Berkeley v Cornell?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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<p>I don’t think that’s true anymore. It was true, but not after Cornell’s 1997 either hopelessly naive or Machiavellianly savvy move - I’m not sure which - to publicly post the grade distributions of their courses, thereby allowing Cornell students to determine which courses were graded the easiest and then choose accordingly. </p>

<p>[Grade</a> Inflation at Cornell](<a href=“http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/grade_inflation_at_cornell/]Grade”>Grade Inflation at Cornell – Outside the Beltway)</p>

<p>Maybe Berkeley should do the same. Yes, I’m aware that there are 3rd party websites that discuss the grade distributions of various courses. But why not make it official and that includes all of the data, so that all students can see, once and for all, which courses/majors are the easiest in terms of grading and then choose accordingly.</p>

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<p>Yeah I saw that the earlier part of the post (with which I agreed). It was the “departments vary” par that didn’t fit with the discussion. (Those two schools are large but departments don’t tend to vary much.)</p>

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<p>Isn’t overall prestige the sum of its (departmental) parts? Can one have an “overall” (liberal arts) prestige with only strengths in a few areas?</p>

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<p>Overall prestige is absolutely not the sum of its departmental parts. The trope example of that would a comparison of schools such as Brown/Dartmouth vs. large flagship state schools such as Ohio State, Indiana, or Minnesota. The departmental rankings amongst the two groups are highly comparable with the state schools often times have higher ranked programs. Yet I think it’s difficult to make the case that they are of comparable undergraduate prestige. I suspect that very few undergrads at Brown or Dartmouth are wishing that they could be going to Ohio State or Indiana instead.</p>

<p>Another example, would be to take Yale vs. Michigan. Again, the average department rankings are basically the same, with Yale being noticeably (relatively) weaker in the natural sciences and engineering than in the humanities and social sciences. Yet I think it is hard to deny that Yale is more prestigious than is Michigan. I think even somebody such as Alexandre would concede that that’s not even a close call.</p>

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<p>You are probably reading what I said as something slightly different. I said different PARTS of the school are more prestigious, and in fact in different senses. That’s not quite the same as departments. Although there is something to be said of departments too, of course all depending on how one defines prestige. More below.</p>

<p>Yes, we all know that Berkeley departments have rankings pretty uniformly hitting the roof. That does NOT mean undergrad prestige associated to various parts of Berkeley isn’t different!!</p>

<p>Here is one crucial sense in which we can see this: there are departments training you in skills that are likeliest to be directly used in academia and not much elsewhere, and ones which train you both for the workforce and for academia. The ones which are hardcore in the second respect are considerably prestigious and, I would say, put in place more measures for selectivity: Haas and EECS are two good examples of the latter. Mathematics, English, etc on the other hand, teach you material that is primarily geared to an academic career, which nearly nobody actually seems to pursue seriously. The result is that these majors are designed so you can complete them pretty easily as a complement to something else. </p>

<p>It’s no surprise that I’d heard of much prestige associated to both EECS and Haas personally before coming to Berkeley, but I didn’t know that our Mathematics program is simply insanely good for a much longer time. </p>

<p>Whereas at a school like UChicago, Mathematics carries automatic prestige, because it’s a school that’s fairly academia centered, and Mathematics really means doing Mathematics for its own sake, and hence becomes more “hardcore” a departmental culture…</p>

<p>Now, if you use my broader terminology involving “parts” rather than “departments”, then I would say we can single out the specific components of, say, the English department which carry prestige. The academia track carries prestige, because you’re really making use of the best of the best. But that certainly isn’t true of the “overall major,” which frankly a lot of English majors with far from considerable interest can complete.</p>

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<p>I guess this is fine, but aren’t a lot of majors still hard enough that you can’t get by them much easier than you could get by a Berkeley major? Is MCB way easier to get a good grade in at Cornell? How about EE or Mech-E? Because if we’re talking creampuffs, even Berkeley has them.</p>

<p>As for avoiding hard classes, I’ve found it no trouble to figure out if you use ratemyprofessors and stuff like that. It’s nice to make things official, like you said, but I don’t see too much functional difference!</p>

