<p>Having read some archives of several prominent posters on here, there seems to be a consensus that although Berkeley provides tremendous opportunities for undergraduates, ultimately only those undergraduates who are in the top of their class, who are assertive, and who know the techniques to work/study, can make use of them. </p>
<p>To those who are not assertive, to those who are afraid to approach their professors (probably because they have been receiving bad grades), to those that graduated from low to mediocre performing high schools that were not competitive, Berkeley may be a miserable place for them.</p>
<p>Of course, there are a myriad of explanations for why such a substantial portion of Berkeley admits (both freshman and transfers) are "sub-par" and are unable to receive mostly As and Bs in their classes. Like I stated, because Berkeley it as a public school, its admit pool is larger than most ivys and privates with similar quality graduate programs and professors. Because the admit pool is larger, a portion of students are selected with sub-par GPAs, sub-par SATs (my biggest concern), sub-par AP scores, and as can be insinuated, sub-par personal statements. </p>
<p>There is also an understanding that Berkeley's undergraduate program was not as weak as it has been. Previously in USnews, Berkeley used to be ranked in the top 15, surpassing the lower ivies. I would assume that between the 40s and through the 60s, both the undergraduate and graduate programs at Berkeley were incredible due to their selectivity, incredible government funding, and student activism in current events and affairs (as opposed to the political apathy of most students now). Since then, the undergraduate program at Berkeley has transformed from great to "just good," not much better than UCLA, USC, U Mich, ect...</p>
<p>To rid Berkeley of the students who will inevitably perform poorly by making Berkeley more selective and weigh SAT and AP scores higher, place Berkeley in a more financially stable position, and increase the strength Berkeley's undergraduate population to that of the ivies wouldn't privatization solve these problems to a degree? </p>
<p>Privatization would encourage more selectivity, leading to a higher quality student body. Look at Haas. Look at our engineering department. Engineers on average need higher SAT scores, higher AP scores, and because of this, our engineering department probably has the strongest undergraduate student body. Haas is also selective, and those sub-par students who cannot handle pre-bis prerequisites are weeded out. The result in most cases is a vibrant student body in Haas who will want to learn. </p>
<p>What do you think? I know that many will say privatization will go against Berkeley's tradition of providing affordable yet quality education. It will also make Berkeley lose its place as the premier public institutions. But wouldn't it also solve Berkeley's more substantial problems?</p>
<p>Why does Berkeley have to privatize to be more selective?</p>
<p>What I don’t understand is why Berkeley can’t admit less students while still being public. Berkeley actually has to subsidize for in-state students, so if we admit less of them, than Berkeley now has more money and the average student is stronger (I’m not saying in-state students are stupid, I’m saying that we have more money if we admit less of them. I am from California).</p>
<p>But looking at this from California’s perspective, why would it want Berkeley to have a smaller undergraduate population? How does that help California? After all, graduates from Berkeley are more likely to stay in California and thus pay California taxes, so the more we educate, the more money California gets back.</p>
<p>^But because our state legislature and the board of regents have no interest in making Berkeley more selective, privatization would seem like a more feasible option.</p>
<p>From how I see it, it’s actually a good thing that Berkeley’s not so selective.</p>
<p>Here’s why: even with the sub-par undergrads, the quality of the education is not truly being affected; professors still maintain their high expectations, and you still have the same opportunities to be around the top students.</p>
<p>The difference in lesser selectivity is that “sub-par” students are given an opportunity to succeed, and whether or not they’re able to use it is up to them. It’s better for them to have access to difficult classes in which they might be able to pull very unlikely As and Bs instead of not giving them the opportunity at all.</p>
<p>In fact, in my major, this is exactly the policy: for almost all classes, prerequisites aren’t enforced, and they over-admit by a huge margin with the expectation that a good portion fail out / drop within the first few weeks. Also, professors aren’t afraid to give out Ds and Fs.</p>
<p>This decreased selectivity, along with more students, means that I, as an undergrad, get to experience a more diverse student body, possibly get opportunities that I would otherwise not get (since I may be subpar in some areas myself), and have all the advantages of top students / difficult classes at the same time.</p>
<p>There’s a reason why there are graduation requirements and GPAs: that’s to separate the top students from those who are “sub-par”.</p>
<p>The increased selectivity of Berkeley would help Berkeley’s top students, because the endowment would be more focused on a smaller, stronger student body. Consequently, USNews rankings would rise accordingly, bringing Berkeley’s undergraduate ranking closer to its graduate school position, and thus attracting even more top students. Eventually, the academic climate could possibly become more intimate and focused, perhaps like that of the mid Ivies. However, increased selectivity would also hurt Berkeley’s not-so-top students.</p>
<p>This debate boils down to:
Do we want to help top students, at the expense of “mediocre” students?
