenue project and trickling all the way down the Figueroa corridor.
Proud Bruins may still argue true supremacy exists beyond arbitrary rankings in intangibles such as location or the fleeting scandal or accolade, such as Nobel Prizes or national championships.
These purists choose to see it as a matter of public good versus private evil. They can pompously jingle their keys at us while forking over a tuition nearing $50,000 ““ the joke is on the 50 percent of them from California whose parents are subsidizing our tuition via tax dollars. They are, after all, the university of spoiled children, the university of second choice and the university of stolen colleagues, right?
To choose to see it this way is looking through blue-and-gold colored glasses.
We’re a mess, struggling to matriculate black undergraduate students in the triple digits, state-funded in a state that’s broke, locked in a compact that guarantees no fiduciary refuge until 2011.
As of June, our endowment was valued at a cool $2.5 billion , but when did USC surpass the $3 billion mark?
The state deserves partial responsibility for our fiscal woes, and we can’t legally compete with USC’s race-aware admissions policies as they draw from the diverse applicant pool we want.
In this rivalry, the rules have increasingly shifted to favor the way the private sector plays the game, leaving elite publics such as Michigan, Virginia and the UC system scrambling to raise tuition, adopt corporate sponsors or attract more out-of-state students.
So it is perhaps no surprise that the rankings reflect this struggle to adapt.
There are other rankings out there, of course. The Jiao Tong world rankings, for example, hold UCLA at No. 13 in the world, with USC at No. 50.
The Washington Monthly recently devised ranking classification based on social mobility, research and service, and puts UCLA at No. 2 and USC at No. 24.
But with the U.S. News rankings, it’s hardly a question of “if,” but “when,” and when this takes place, it will serve as a symbolic dropkick to the solar plexus of Bruin nation, and will be more devastating than gauntlets, victory bells or championship banners.
When this happens, I hope the shot reverberates into UC Regent boardrooms so we can get back to the business of asserting ourselves as one of the most prominent public universities in the world.
E-mail Aikins at raikins@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.