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<p>Sakky, you speak about Harvard as if it is invincible… Yes; It is the best school on earth. But not all Harvard grads would move on and do well after schooling. There are many Harvard grads that are even jobless today. And, yes, if you’ll do well at Berkeley, you can beat any graduate, including Harvard’s graduates. If you suck at Harvard (example, got a low GPA), you will be easily beaten by a top Berkeley grad. This has been reflected even at top professional schools admissions.</p>

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<p>Personally, I think the far better reform would be to simply equalize grades across all majors. If engineering has to weed out X% of its students, fine, then the other majors should do so as well. Otherwise, engineering should not be allowed to weed out so many students. {After all, it’s not as if Berkeley’s weeding process is somehow ‘preventing’ all poor engineers from entering the labor market, as low-tier schools produce plenty of engineers. A guy with a 2.1 GPA in engineering from Idaho State is still going to be an engineer. } </p>

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<p>But the next question is, are you really going to do well at Berkeley? Plenty of students don’t, and indeed Berkeley’s grade deflation clearly militates against most students doing well. </p>

<p>Furthermore, even now, after admittedly impressive improvements and reforms, a significant percentage of Berkeley students are unable to graduate. A whopping 98% of Harvard undergraduates will graduate in 6 years, and I suspect that the remaining 2% consists largely of the Mark Zuckerburgs and Matt Damons of the world who simply found something more important to do. I wish Berkeley could graduate 98% of its students. The upshot is that if you suck at Harvard, you will still probably graduate (and with a degree from Harvard to boot). Your grades may be mediocre, but you’ll still graduate. If you suck at Berkeley, you may not even graduate at all. </p>

<p>Harvard could therefore been seen as the risk-averse choice along multiple dimensions - in terms of the branding and in terms of the nearly-certain-guarantee of graduation. </p>

<p>I certainly agree that Berkeley students who do well can match the graduates of any school. But the real question is - what if you don’t do well? There are a lot of Berkeley students who don’t do well.</p>

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<p>To continue my above post (for which I missed the 20-minute editing cutoff window): </p>

<p>As a case in point, I would argue that anybody who ends up with, say, less than a 2.5 GPA at Berkeley would have been better off if they had gone to Harvard (had they been admitted). Let’s face it, with a sub-2.5 GPA from Berkeley, you’re not really going to have a selection of desirable jobs or graduate school placements available to you. Granted, maybe if you had gone to Harvard, you would have also earned less than a 2.5 GPA. But at least you can then leverage the brand and the network - to likely find some decent opportunities. Believe me, there are plenty of no-name, low-tier management consulting and finance firms who seem to quite eager to hire a Harvard graduate, even one who performed poorly, just to be able to say that they have a “Harvard-educated talent pool”. </p>

<p>The other, perhaps even more cynical but surely lucrative, option, for that low-performing Harvard graduate is to work in that cottage industry of college admissions advisory firms that helps prospective applicants to maximize their chances of admission to Harvard (or other top schools). That industry is becoming particularly prominent in Asia where millions of nouveau-riche parents in China and India would like nothing more than to send their child to Harvard and have the money to pay for advice. For the purposes of that industry, it won’t matter that you performed poorly while you were at Harvard; all that matters is that you got in, for the admissions step is by far the most difficult part of Harvard, and since you got in, you will be viewed as somebody who can sell advice regarding how others can get in. </p>

<p>That sort of job surely must be better than, say, working as a Starbucks barista.</p>

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<p>Again, your post in unclear. What does your broader intent of ‘parts’ mean? “Academic tracks” (whatever they are) within a Department? Isn’t that a narrower definition? I don’t get it. Just like practically any liberal arts major, one can always find “easier” courses to take. Or, one could write an honors thesis. Or something in between.</p>

<p>Just bcos you were uniformed about the strength of Cal’s math department doesn’t make it non-academic.</p>

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<p>Perhaps true (and so what?), but I suspect that very few undergrads at THE Ohio State (or Indiana) are wishing that they could be going to Cal or UCLA instead. (wrt to your Brown/Dartmouth example, I’m not one that compares privates and publics – they are just too different in their missions and of course, geography comes into play and often times outweighs prestige.)</p>

