<p>^ Now, that Berkeley is overpopulated is another issue altogether. On that issue, I am disappointed that the Chancellor has not done anything to cut the number of undergrad students at Berkeley. I think cutting the number of transfer admits would be a good start.</p>
<p>Ankur, you sound like a hater. Why did you decide on Cal anyway if it’s SO not working out for you? </p>
<p>(It’s students like these, IMHO, that are Berkeley’s biggest weakness).</p>
<p>RML, the links are very helpful. They do help answer the Berkeley vs Cornell question, but more importantly show why Berkeley vs UCLA should be an absolute no-brainer. The campus does a terrible job in promoting these stats in attracting cross-admits. </p>
<p>(And I agree with you 100% about the undergrad class size. If it was reduced even a modest 20%, it would really improve things for everyone.)</p>
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<p>Though I may disagree with some things he is saying, I think it would be wise to acknowledge different perspectives about this issue. People generally only like to hear what they like to hear, and he’s doing the job of revealing the other side. </p>
<p>Regarding the issue of cutting down the undergraduate/transfer admittance rate, Cal is a public school. There’s no way it’ll cut down even 10% of it’s incoming class. Heck, they’re even building a new dorm for incoming freshmen which will be complete at the end of 2012. They’re even considering destroying People’s Park in order to build more housing for students. If anything, the # of students will go up, not down.</p>
<p>Probably, the only solution is to make Cal a private school and increase tuition. No one would like that. So, that’ll never happen =x</p>
<p>There is no correlation between “being a public school” and not being able to reduce enrollment. Institutions can modulate their makeup as funding and other situations warrant. Private schools have more authority, but that depends partly on the level of subsidies that hold the publics up.</p>
<p>On that note, the state has divested enormously from UC as a whole. Berkeley should do whatever it needs to do to maintain its quality and reputation.</p>
<p>That the school is building more housing doesn’t mean it’s adding more students, either. It’s doing what it should do - move towards being more residential and allowing a higher percentage of students an opportunity to live in campus housing.</p>
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<p>My point is that your numerical claims regarding YLS seems to be off. Now, if you can present data to back your claims, then by all means do so. After all, if you’re going to cite numbers, you ought to be able to state where you obtained those numbers from.</p>
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There’s been capital for renovations and new academic buildings:</p>
<p>Durant Hall:
[Mark</a> Cavagnero Associates - Home](<a href=“http://www.cavagnero.com/#UCB]Mark”>Home - Mark Cavagnero)</p>
<p>Student Athlete High Performance Center and Memorial Stadium Renovation:
[Inside</a> Berkeley’s newest, most discreet, building | Berkeleyside](<a href=“http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/08/08/berkeley-newest-most-discreet-building-cal-athlete-center/]Inside”>http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/08/08/berkeley-newest-most-discreet-building-cal-athlete-center/)</p>
<p>New Center for Biomedical and Health Studies:
[Li</a> Ka-Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences : University of California Berkeley](<a href=“http://www.aeieng.com/markets/projects/UC_Berkley_li_ka_shing/]Li”>http://www.aeieng.com/markets/projects/UC_Berkley_li_ka_shing/)</p>
<p>Boalt Hall Law School Renovation and Expansion:
[Boalt</a> Hall School of Law Renovation and Expansion](<a href=“http://www.cp.berkeley.edu/RFQ_18183A_BoaltRE.html]Boalt”>http://www.cp.berkeley.edu/RFQ_18183A_BoaltRE.html)</p>
<p>New Helios Alternative Energy Research Center:
[Helios</a> Energy Research Center | Berkeleyside](<a href=“http://www.berkeleyside.com/tag/helios-energy-research-center/]Helios”>http://www.berkeleyside.com/tag/helios-energy-research-center/)</p>
<p>Construction and investment continues in Berkeley’s facilities…</p>
<p>sakky, check the link I provided. There you’ll see YLS took in 89 undergrads from Yale College. Then again, I wonder why that became the issue here when this was about Berkeley vs Cornell.</p>
<p>What link are you talking about?</p>
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<p>Hey, I didn’t bring it up.</p>
<p>I think Berkeley is a great institution, not just for CA, but for the world. I hope CA state will continute to invest in Berkeley.</p>
<p>Being prestigious is not in Cornell’s mission statement. 'Any person…any field of study" is refected in the diversity of the 7 colleges at Cornell. If they were all about ranking and prestige they wouldn’t have the college of Hotel Administration & the Ag School…these colleges are what the “intellectual elitist” look down upon Cornell for.</p>
