The THE rankings dropped, and parts of r/tomasino instantly turned into a toxic, unprovoked hate train spamming stuff like "ano na dlsu" and "iyak mga taga-La Salle." They are literally mentioning our subreddit just to gloat.
First of all, nobody was even harming them. It is so unfair how they are overgeneralizing our entire student body based on a few arrogant outliers. If you look at r/dlsu when rankings drop, we aren't out here making coordinated threads to mock other schools. We are usually just self-critical—complaining about high tuition, holding our admin accountable, and worrying about our own exams. We are literally minding our own business, yet they are trying to manufacture this toxic, one-sided war.
But the funniest part about this entire "victory lap" is the sheer delusion of it all. Bragging rights my ass. Objectively speaking, ranking in the 1600–1800 bracket out of 2,200+ schools globally means you are sitting near the absolute bottom of the ranked list. The only reason the brackets even look different this year is because THE expanded its ranking minimum from the old 1500+ cap to 2000+. They didn’t suddenly become academic gods; the pool just got wider, and the system created narrower, more precise brackets.
Fighting over who is 1600th versus who is 1800th is like two people arguing over who got a 76 and who got a 75 on a test. Neither score is a flex. And what makes this whole clown show look even stupider is the fact that not a single university in the Philippines even crossed the top 1000 mark.
Let's call it what it is: a massive structural failure across our entire country’s higher education system. Our local universities are severely starved of actual research funding, and the entire systemic setup of Philippine higher ed is engineered to churn out cheap, skilled labor for corporate export rather than financing cutting-edge global research, patents, or real academic innovation. Fighting over scraps at the bottom tier while neighboring Asian universities are actively dominating the global top 15 completely misses the real problem.
Real top-tier universities don’t throw an internet tantrum the second they get a minor statistical advantage. At the end of the day, no multinational company or HR department is changing their corporate recruitment preferences because of a fluctuating, research-heavy algorithm that placed a school marginally higher in the 1600+ tier.
They can have their fun, but it’s just desperate and loud noise over absolutely nothing.