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<p>Like Hopkins, Chicago is research-centered for undergrads, and proud of it. But now you are just parsing levels of prestige: in yoru view, Chicago, with a 2:1 ratio of grads-to-undergrads is more prestigious in math than Cal with a higher ratio of undergrads.</p>

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<p>Within every department, there are students who choose to pursue various <em>very</em> different paths, based on what they want to do. These are the <em>PARTS OF BERKELEY ACADEMICS</em> I refer to. </p>

<p>In several subjects, math included, most undergrads aren’t in it to research (which is what the departmental rankings you brought up even measure primarily). Whether it be a naive look at US News or a deeper knowledge of the department, it’s hard to contest that it’s the faculty and researchers who make that department what it is. </p>

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<p>Precisely correct, Chicago is research-centered. And that doesn’t make all of Chicago more prestigious. But it makes it so that the undergrads in math are a lot more focused on average in the subject, whereas at many other schools, it becomes a side thing more than their primary pursuit.</p>

<p>What I’m arguing is that by not associating with the research side of English, history, math, etc - all these subjects which are notorious for teaching less than immediately practical skills - they’re relinquishing claims on the prestige associated to the department. Because what they’re after and what the department is known for are two different things.</p>

<p>If nearly all of the history department were centered on going to a top grad program and becoming researchers in their field, and were achieving heavy success, then that would be an example of <em>not</em> relinquishing claims on that departmental prestige. Else, the “overall undergrad prestige” associated to that department is virtually nonexistent.</p>

<p>In a field such as Chem-E, EE, etc the undergrad admissions is specifically competitive, because engineering is simply a less academia centered discipline, and further, engineering is one of the disciplines in which undergrad training correlates perhaps more to the skills you’ll need after college than elsewhere. You probably won’t do the same things, but it’s pretty directly helpful stuff. Go through the heavy hitting CS courses here, and it’ll help you. That’s why, I believe, there is still prestige associated to EECS and such areas here at the undergrad level[. It is true that even in those fields, the grad students probably get a lot more of the prestige, because the departments are simply known for research most. But in a practical subject like engineering, I think they’re simply able to maintain that edge even in undergrad for aforementioned reasons.</p>

<p>The same isn’t true of all departments.</p>

<p>Now there is yet another version of prestige which can be considered, and is not what I was talking about - that is overall school brand name. That goes back to Sakky’s discussion of how the Harvard brand name stands pretty firmly at or near the top.</p>

<p>Yes, you’re right that my definition was broader and thus included even the various narrower subclasses of people.</p>

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<p>Of course not, I never said that. But most undergrads at Cal and most other good schools for math don’t want to go into academia and don’t take the steps to do so. Thus, the undergrad departments at many top math academia schools are relatively non-academic themselves.</p>

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<p>Well, the ‘so what’ is that the example serves to illustrate that prestige is far more than the mere aggregation of department rankings alone. Brown and Dartmouth are prestigious in spite of their relatively modest departmental rankings. </p>

<p>Put more starkly, let’s face it, you’re probably not going to be able to land a job at one of those college admissions advisory firms if you had gone to Ohio State or Indiana. I suspect that there aren’t exactly a lot of rich parents who are willing to pay handsomely for “insider” advice about admission for their kids to Indiana. </p>

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<p>Do you mean to say ‘very few’ or ‘very many’? More importantly, are you trying to say that Indiana is equivalently prestigious as Berkeley? {If so, I suspect that RML might have something to say about that.} </p>

<p><a href=“wrt%20to%20your%20Brown/Dartmouth%20example,%20I’m%20not%20one%20that%20compares%20privates%20and%20publics%20–%20they%20are%20just%20too%20different%20in%20their%20missions%20and%20of%20course,%20geography%20comes%20into%20play%20and%20often%20times%20outweighs%20prestige.”>quote</a>

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<p>Fine, then let’s consider the University of Virginia. If there is one school that consistently challenges Berkeley as the most prestigious public school in the nation for undergraduates, it’s UVa. Yet t seems to me that on a pure departmental ranking basis, UVa doesn’t really seem to be stronger on average than Indiana, Ohio State, Minnesota, or the like. Nor does geography seem to play any obvious role, as it’s not clear to me that the state of Virginia is an obvious attraction for young people. {If somebody would like to argue that the state of Virginia is indeed a magnet for young people, I’m happy to hear it.} </p>