Do we want to help “mediocre” students, at the expense of top students?</p>
<p>Personally, I think #1 is better. Top middle-class students need a cheap alternative to the Ivies, while top low-income students usually receive full-rides to Ivy-type schools. The so-called “mediocre” students (though, they are still some of the best in CA) have many other outstanding UCs to choose from. Consequently, the other UCs would also all benefit by having those “mediocre” students, who could not make the new Berkeley standard. All UCs would slowly rise. CSUs would remain a viable and strong option for those who could not make the new standard of the UCs.</p>
<p>Therefore I argue that UC Berkeley should cut its undergraduate population by about 10,000 students. It would not hurt Californians; rather, I believe this would help our HS students in the long run. The UCs need to become more competitive, while the CSUs can remain as strong backups for everyone else.</p>
<p>Berkeley’s undergrad population should not exceed 10 thousand. It does not also need to be privatized. What is needs is to to have a decent and fair scholarship program that is automatic to all those who qualified to study in Berkeley. It should also not limit OOS and International in-take. A 50%-50% looks ideal though.</p>
<p>Considering that there is no chance California’s flagship state university will ever be privatized, one might as well ask what would happen if magic trees started giving out Starbucks gift cards.</p>
<p>Again, what’s the point? One might as well discuss the merits of Harvard becoming a branch of UMass. Neither is ever going to happen.</p>
<p>But let’s play the game. Doing so would, of course, be a disaster for the state of California and its citizens, and a final repudiation of what has made the state such a great place to live and work: a world-class public system (rather, systems) of higher education.</p>
<p>It’s no coincidence that the time everyone thinks of as California’s golden age - the 1950s and 1960s - were marked by a time of dramatic investment in, and expansion of, the state’s three higher education systems.</p>
<p>My post (#5) was merely arguing for the reduction of the undergraduate population at UC Berkeley. THIS is what UC Berkeley needs.</p>
<p>There is NO other school in the world that is ranked top 5 in almost every graduate department, while not making top 20 for undergraduate education. This disparity could disappear with a significantly smaller, more selective undergraduate population. Berkeley can’t cut top 20 USNWR because the undergraduate population is too large. We already have the right faculty, which is the “hard part” for a school’s rankings/prestige. I truly believe the enormous undergraduate population is holding the school back, and at the same time, hurting undergraduates.</p>
<p>People argue that a selective Berkeley would hurt tax-paying Californians but I argue it would help them. As I said before, the best low-income Californians get full rides to Ivies, while middle-classers are the ones who most need the low cost of public education. Right now, TOP Californians of the middle-class must choose between expensive Ivy or lower-ranked Berkeley.</p>
<p>Anyway, privatization would remove the flagship UC without any benefit! This would not help Californians it would hurt them! I am against privatization. Why would we want that?</p>
<p>So what? USNWR rankings are meaningless anyway. You’d reduce the number of students who could get a quality education at a great university just to needlessly inflate a useless and subjective ranking?</p>
<p>Seriously, the whole rankings fetish on this Web site is utterly bizarre - and it bears no resemblance at all whatsoever to what happens in the real world. None of my employers have ever asked me where my undergraduate alma mater was “ranked” by a dying newsmagazine.</p>
<p>My two cents as an engineering graduate student:</p>
<p>One aspect of privatization that may benefit UC Berkeley is increased tuition. A paradox of public universities is that they (often) have worse budget woes than the top private universities, despite their government subsidies. One reason for this is that public schools, unlike private schools, have a governmental obligation to keep spending low in order to keep tuition/taxes low. While I applaud the UC’s commitment to low tuition, I believe the cuts in UC tax money (uncompensated by tuition raises) will ultimately damage the UCs.</p>
<p>Services essential to research are being cut because of budget problems. For example, when I need to order stuff for my lab, it takes a month for bureaucrats to approve the purchase. That’s a serious barrier to research. And it’s not because of red tape; it’s because the reduced number of bureaucrats has caused a backlog of purchase requests.</p>
<p>Cutting services such as these do not save money. The purchase requests must still be eventually processed, regardless of the delay. All that firing these bureaucrats did was push costs back a few years at best. And now campus purchasing is horrible. Services like these are absolutely worth the money. Falling tax revenues is no reason to stop spending money on services that create more value than they cost. If tax revenues fall, we must preserve them by raising tuition. </p>
