By becoming AAU, building a top notch medical school, creating a more traditional, residential student body, and winning a few basketball natties
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I generally donât mentally compartmentalize any UCs as âpublic non-flagshipsâ anyway; theyâre their own thing.
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Yes for the above and winning football natties too.
Then you mention:
creating a more traditional, residential student body
Again, you clearly have never been to Westwood and been on UCLAâs campus.
You want us to be like UCLAâs campus? Move the entire campus to The Woodlands, add the River Oaks neighborhood and you are slowly getting thereâŠnot even close yet.
The only way for our campus to be changed to a more viable campus we need to:
Incorporate TSUâs campus with ours. We are in 2025. It is time for TSU to be part of UH. We either incorporate or not. This is a delicate discussion but way over due. We are all the same. Our skin color should not matter today. Gentrify the entire neighborhood with the City of Houston helping revitalize the entire neighborhood. Enough with words, the City of Houston has to make a choice. Either help UH and TSU or say you donât want to. Everybody will be better of for it.
I have a hard time thinking of any Cal public other than Berkeley as the flagship, but UCLA comes close.
I just got back from a top academic school in a P4 league recently - the campus and residential aspect is literally built around the football stadium and they live on each other pretty much A makes for a good atmosphere in an urban environment
We have too much space as funny as it sounds
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UCLAâs ranked higher, theyâve got a lower acceptance rate, and theyâre in a bigger athletic conference; I think itâs hard to make a case that they arenât at least co-flagship.
The core of our campus (Inside of the Cullen/Wheeler/MLK/Elgin bounding box) is only about 200 acres, and contains all but one of our dorms and all of the classrooms that arenât in Garrison (the single worst building on campus) or the optometry school (its own thing). Curious what school you went to that felt smaller.
UhhhhâŠâŠlast I checkedâŠ.Cal was ranked #17 by USNEWS, #5 by Forbes, and #8 by the WSJ.
Two of those three are HIGHER than UCLA.
They have 59 Nobel prize winners, UCLA has 18. By comparison, Illinois has 24 and CWRU 17.
In your field, Engineering, Cal is the HIGHEST ranked public U.
Definitely the flagship.
UCLA is historically better in football and menâs basketball though.
And the one that isnât is the only one anyone cares about.
Thatâs marginal though.
Undergrad, UCLA is 15 and Cal 17.
Cal is ahead in law, engineering, and many other graduate fields.
And of course Cal blows them away in Nobel laureates.
In any case, itâs not a very large gap and I wouldnât hesitate to describe UCLA as a flagship, especially given that Northern and Southern California are spiritually different states anyway. (I also count GT as a flagship in everything but name and sometimes forget that Georgia is formally the flagship in that state.)
Cal is heavy Asian, etc. but they buy into it - however theyâve admitted the acc move has hurt the gate ironically
But itâs more compact meaning thereâs seamless transition from downtown to the neighborhood to the school
You donât have that in Houston due to freeways and reliance on transportation
On GaTech, yeah, I hear you.
I believe UGa is considered the flagship, as the public land grant, but according to my GA kinfolk, one of whom was a professor at GaState, GaTech is SOOOOO much better in STEM fields that it is pretty much considered the Stateâs leader in those areas over UGa.
I believe I mentioned that my GaState prof Uncle had four sons. One of them went two years to GaTech and flunked out. Another graduated from GaState.
Flagship is a dated term
I get what you think it means in regards to the PAST but we are NOW better funded than over half of the other states #1 Flagship School.
And in most cases, we ALREADY have better academics, more students and a larger Endowment.
We are in a good spot.
UT v2.0 is our ceiling
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Weâre better funded relative to the size of the state
Flagships in Smaller states with less competition arenât going to need the same funding
Still relative to how we are funded compared to the other public school options in the United States
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I agree with most of this â I think itâs worth considering that weâre functionally the flagship of a 6MM person metro area thatâs bigger than most states, and branding ourselves as such â but I think our upper bound is closer to Iowa or Utah than it is Texas. The UTexas System has the single largest endowment in the country and the bulk of the stateâs political power; weâll never realistically approach that, or even A&M, especially while our local students pay in-state tuition at those two. If we got close, the state legislature would likely prevent it.
(Note: we are not the only school in this situation; I think schools like FIU and UTD and UIC and Temple are inevitable for largely the same reasons.)
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While I love your passion for a better university, the truth is UH will not be UT v2.0 in our lifetimes. Itâs a matter of socioeconomics, not race, as Iâve mentioned. There will be no ability to change that with i) trying to get POOR kids from out of state to come here for better âROIâ on a scholly, ii) getting in-state kids to change their generational allegiance and iii) getting more POOR kids in the Houston area to stop commuting. Itâs exhausting. You think the median household income changes overnight, or even in 10 years? No. It takes a long time to move the needle even slightly. Also, Iâm okay with POOR students. I was one of them. Thatâs just reality. Youâre not going to live at a frat house and go hunting with your parents when youâre broke. Enter UT.
Putting more kids on campus, with more debts, doesnât make them better ambassadors of the school. They are still not kids that go to destination schools, and their living on campus hasnât changed it. Socioeconomics matter for all you care about. Unfortunately, that takes a generation, if not more. Canât recreate Skull and Bones at Yale in 10 years, which is what - party to multiple senators and presidents?
I know a thing or two about out of state kids. My brother-in-law, from Columbus OH, came to UH because it was a free ride. Doesnât give a damn about UH at all, and lives and breathes Ohio State - ungrateful ass. His kids, my nephews, all ended up attending UT and A&M.
Iâd be very skeptical of a UT or UCLA result - and I donât understand why thatâs not extremely obvious. Better to say Pitt or some other more established AAU city school.
I post again in case others have missed it.
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Comparing those two is a distinction without a distinction difference.