<p>Hence, the point is that prestige and department rankings do not seem to be tightly correlated. As another case in point, Cornell has roughly about the same average departmental ranking as Yale does (Yale is better in non-technical disciplines, Cornell is better in technical disciplines). Would anybody like to argue that, at the undergraduate level, Cornell is equivalently prestigious as Yale?</p>

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<p>For the record, I would agree that Berkeley has a better brand name than Cornell overall, and especially internationally. In fact, that’s why I’ve often times wondered why more Berkeley graduates don’t readily leverage their brand by taking international jobs (and why Berkeley doesn’t do more to help its students to garner those jobs). I suspect that there are numerous newly rich parents in Asia who would readily pay for advice about how their children can be admitted to Berkeley. </p>

<p>If nothing else, that’s gotta be better than becoming a barista at Starbucks.</p>

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<p>This has to be one of the most biased, unfounded posts I’ve ever read (so much so that I had to actually log into my account).</p>

<p>FYI, Cornell is known to rely more on the “intangibles” rather than scores. Why don’t you take a look at this year’s accepted thread in the Cornell forum. As some angry posters pointed out, Cornell rejected most of the 2300+, 3.9+ and instead accepted the 1800, 3.5 GPA people. In fact, there were a lot of people questioning why Cornell didn’t accept them when they got into HYP, etc. I guess that’s what you would call predictable, huh?</p>

<p>Also, about the SAT scores. If you just look at the Arts & Sciences and Engineering colleges, you can see that the SAT average increases. After all, I don’t see half of Berkeley’s student body majoring in Agriculture, Hotel Admin, etc…which don’t seem to really care about high scores. </p>

<p>I don’t even need to talk about the % in top 10 cause I’m pretty sure Berkeley’s 99% is just manipulated data (I don’t even think HYP’s rates are that high). If it’s actually true, that just means Berkeley’s admissions is that much more predictable, which is what you’re arguing against. </p>

<p>I’m not sure about lay prestige/international recognition, hell I might even admit Berkeley has an advantage in name recognition, but to say that Cornell isn’t harder to get into is just plain bs. Every single one of my friends from California got accepted to Berkeley, not to mention they make fun of it for being so predictable. In their words, everyone and their mother gets into Berkeley as long as they have a 2100+ SAT and a 3.8 GPA (and California residence). Seems like the Californians in private schools don’t think Berkeley’s admissions is unpredictable like you do.</p>

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<p>According to the latest US News ranking, Berkeley and Cornell now have the same reputation rank.</p>

<p>This is not good news for Berkeley. For many, many years Berkeley was in the top 5 reputation wise (usually tied with Caltech and Yale). Things are heading south. The Chancellor needs to stop worrying about funding illegals and get on the fundraising trail.</p>

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<p>Depends on your major… I would go to Cornell if i were a science major… But since I am a business major, Berkeley definitely outranks cornell</p>

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<p>One needs to realize that the reason Berkeley is on par with Cornell is because of transfer kids. Without these kids, Cornell/Penn are cakewalk.</p>

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<p>Well, Cornell is part-public too. It accepts a large amount of transfer students just as UCs do. It even has agreements with certain CCs that suggest a very likely admission if one has a certain GPA.</p>

<p>I don’t know what you’re trying to imply with this statement.</p>

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<p>I believe that he was implying that transfer students aren’t of equal value as trad students because of the ease of acceptance for transfers.</p>

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<p>Does anyone actually believe that transfer students are capable of being subject to the same academic rigour as kids accepted from high school? </p>

<p>Just compare the two years of education they received at their community college to two years of classes at Berkeley . . .</p>

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<p>Capable, yes. Usually, no. There’s definitely a share of community college professors who know their stuff insanely well and have much fewer duties than Berkeley professors, thus spending inordinate amounts of time making their class intense based on their own tastes, rather than just following the textbook and having TAs take care of everything in a streamlined (and thus less difficult) fashion.</p>

<p>Sometimes people can actually find their community college prepared them better than the first 2 years at Berkeley, but that’s not the norm of course.</p>