<p>In the effort to not raise tuition, the campus is becoming less and less efficient, which will cost us in the long run. Purchase requests suck. Microfabrication staff suck. All sorts of service cuts are impeding our ability to do good research quickly.</p>
<p>Stanford, for instance, has staff dedicated to each tool in their microfabrication facility. These staff keep the machines up and running, and are responsible for training and maintenance. It’s an efficient way to get work done. At UC Berkeley, since we’re poor, there are no staff dedicated to each tool. Graduate students get assigned as superusers and are supposed to be in charge of things they have no time for. It’s horribly inefficient and results in a lot of machine downtime.</p>
<p>Stuff like this is making Stanford more and more attractive for professors and graduate students to do research. Ultimately though, it doesn’t matter how we rank compared to Stanford: The real problem is that UC Berkeley’s overzealous cost-cutting is getting in the way of doing great work to make the planet a better place.</p>
<p>And to fix it, we NEED higher tuition.</p>
<p>And higher tuition would presumably be a part of privatizing UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>(To be clear, I support higher tuition, but I think privatization of UC Berkeley would be bad and it won’t happen.)</p>
<p>That would indeed work is GPA was truly deterministic: that is, if grades perfectly represented your level of knowledge about the material. </p>
<p>But they don’t. Grades are necessarily stochastic. Surely we’ve all witnessed somebody who was unquestionably well prepared for an exam…yet performed poorly anyway. Maybe he just had a bad day. Maybe he made a crucial error in the beginning of a quantitative problem that resulted in demerits throughout the entire answer. Maybe he just got nervous. Maybe he just read a question wrongly, and answered the question that he thought was asked, rather than what was actually asked. I recall hearing a story where a girl began to experience menstrual cramps during a crucial final exam which, while not severe enough to cause her to stop the exam entirely, gravely damaged her ability to think clearly. </p>
<p>{Note, the opposite happens as well - surely we can all think of people who knew little about the course material, but just happened to luckily score well on the exam anyway. Perhaps he luckily studied only those particular topics that happened to be asked. Perhaps he luckily included on his cheatsheet the very methods necessary to solve those particular questions that the exam asked. }</p>
<p>But the point is, you may well be one of the most knowledgeable students in your class yet nevertheless receive a terrible grade if you’re stochastically unlucky. And at Berkeley, that terrible grade may well be a failing grade. Hence, you will be deemed ‘subpar’ only for stochastic reasons.</p>
<p>Contrast that with other schools at which it’s practically impossible to actually fail. You might not get a top grade, but you won’t actually fail. </p>
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<p>Well, I don’t think the goal is simply to increase Berkeley’s USNWR rankings, but rather to improve the educational experience as a whole. A rankings improvement would just be a side-product. </p>
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<p>But Berkeley is extensively doing so now…within its graduate programs. Berkeley’s graduate programs, especially its PhD programs, are amongst the most selective programs in the world. Coincidentally - or probably not - they are also among the highest rated such programs in the world. I am not aware of any initiative for Berkeley to vastly increase the admissions of its PhD programs in the name of providing a quality education for more students. </p>
<p>To this day, I have never heard of a logically consistent reason as to why Berkeley should run highly selective graduate programs but less selective undergrad programs. If the true goal of Berkeley is to provide an education to as many students as possible, then Berkeley should open the graduate programs wide. Why not? Graduate students are students too. </p>
<p>But of course if Berkeley did, then Berkeley’s graduate rankings would surely plummet, for reasons explained below. </p>
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<p>Actually, the quality of the education of the other students is being affected. Most obviously, the subpar students consume academic resources - resources that could be more profitably used by other students who are more capable of using them. </p>
<p>For example, surely many of us here have experienced the displeasure of not getting a class we wanted because of a lack of seats. What compounds the problem is that perhaps you would have done well in the class, but we’ll never know because the seats were occupied by some subpar students who will do poorly. The quality of your education has therefore been reduced by those students.</p>
