<p>“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? The world may never know!”</p>
<p>And it should be noted that under all that paint, it’s a giant hunk of purple quartz, which I imagine would be pretty stunning. Damn our traditions!</p>
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<p>Most CC posters distinguish Berkeley undergrad from grad. There are a lot of top undergrad students at Berkeley, too. </p>
<p>Undergrad students + Grad students + Faculty + Facilities = University</p>
<p>Cal has strong undergrad students, top tier grad students, top tier faculty and constantly improving facilities.</p>
<p>so even berkeley’s rock looks a bit prettier as a rock to me, northwestern’s quartz would worth a lot more in the market.</p>
<p>ucbchem,</p>
<p>i was thinking more about the atmosphere and the overall “personality” of your classmates. i really don’t believe berkeley is more or less intellectual than most top privates. i don’t believe one can tell the difference until you get to places like uchicago or yale.</p>
<p>There’s be more pot and less beer at Berkley, IMO. (It’s ok to make wild, uninformed conjecture so long as I post script it with IMO!)</p>
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<p>At least spell it right: Berkeley, not Berkley.</p>
<p>let’s look at objective data:</p>
<p>endowment per student:</p>
<p>NU: $753,897
Berk: $149,050
(yes, that’s a factor of 5)</p>
<p>students per faculty:
NU: 7:1
Berk: 15.5:1
(yes, northwestern has more than double the professors)</p>
<p>SAT:
NU: 1423
Berk: 1316
(yes, that’s a discrepancy of 100+ points)</p>
<p>what a joke this thread is. berkeley kids are too busy trying to squeeze every ounce of credit they can out of their school instead of beginning to work to make it a respectable public institution that would actually compete with top privates.</p>
<p>keep arguing that having 99% of your class in the top 10% of one of the worst public school systems in the country means you maintain a program that competes with schools who take smarter, better students from the best high schools in the country</p>
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<p>When will CCers give up this whole “endowment” idea? It is such a misleading factor. Yes, privates have apparently larger endowments, but publics are largely supported by something that privates don’t get: government funding. Typically, a university will spend 5% of its endowment each year (by policy). Berkeley alone gets over $400 million from governmental revenue – just to spend. In order for a private school to match what Berkeley gets just in spending money from the government, it needs an $8 billion endowment (5% of 8 billion = $400 million). So Berkeley actually has an “implied” $8bn endowment (about), and an “actual” $3.5bn, for a total of about $12bn.</p>
<p>But even then, the comparison isn’t completely fair. Medical schools make up a large portion of a school’s budget, and consequently, its endowment. Berkeley does not “officially” have a medical school; UCSF, founded right after Berkeley as its med school, has always played that role (sharing faculty, students, funds, facilities, programs, degrees, etc. with Berkeley). Today, it receives over $600 million in governmental revenue, not to mention it has a $1.2bn endowment. If we were to add the two endowments (implied + actual) together, as one entity to make comparison easier, they’d have a $26bn endowment.</p>
<p>Of course, Berkeley doesn’t get as much from student fees, but we all know that they don’t even begin to cover the costs of running a university. And Berkeley has more students.</p>
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<p>This figures are always deceptive. I highly, highly doubt that NU has 4,000 professors.</p>
<p>And it turns out I’m right. From the most recent CDS, NU’s total instructional faculty is 1,192. Berkeley’s total instructional faculty? 2,028.</p>
<p>[2006-07</a> Instructional faculty and class size, Common Data Set - Northwestern University](<a href=“http://www.ugadm.northwestern.edu/commondata/2006-07/i.htm]2006-07”>http://www.ugadm.northwestern.edu/commondata/2006-07/i.htm)