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<p>Ankur1521 - are you being serious? I don’t like accusing people of ■■■■■■■■, but I would think these two lines, both said by you, seem fishy when read together.</p>
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<p>While I am not yet accusing him of ■■■■■■■■, his exposition thus far has not done much revealing - only stating an opinion which appears to me quite unfounded.</p>
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<p>This appears to show one thing only: that Berkeley admits a lot more people, and that the bottom of their heap doesn’t make it. One can make the same claim about several small schools which have a reputation of being “grad school prep” and feed a lot of people successfully into PhD programs. I would guess much more percentage-wise than does Cornell. I would not call those small schools more prestigious than Cornell.</p>
<p>Your own “reasonable” assumption that a similar percentage of people want to attend grad school is a little more dubious than you might expect. I find that a lot of people who go to grad school don’t even really want to - they go because they don’t know what else to do. It is quite obvious to me that the larger the “bottom of the heap” in terms of academic motivation (which tends to be larger at a bigger school), the more likely there will be considerably more who don’t make it into the schools they apply to.</p>
<p>I think if I were to be honest now, the simple truth of the matter is that Cornell admits fewer students, with not incomparable standards. That means the bottom of the heap is probably going to be larger at Berkeley.</p>
<p>As for breadth of departmental strength, Berkeley seems to win hands down. HOWEVER, there is something to be clarified about this.</p>
<p>This whole nonsense behind “it doesn’t matter for undergrad” is basically a bunch of people who don’t know what grad school is parroting something they heard somewhere. Who said grad students suddenly magically are able to appreciate departmental strength? Most of the time your adviser’s work is so above what you have the knowledge to do that you’re closer to being an undergrad than you are to being a researcher. That may start changing slowly, at the later stages of your career.</p>
<p>I am, of course, distinguishing grad and professional schools. </p>
<p>That said, in the academic world, schools like Berkeley and Cornell are so high up there that usually the people who go “come to Berkeley because its departments are better” are wrong. The professors at both schools are bound to be insanely talented, since getting a professorship is much harder than getting into undergrad or grad. The simple truth is that a majority of people saying these words are not at the level to distinguish between Berkeley professors and Cornell professors. They’re plainly spouting nonsense after reading a ranking system. </p>
<p>Let’s face it - Berkeley and Cornell are pretty giant schools. And prestige isn’t just about the name of the school - it’s about what PART of the school you associate with - which, in a giant school, can vary considerably. I don’t know that “overall” claims are in any way consistent or meaningful. </p>
<p>I think one should remember that the objective is ultimately to graduate with a degree from one of these schools. If you graduate after achieving a lot in the tough stuff either of these places has to offer, you will be proud of yourself. </p>
<p>Honestly, talking Cornell vs. Berkeley prestige the way it is going here seems to be a little bit like comparing SAT scores years after the fact.</p>
<p>"I didn’t know anyone took the little Ivies seriously. I certainly don’t. "
what’s with all the hate that cornell gets??? </p>
<p>I think both schools are amazing in their own ways. Personally speaking though, I’d pick Berkeley just because it’s CALI and I’m a CS major.</p>
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<p>Ahh, but that is the beauty of a Cal or Cornell (or HYP). The programs do not very, much. Cal has as many top-ranked departments as Harvard, for example, including many top 5 nationally. A ‘poor’ ranking for a Cal department is 10-15 nationally. Of Cal’s 52 departments that are ranked (out of 62 possible), 48 are in top 10, nationally.</p>
<p>Cornell has 31 top 10 programs, and 48 in the top 20. Neither are too shabby, IMO.</p>
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<p>Well, I’m not sure that I can entirely agree with that from an undergraduate standpoint, for the simple reason that the vast majority of undergrads are not going to professionally pursue for more than a few years whatever degree program they had chosen anyway. As I’ve said repeatedly before, most sociology majors do not become professional sociologists, most history majors do not become professional historians, heck, as mathboy98 would surely agree, many math majors do not actually become professional mathematicians. Heck, one recent math major apparently decided to become a barista at Starbucks. </p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Math.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Math.stm</a></p>