<p>But I think the far bigger reason that subpar students hurt the quality of education for everyone is not simply one of resource matching, but rather one of sociology. We tend to vastly underestimate how strongly social forces impinge upon our behavior. Essentially, people tend to copy the behavior of others around them. When you’re surrounded by hard-working and inspired people, you tend to become hard-working and inspired yourself. But when you’re around people who are not that dedicated, who don’t really care that much, who don’t really study that hard, who are more interested in partying and enjoying life, then you will also tend to do the same. Obviously a psychologically strong person can resist social forces. But let’s face it, most people are not psychologically strong.</p>
<p>This is particularly true of new college students right out of high school. These are students who usually have never lived away from their families before, and have certainly never lived alone before, and are now placed in an entirely new social environment. It’s exceedingly easy for such people to make poor social choices by fraternizing with and picking up habits from those students who are subpar, thereby rendering you subpar yourself. </p>
<p>Note, to be clear, I am not picking on the subpar students. These students are ‘subpar’ only according to the standards of Berkeley. They would probably do quite well in a less intense academic environment. I therefore recommend that they not be at Berkeley as much for their benefit as for the benefit of other students. Let’s face it: earning consistently poor grades at Berkeley makes for a bitter college experience. {Note, yes, I did say that grading is stochastic, but it isn’t entirely random either - a strong student may occasionally receive a poor grade, but subpar students will consistently receive poor grades.} </p>
<p>I remember one guy who came to Berkeley and performed noticeably poorly. He now freely admits that he shouldn’t have come to Berkeley. He would have been far better off at a lower UC or a CalState. He knows this because he was dismissed from Berkeley for awhile, and as condition of his reinstatement, he took courses at a CalState where he performed decently, whereupon he was reinstated back to Berkeley, only to perform poorly again. The differential in performance strongly indicates that he would have been far better off if he had gone to the CalState right from the very beginning. </p>
<p>Now he has to wear the albatross of a sundered academic record for the rest of his life. Anytime an employer asks him whether he’s ever been dismissed from school, he has to say yes. Anytime an employer asks to view his transcript, they’re going to find a record riddled with failing grades. His chances of ever entering a decent graduate program are essentially nil. None of that would happened had he attended an easier school.</p>
<p>1) graduate programs could receive less funding overall than undergrad programs do, and as a result, even though there may be significantly qualified applicants, there may not be enough room for them all, and hence need to be very competitive.</p>
<p>2) most people don’t go into graduate programs. And most of the ones that do tend to not got to, or at least not get selected for, the same ones they did for undergrad. as competitive as undergrad programs are, grad programs are way more competitive. For one, grad programs (BA –> PHD) is a 7 year investment, which most people don’t finish. The grades a person receives in his undergraduate give a picture of how the person will perform in grad school.</p>
<p>1) Graduate students require a large amount of one-on-one attention with professors. You can’t substantively increase graduate enrollment in Ph.D programs without dramatically increasing the number of graduate faculty. That would require a serious increase in funding.</p>
<p>2) Graduate students in Ph.D programs expect to be funded. You can’t increase the number of funded graduate places without a increase in available assistantships, either research or teaching positions. That would require a serious increase in funding.</p>
<p>In fact, reducing undergraduate enrollment at Cal could have a negative effect on graduate education. The large undergrad population requires a large number of teaching assistantships - which are funded opportunities for graduate students.</p>
<p>Fewer undergrads would mean fewer graduate assistantships, and hence fewer funded graduate students.</p>
<p>If there are less undergrads, that simply means less graduate students will need to be GSIs. It in no way means that there are less grad students! </p>
<p>Your logical reasoning is flawed because you fail to realize that GSI is a “funding” only because if a section didn’t have a graduate student teaching it, Berkeley would have to allocate resources to hire another teacher to lead that section. If the section didn’t exist in the first place, then Berkeley would never have needed to hire a teacher for the section. As a result, the graduate student doesn’t need to teach it.</p>
<p>My wording is pretty bad so I’ll put this in another way.</p>