<a href=“http://cds.berkeley.edu/pdfs/PDF%20wBOOKMARKS%2006-07.pdf[/url]”>http://cds.berkeley.edu/pdfs/PDF%20wBOOKMARKS%2006-07.pdf</a></p>
<p>Of course, this includes full- and part-time. One thing I’ve noticed that some privates do is that they count total instructional faculty and only undergraduate students to calculate the faculty:student ratio, even though the CDS instructions say to use all full-time students (+ 1/3 part time). Privates also tend to advertise their faculty # as total instructional faculty + med school faculty + grad student instructors + lecturers + researchers, etc. or any combination thereof. It seems NU does this:</p>
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<p>Seems exactly like what you’re doing for NU. ;)</p>
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<p>Beginning? Newsflash: it already does, and has for a long time. Ask any real-world academic whether Berkeley is on par with top privates, and they’d tell you yes. It’s only US News that seems to dispute this (and they have to, if they want their controversial rankings to keep selling). In the majority of rankings, Berkeley’s placed well above most privates. (To say that Berkeley isn’t quite on par with top privates is one thing; to say that it hasn’t even begun to compete is another – a completely ludicrous thing at that.)</p>
<p>Elsifjdl, I am not sure your numbers are that meaningful. I am not convinced.</p>
<p>First of all, NU’s endowment per student is not $750,000, it is closer to $400,000. According to the NACUBO, as of July 2007, Northwestern’s total endowment stood at $5.9 Billion. With $14,000 students, that works out to $420,000/student, which is still pretty bloody awesome. Cal’s endowment in July of 2007 stood at roughly $3.3 billion, which works out to about $100,000. But Cal gets $500 million from the state each year. A university requires and endowment of $10 billion to raise $500 million/year. Furthermore, given its size, Cal probably has some benefits of economies of scale, though given NU’s size, that probably isn’t much of a factor (it would be more of a factor if NU was more of a LAC). Also, NU has a Medical school, which eats up a great deal of a university’s endowment. Cal has no Medical school to fund and operate. In short, NU is definitely better off than Cal financially, but we aren’t talking about night and day as you seem to suggest.</p>
<p>Secondly, student to faculty ratio is not telling. Class size is far more telling and Cal classes, particularly past intro-lvel courses, are very manageable. I doubt you will find a huge difference in class size past the intro-level at Cal and NU.</p>
<p>SAT scores and ranges are obviously an area of interest. When you can prove three things to me, I will acknolwege your point:</p>
<p>1) The SAT actually measures ability.
2) Northwestern’s SAT reporting is identical to Cals (i.e., superscoring does not impact one adversely)
3) Students who apply to Cal prepare equally hard for the SAT as students who apply to NU.</p>
<p>Similarly, can someone explain why an undergrad student would be better off at Cal or Michigan as opposed to Dartmouth or Northwestern? Both Cal and Michigan apparently have better grad programs.</p>
<p>Collegebound, I don’t think Cal and Michigan are better than Dartmouth or NU. In opinion, all 4 of those universities are awesome and offer different experiences, all of which are unbeatable in their own right. It boils down to personal preference. If you ask me personally, I have always (and continue) rated all 4 of those universities in the same group. More specifically, I place them all in Group II (Group I has 5 universities; H,M,P,S and Y).</p>
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<p>oh dear, 7:1 vs 15.5:1 means double the ratio. NU has 14k students while berkeley has over 33k students. of course nu doesn’t have 4,000 professors cos that would make the ratio become 3.5:1 and nobody was saying that.</p>
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<p>Care to explain how did you get that computation?
