<p>Within the last couple of days Berkeley professors received two national awards.</p>
<p>Alex Filippenko was selected Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is one of the world's leading astrophysicists, teaches an undergraduate class every year and is a wildly popular lecturer.</p>
<p>Jay Keasling is Discover Magazine's Scientist of the Year. He is a professor of chemical engineering and has been in the news of late for his work in synthetic biology, specifically his effort to develop inexpensive malaria drugs.</p>
<p>It is astounding how Berkeley manages to maintain its faculty superiority in the face of the unlimited funds available to the elite privates. It's too bad more high school kids outside California don't realize this. </p>
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It's too bad more high school kids outside California don't realize this.
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<p>I've seen little evidence that Berkeley in underappreciated by high school students outside of California. At any rate, UCB is almost 90% resident, so I would imagine that admittance from other states is already pretty selective. Do you feel it is not selective enough?</p>
<p>My impression from reading this board is that many posters believe the world begins and ends with the elite privates. Some acknowledge the superiority of Berkeleys graduate departments but denigrate, unjustifiably in my view, the undergraduate experience. Professor Filippenko, referred to in my earlier post, makes a point of teaching undergrads. I suspect he does so not in spite of his renown, but because of it. He is far from an isolated case. As to your question about admission stats for out of state students, I dont have an answer, though when my kids went through the college admission dance in the 90s, Berkeley was pretty difficult for out of state applicants unless you fit into a special admit category.</p>