<p>So then who really cares how highly ranked your individual program is if, like most students, you’re not really going to pursue it professionally for more than a few years (if at all) anyway? Overall prestige,with the corresponding improved recruiting and networking access, is then what matters for those students. </p>
<p>As a case in point, let’s be perfectly frank: the vast majority of students at Harvard are there for the brand. They could choose a program that is relatively low-ranked at Harvard, and it doesn’t really matter because they still have the Harvard brand. Nor is this behavior irrational, for through the Harvard brand they will have access to the recruiting at elite consulting and finance firms that have become so attractive to undergrads of late. They will have lifetime access to what is surely the most high-powered college alumni network in the world, and let’s be honest, most job placement, especially mid-career, is conducted through networking, for which your college major matters little. No fellow Harvard alumni is going to say: “Oh, I see that decades ago while at Harvard, you had majored in some relatively low-ranking program, therefore I refuse to take your phone call.”</p>
<p>^ So, universities should stop excelling their departments because not all their graduates will pursue the major once they leave the school anyway? </p>
<p>Harvard is prestigious. But so is Berkeley. I admit it’s not of Harvard’s prestige level, but it is a better brand name than Cornell’s overall. </p>
<p>Re employment, you’d need to have a good GPA from Harvard to get into a good company. Goldman and McKinsey, for example, aren’t to get an average Harvard grad over a highly achiever Berkeley grad. Both Harvard an Berkeley are good enough to get you anywhere you want.</p>
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<p>I think the better question is, given limited resources, where should a school spend them to maximize its value to its own undergraduates. Another way to look at it is to ask yourself, as a prospective undergraduate, which school is likely to be more helpful to your career. To give you a stark example, I suspect that the ‘average departmental rating’ at many state schools such as Ohio State, Minnesota, Maryland, and the like may well exceed that at Dartmouth or Brown, but to then conclude that undergrads should prefer to Maryland over Brown is questionable. PhD students would be a different story, but we’re not talking about PhD students here. </p>
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<p>I doubt that that’s true, particularly, say, 5-10 years after graduation when practically nobody cares about your GPA anymore, but alumni networking still carries great sway. Like I’ve always said, the most effective means of building a successful career is through savvy networking. I have seen far too many Harvard alumni obtain meetings that other people couldn’t get simply because they knew the right people. They had contacts who could make the introductions. I can think of countless guys with quite nice positions in private equity, hedge funds, analytical consulting (which, truth be told, is arguably better than strategy consulting), or the like who didn’t seem to be particularly academically impressive, but did have an elite degree of some sort.</p>
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<p>Yes, but recall what I said about rankings? Most undergrads AND grad students are likely not at the level to distinguish too much between a “super super super top school” and a “very top school” in the first place. So how well a Cal program is regarded is not what matters so much as what aspect of Cal’s programs you choose to associate with. For instance, being an English major doesn’t carry tremendous prestige by itself, I daresay, but associating with the academia side of Cal in English does; while random person X will not recognize that prestige, you’ll find that academics in your career path will like what you associated with. Whereas, if you associate with the nonacademia side of things, your employer or law school will probably not consider there to be much prestige associated with your academic upbringing. I also think entirely analogous remarks hold for Cornell, and that Berkeley’s supposed advantage in rankings will not help the student very much here.</p>
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<p>Yes, I agree with this. Given the choice between Harvard and Berkeley, for most people, it simply makes more sense to pick the brand name. Although, you can of course imagine why I would not say the same of Cornell v. Berkeley - Cornell seems to deflate grades, one of its most prestigious programs is engineering, and when it comes to technical majors and engineering, I think the Berkeley brand name is sufficiently out there that employers seem to care. Cornell in fact seems to have a lot of the “flaws” like grade deflation, etc, which does not make it singularly attractive as Harvard. As you might say, better head to nicer weather (well of course depending on taste) and major in a creampuff ;)</p>