To be frank with you, that data does not mean so much to me either. Why?</p>
<p>Because you’re assuming that state schools rely heavily on earnings from endowment. State schools rely funding from the government, aside from the student’s tuition fees and research fundings from private tie-up companies. </p>
<p>How much funding/budget does NU use for its students from endowment? Everything? I guess not.</p>
<p>Also, the endowment fund includes grad schools. You don’t want Cal supporters here to include Cal’s grad school in we discuss about university prestige but here you are borrowing NU’s money to support its underdrad. Isn’t that an attempt to twist data, AGAIN? </p>
<p>And also, isn’t the bulk of that NU’s amount fund NU’s school of medicine?</p>
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<p>And exactly how is that any different in one’s learning environment? Is there really a difference when you sit in a class with 7 classmates from a class with 14 classmates? </p>
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100 points is not that big a difference. I’m very, very sure that in a class at Cal, you would have classmates who are “harvard” type of students too. Somehow, that evens out the environment and the learning process. BUT then again, I’m not a huge fan of SATs. Again, I’m not a huge fan of SATs. I do not think it is the best measure of the student’s preparedness to enter college and to succeed in future life.</p>
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<p>I am not from Berkeley. And if this matters to you, I am currently living and working 12 hours away from Berkeley by an Airbus 380. I have no relatives who have gone to Berkeley, only friends. My father went to Stanford for grad school (Electrical Engineering). My mother went to JHU grad school (Public health). My 2 brothers went to Wharton (MBA). And even then, my family could not fathom to hear from someone saying NU is better than Cal. In fact, my father has been encouraging me to go Cal for grad school. But all these are beside the point. My point is, you don’t need to be from Cal to appreciate the university. It has huge fan-based across the world because Cal is a top global university and only very few schools can match it – Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. </p>
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<p>You have not proven that NU students are smarter. Your only proof was the SATs, which, unfortunately is not a veyr good measure and is not a better indicator of one’s college preparedness than high school achievement rank. </p>
<p>Like I asked you before, if SATs are that good an indicator for the students’ preparedness to succeed in college life (and after college) as you implied it, why won’t Harvard – the best and most selective university on earth – , for instance, rank all its applicants’ SATs scores and get the students who have the best scores?</p>
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<p>Oh, this is a much better illustration of my point; Kyle said it more eloquently than I did. </p>
<p>Kyle, thanks for saying that more flamboyantly and sorry that I read elsijfdl post before yours.</p>
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<p>Agreed, for undergraduate education. </p>
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<p>Not for grad school level. Berkeley’s grad school can head-to-head with the best grad school there is on earth. For example, Berkeley’s Chemistry is the number one Chemistry education in the world. And Cal’s engineering is only matched by Stanford and MIT. </p>
<p>The reason why I said UC Berkeley > NU is because I counted them as two universities competing each other. I did not separate undergrad from grad schools because when you talk about a UNIVERSITY, you count undergrad student body, grad student body, alumni of the university, faculty, facilities and research output of the university as ONE. :)</p>
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<p>Sam Lee, </p>
<p>This is what State U supporters call data “manipulation”. This practice effectively screws up objective data. You borrow data from grad school whenever you need them in order to boost your data. And you criticize State U supporters when they do the same for “Prestige Ranking” part.</p>
<p>Hold up guys. My cousin wanted to ask this and this has nothing to do with our discussion:</p>
<p>Would you give up Harvard for NU?
Similarly, would you give up Harvard for Cal?</p>
<p>Had there been students who have done that in the past?</p>
<p>Personally, I would give up Harvard for Berkeley if I’ll do computer science, engineering or chemistry, most definitely even if I am international and no scholarship privileges are given to me. But I would in no way give up Harvard for NU in any subject or anything. That’s not a smart thing to do because, for me, NU has no clear identity. It’s just an Ivy League wanabe. Cal is very distinct and caters to a specific market, side from its top in-state constituents/students. This may sound a little bit harsh but the general perception for NU is – it is a dumping ground for Harvard rejects. Cal cannot be said to be the same because Cal has its own clientele/market and very few Cal aspirants have applied to Harvard or have really considered of going to Harvard. But, again, this is just my personal view that’s why I keep telling him, I am not the best resource person to ask about those things because I’m clearly biased for Cal as it is my preferred school.</p>
<p>Powergrid, not separating undergrad from grad can sometimes be misleading, not so much because schools with great graduate programs do not have great undergraduate programs, but rather because some schools with great undergraduate programs sometimes have small and passive graduate programs. Dartmouth and many top LACs fall in that category. </p>
<p>In this forum, it is wise to separate undergraduate from graduate. I agree that at the graduate level, Cal is one of the top 3 or 4 university on Earth. At the undergraduate level, it is only slightly weaker. In other words, perhaps not top 5, but definitely among the top 15 in the US. Dartmouth and NU do not compete with Cal at the graduate level (not in most fields of study anyway), but at the undergraduate level, they are just as formidable, albeit in different ways.</p>
<p>^ Agreed for education or training purposes. :)</p>
<p>Bah! Let’s settle this debate on the football field. When do you think Cal and Northwestern will get together for a Rose Bowl game? ;)</p>