All are top 10 in engineering: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering...

This jives with engineering industries, where USC is a consistent producer of aerospace/mechanical and tech talent. USC is considered a top school in many other research fields as well.

I think it's more likely that you actually know very little about academics at these institutions.

Disclaimer: I work at UPenn (doing research!) and went to USC.

Maybe at the graduate level Berkeley should be ranked higher but how are public schools dinged? UCLA has an endowment almost as high as USC’s with comparable student body size. Thinking public schools are dinged because they’re poor is factually wrong.

Also, Berkeley is about where it would be given its acceptance standards and standardized scores outside of EECS are among the lowest in the top 25. The only school where it’s actually getting easier to be accepted year after year.

The student bodies aren't all that comparable. Although they both have 45k students, USC has twice as many graduate students as UCLA and they even outnumber the undergrads.

But really, its pretty foolish to compare an entire school to another. A given program against another given program? Sure. There are fields that USC and UCLA each might be at the top of, and there are fields where they are going to be much worse. That's the real rub with these rankings, combining and binning aspects of schools that aren't related at all. The only thing that's worth looking at is the rigor or research output of a specific program.

Feel free to share whatever ranking validates you.

Regardless of rankings, I'm definitely jealous of USC's alumni network. It's leagues above UCLA/Berkeley (rivaled probably only by Stanford).