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First of all, I don't think your army analogy is completely accurate. When you're in the army, there's only so much you can do to prevent an attack, or drive it off. Sometimes you just might be one of those unlucky people around when a suicide bomber detonates his explosive. You could be crippled, but it isn't necessarily your fault.</p>
<p>In college, however, it's a completely different story. Your experience at any university is what you make it, 99% of the time (let's disregard things like family emergencies, etc, for this discussion, because those are just extreme cases, not applicable for most people). You can party all day and all night and nobody is going to stop you like your parents would have for the previous 18 years
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<p>Not in the case of Berkeley - not in the case of the tough technical majors, i.e. engineering. Let's face it. Most high school seniors don't really know what engineering is all about, yet they are forced to sign up for it anyway if they want to secure a spot for themselves in the CoE. So what if they find out that they're not good at it? The rules at Berkeley are such that you may find it difficult to switch out of engineering. It is difficult to switch to Letters & Science if you don't have a 3.0, and trust me, PLENTY of Berkeley engineering students have nowhere near a 3.0. Nor can you easily switch from one engineering major to another, as all of them are impacted, and hence, none of them are easily switchable towards if you don't have a decent GPA.</p>
<p>The upshot is that plenty of engineering students who are doing poorly are * required to stay * in the major. I call this the 'engineering major trap', and other people have different terms to describe it. But the basic point is that students get screwed because of a simple lack of information. Like I said, most high school students have no engineering experience and so they don't really know what they're really signing up for, and by the time they find out, it's too late. They can't get out. It's quite a shame that this happens at Berkeley ,but that's the reality of the situation. I know a number of engineering students who would love to get out, but can't because nobody else wants to take them, and hence they are forced to stay in engineering (or else leave Berkeley entirely). </p>
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As Uncle Ben said (I haven't seen Spiderman 3 btw): "With great power comes great responsibility". Well let's face it: some people don't do well with that new responsibility, and that's life. To say to students: "If you do well, you can show your grade but if you don't nobody will know about it" is putting an inaccurate and in a sense harmful point of view in students' minds. A university's job is to prepare students for "the real world", yet in the real world, nobody is going to give you money back that you lost in the stock market and say "let's pretend it never happened". Nobody is going to say: "It alright you haven't been showing up for work for the past month, let's forget about it".
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<p>The real world analogy is not accurate, because the fact of the matter is, Berkeley is harder than the real world. Any decent undergrad program is. Let's be perfectly honest here. Most jobs really aren't that hard. You don't really need to have great expertise to do most jobs. Most jobs are simple common sense, combined with social skills and some basic technical knowledge. Rarely do you ever have to work on any projects that require true cutting-edge, high-level knowledge.</p>
<p>Let me give you an example. When I was an engineering summer intern, I was surrounded by people who had master's degrees and PhD's in engineering. * But I was the only one who still remember how to do complex engineering derivations. *. One guy with a PhD, who had a daughter who was taking high school calculus, actually came up to me and asked me to give him refreshers on basic calculus so that he could help his daughter. This is a guy who had a PhD in engineering from a top school, and I was just a lowly summer intern. Yet he was asking me for math help. What's wrong with this picture?</p>
<p>The sad truth of the matter is that all colleges teach you a lot of things that, frankly, you don't really need to know to do the job. Hence, the notion that college really prepares you for the real world is, frankly, a chimera. If that was really true, then how is it that college dropouts like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs do so well for themselves in the real world? Seems to me that those guys were very well prepared for the real world, despite not having college degrees. But put those guys aside. Ask anybody who's actually been in the workforce for awhile, in any job, and if they're honest, they will tell you that most of the things they learned in college, they never use. Not only that, but a lot of things they need to know were never taught to them in college. Frankly, the top colleges basically serve as market signals that you were good enough to at least get into that particular college and to survive it, and hence that's a mark of self-discipline and raw talent. But it's not like you really need to have the actual education itself in order to do most jobs. </p>
<p>So take it back to the case of Berkeley. Berkeley weeds people out for not knowing things that, frankly, they don't really need to know. To give you an example, I know a guy who majored in English at Berkeley, but also learned software programming on the side just as a hobby and as a way to make extra money. When he graduated, he was hired as a software engineer, and has enjoyed a highly successful career doing that. All this, despite the fact that not only did not he never major in CS, but he also never actually took a formal CS class. The employer doesn't care - as the guy basically knows what he needs to know to do the job well. The guy even said himself that he's thankful that he never actually tried to major in CS, as he suspects he probably would have been weeded out. Because he took the path he did, he wound up with a better job than a lot of Berkeley CS graduates got. </p>
<p>To elaborate more on the CS path, again, the CS path insists on teaching you things that, frankly, you don't really need to know to do the job. For example, a lot of the CS coursework is about theory. But you don't really need to know any theory in order to just get a computer job. Computational/complexity theory - who cares? Nor are there a lot of compiler jobs out there - but most CS programs require that you take a class on compiler implementation (hence, writing your own compiler). And what about digital logic? Again, for most real-world programmers, who cares? All of these things are topics that you don't really need to know in the real world. But Berkeley will weed you out if you don't know them. Don't get me wrong - these are nice things to know and will probably help you if you do know them. But the notion of weeding somebody out because he doesn't know it, even though the real world doesn't require that people know it? That's dubious to me. </p>
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There is a reason why colleges don't like transfer students with poor grades - it shows them that they've done poorly before, and no matter what they say on their essay, statistically speaking they are likely to do poorly again, no matter the school. And even if you disagree with that, it's indisputable that they're much riskier candidates than those who have maintained good grades.
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<p>But don't you see what you are saying? You are basically reinforcing the point that people shouldn't choose Berkeley, if they have a more palateable option (i.e. HYPS). Why take the chance in flunking out and greatly damaging your career, if you don't have to take that chance? Hence all this talk about how tough Berkeley is only deters people from selecting Berkeley ex-ante, and instead, choosing to go to, say, Stanford, where the program is less harsh, and yet the graduates still get excellent jobs. Why put your career at risk, if you don't have to?</p>