I couldn’t have put it better than Stefan. Here’s a copy of an email that is floating around in the department:

US News & World Report’s periodic rankings of graduate programs in
computer science will be officially released tomorrow. We did well :-)

Now, before I go on, let me be clear that reputation rankings like these are
inherently imperfect, biased, trailing metrics of quality and impact (see
the Graham-Diamond report for more discussion here). They’re definitely not
a meaningful goal in and of themselves. That said, it is comforting that
others recognize what we already know — UCSD CSE is a top program that is
on a singularly rapid rise.

Here are the numbers: the overall CS program is now ranked 13th. All four
computer science specialties that US News covered are ranked in the top 20
(AI: 19th, PL: 17th, Theory: 14th and Systems: 9th).
Genomics/Genetics/Bioinformatics is ranked 6th (technically its listed as a
subspecialty of Biology, but on this campus we’ll claim at least some of the
credit) and Computer Engineering is ranked 17th.

For those of you who are new or don’t track this stuff, let me try to
provide some context to appreciate these numbers. Reputation rankings have
been widely studied and are known to change quite slowly — reputation has
tremendous social momentum. However, UCSD has consistently been the
exception to the rule in computer science. In 1994, US News first started
ranking CS programs and UCSD was ranked 30th. By the time I joined UCSD in
2000 we were ranked 25th (FWIW, my prediction at the time is that we’d be
recognized as a top 10 dept within 10 years… and I still believe that).
In 2002, we rose to 20th and, as of tomorrow, we’re ranked 13th. Not only
is our change since 2002 the largest improvement of any CS dept in top 30,
but our overall rise of 17 positions over the last 12 years is
unprecedented and unmatched. In fact, no one else is even _close_ (you need
to add the improvements of multiple departments to match ours, 90% changed
less than 3 positions).

In the end, all of this is just a reflection on what we’ve done. However,
it’s a reflection that all of you are a part of and should be proud of –
including the staff who make the department run, the students whose ideas,
proofs, measurements, algorithms, systems, and simulations are what we’re
known for, and finally the faculty who write e-mails, shuffle papers, and
provide critical funding for the coffee cart. Seriously, thanks everyone
and keep it up!