<p>Let’s say you have 100 undergrads and 4 sections. You need to hire 4 teachers but you don’t have the money to, so you tell 4 graduate students to teach those 4 sections. All of a sudden, you lose half your undergrads so now you only have 2 sections. Now you only need 2 graduate students, but you don’t have to tell the other 2 to leave the school. </p>
<p>Also, in case you didn’t know, Berkeley spends more money per undergraduate student than it gains from tuition. So by cutting the enrollment down, Berkeley will actually have MORE money and can hire MORE graduate students.</p>
<p>The key idea is that graduate students aren’t truly funded by being TA’s. They’re funded either by outside fellowships or by their professors (it’s a school’s endowment + professors’ research that brings in the money, not the students). Whether they teach or not is simply if they need to.</p>
<p>So the two graduate students who lose their GTAs will… what, get magic funding from the money tree?</p>
<p>It’s not like there are grant-funded research positions and fellowships just sitting around waiting to be filled, and there won’t magically be money to increase their number.</p>
<p>Do you really think UC Berkeley could cut undergraduate enrollment without losing significant state funding? Hint: Not going to happen.</p>
<p>And what I mean by the latter is, it would be politically impossible for the UC Regents to do so. Any move to significantly reduce undergraduate enrollment (particularly any reduction targeted at in-state students) at California’s flagship public university would be (quite rightly) seen as putting top-flight higher education further out of reach of working-class and middle-class Californians. The public outcry would be enormous and the Legislature would act.</p>
<p>I think we can safely dismiss this possibility as being empirically false - there is little dispute that graduate programs are significantly better funded than are undergrad programs. Professional degree program students pay substantially more than do undergrads, and MS/PhD students either provide their own funding through outside fellowships (i.e. NSF), through TA/RA-ships, or could simply be charged more (see below).</p>
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<p>The question is not whether the graduate programs should be as large as the undergrad programs. The question is whether the graduate programs could be larger than they are right now. Many (almost certainly most) of Berkeley’s graduate programs admit a significantly smaller percentage of applicants than the undergrad program does; certain PhD programs I believe admit fewer than 5% of their applicants. True, the applicant pool is small to begin with, but that still means that there is ample room for Berkeley to vastly increase its graduate admissions if it so chose. </p>
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<p>Actually, that’s not quite true, and in fact illustrates the fundamental endogeneity of the question. Graduate students require one-on-one attention if you are running an elite-quality program. But Berkeley could have easily chosen to run a weaker graduate program by simply not providing one-on-one attention. And that illustrates the central point: Berkeley has made the specific choice not to sacrifice quality in the name of access when it comes to graduate programs. </p>
<p>But Berkeley has (sadly) chosen to do so for its undergrad program. I continue to wonder why that differential treatment exists. </p>
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<p>And that again illustrates the endogeneity of the question. Graduate students at elite programs expect to be funded. But Berkeley could have simply chosen not to run elite graduate programs by not providing that funding, and if students don’t like it, oh well, they could go somewhere else, such as that certain school in Palo Alto. Or, Berkeley could have simply chosen to provide funding only to certain grad students, but not others, and those who aren’t funded could go elsewhere. After all, there are lower-ranked graduate programs that don’t fund all of their students.</p>
<p>But, again, that’s the point - Berkeley didn’t want to run lower-ranked graduate programs. Berkeley made the specific choice to run elite-level graduate programs, many of which arguably the best in the world in their discipline, and that does indeed require funding all of their students. </p>
<p>Which again begs the question - why didn’t Berkeley make the same choice regarding its undergrad program? Imagine if Berkeley had made the choice to have the #1 undergrad program in the world. Why not? They did make that choice regarding having the #1 ranked Chemistry, English, and other graduate programs. </p>
<p>But the fact remains, they didn’t. Instead, Berkeley chose the dichotomy of having elite-level graduate programs with elite-level admissions regimes, and a less stringent admissions regime for an undergrad program that is (not coincidentally) not as strong as its graduate programs. And so again, I have to ask, why the dichotomy?</p>
<p>^ sakky, you make an excellent point. However, years ago, UC Berkeley’s undergraduate program was also considered elite, no? Did Berkeley CHOOSE this dichotomy or has the undergraduate program merely slipped?</p>