<p>the original poster is an idiot</p>
<p>"better for pre-med" is an arbitrary statement. Is Caltech better for pre-med than UCLA....afterall, it had a 75% med school placement rate a couple years back.........with 6 out of 8 applicants getting accepted. Big schools like Michigan, UCLA, and Berkeley each send a couple hundred to med school, every year. Berkeley vs. UCLA premed is so arbitrary that to be honest, it doesn't make a difference. UCLA has a good premed curriculum, resources, research opps, and volunteer opps, and so does Berkeley. When you decide Berk or UCLA, you're choosing a school, not your destiny. Hope that helps.</p>
<p>Cmaher, you're the idiot.</p>
<p>Why dont you participate in rational discussion rather than dissing someone who's getting all his facts supported.</p>
<p>And IMO, USC wont ever be better than UCLA. It's still in the shadow of UCLA, and will probably never rise. If their only ability is accepting rich kids who can afford to donate $1000000's to the university, they are very sad.</p>
<p>cmaher, that hurts my feelings weeely baaad. If your response to pages worth of opinion-backed-by-reason is "the original poster is an idiot," then maybe this g-rated forum is too much for you. Here's a web page you should go to instead: <a href="http://www.disney.com%5B/url%5D">www.disney.com</a></p>
<p>Nobody needs to be calling anybody an idiot. We are here to have honest and forthright discussions, not to name-call.</p>
<p>However, I have to disagree that USC will never become better than UCLA. I don't know if they will or not, but to say that it will never happen, I think that's too strong of a statement. </p>
<p>Consider this. It wasn't all that long ago when Berkeley was considered to be a clearly better school than Stanford, in fact, so much better that there was really no comparison. Only 60 or 70 years ago, Stanford was still considered to be a backwater regional school of little consequence. In fact, during Stanford's early days, Stanford administrators used to write about how they trembled and despaired that they could ever build a strong school in the frigid shadow of their vaunted neighbor across the Bay, which had the full and substantial backing of the state government and seemed to pull in all the educational resources of the state like an academic magnet. The operating budget of Stanford during its early days was a mere speck compared to the generous state largesse afforded to Berkeley, and Berkeley dominated higher education in the state of California up until the 1960's. By the time that the Stanford faculty won its first Nobel (in 1954), Berkeley had already won 6. In fact, Berkeley's most serious academic competitor in California during those days was not Stanford, but was Caltech, which had also amassed a substantial reputation for research. But of course Caltech was (and still is) a highly specialized school, almost a 'boutique' school, that could never compete with Berkeley on a broad front. Hence, during those days, Berkeley had no true competitive peer on the West Coast. Stanford at the time was considered a minor school of little consequence. </p>
<p>Fast forward to today. My, how things have changed, and how quickly they changed. I think there is little dispute that today Stanford is probably the best school in the West Coast, and one of the most elite schools in the world. I would further state that if we had to identify one school that would be the likeliest candidate to replace Harvard as the most prestigious and strongest school in the world, it would be Stanford (don't get me wrong, I don't think Harvard is going to fall from its perch anytime soon, but if it does, I would say that Stanford is the most likely to replace it). Somewhere along the line, Stanford passed by Berkeley. Somewhere along the line, the best high school students in California changed from preferring Berkeley over Stanford to preferring Stanford over Berkeley. Somewhere along the line, Stanford became at least as respected of a research house as Berkeley is, if not more so. </p>
<p>Case in point - during the early 60's, Berkeley had something like 8 Nobel Prize winners to Stanford's 1, and during the early 50's, Berkeley had 6 winners to Stanford's 0. Today, Berkeley has 7 to Stanford's 16. Obviously, it is true that Nobel winners don't tell the whole story. But what is indisputable is that somewhere along the line, Stanford vastly vastly improved its research strength, and did so in a very short period of time. </p>
<p>So in just 2 short generations, Stanford rose from basically being a no-name school to being one of the indisputably best in the world. So is it really so impossible that USC could do the same, or at least, improve by enough to beat UCLA? Hey, if Stanford could do what it did, I don't see why it's impossible that USC could one day beat UCLA.</p>
<p>first of all, the number of nobel prize winners is a unbalanced way of comparing schools</p>
<p>berkeley and other state schools have declined simply because the government and by extension society as a whole has decided to provide less money for public education. I think Prop 13 was the final nail in the coffin for berkeley</p>
<p>I already said that Nobel Prizes are not a perfect metric. Nevertheless, I think it is indisputable that Stanford has greatly improved as a research school in just 2 short generations, and Nobels are just one indication of that fact. </p>
<p>I would also argue that the story regarding public schools is far more complicated than simple government funding. In particular, I would point to the dichotomy between UC graduate schools and UC undergraduate schools. Both are 'publicly' funded, yet the fact is, UC graduate schools have on the aggregate remained highly competitive and strong. For example, Berkeley continues to run one of the strongest graduate schools in the world. The graduate schools at the 'lesser' UC's, most notably UCSB and UCSD, have recently and rapidly risen to become important research centers in their own right. UCSF Medical continues to be widely considered to be the best medical school on the West Coast - better than Stanford Medical, despite Stanford Med's lavish funding. In fact, the entire UC Medical school system is competitive with the Ivy League medical schools if you exclude Harvard Medical (and even if you do include Harvard Med, the UC Medical School system can still give the Ivy med-schools a run for their money). Haas and Anderson continue to run highly respected MBA programs. Berkeley and UCLA both run highly respected law schools. </p>
<p>The problem is with the UC undergrad programs. Don't get me wrong - I am not saying that they are bad, in fact the UC undergrad programs are pretty good. But I think it is widely acknowledged that with perhaps a few exceptions (i.e. the Haas School's undergrad program) they aren't a whole lot better than they were a generation or two ago, and probably worse, and in any case, they clearly haven't kept up with the rapid improvement of, say, the Stanford undergrad program. </p>
<p>Hence, the point is, to blame it all simply on government funding is just too simplistic. If government funding was all there was too it, then ALL UC programs, whether graduate and undergraduate, should have declined. After all, they all take government funding. So the real question is, if lack of government funding is the problem, then why have the UC graduate programs escaped relatively unscathed? </p>
<p>Case in point - UCSF Medical suffers just as much from government budget cuts as the Berkeley undergrad program does, but UCSF Medical somehow manages to weather the storm far better, such that UCSF Med is still better than Stanford Med, whereas it's very hard to make the case that the Berkeley undergrad program is better than the Stanford undergrad program. Why is that? </p>
<p>I think it's more than just money. It's not just about what money you have, it's about what you choose to do with the money you do have. In other words, good management and good administration are also important. I defy you to find anybody who seriously believes that the Berkeley undergrad program is well managed and well administered. </p>
<p>In fact, what dismays me is that the lack of money always seems to be used as a convenient excuse by Berkeley to never have to improve its undergrad program. The administrators always cry that they can't make things better because they're having their funding cut. Hey, UCSF is also having its budget cut too, but you never hear them whining and making excuses. The UC graduate programs are having their budgets cut too, but you don't hear them whining. They just shut their mouths and go out there and fight to maintain their excellence. It's only in the undergrad program that you start getting all the excuse-mongering.</p>
<p>hmmm, you have a point there............sooooooo who thinks the new chancellor will do a good job and give us a good bang for the buck?</p>
<p>the funding of grad and ug comes from different places, Grad programs can depend on federal funding because there is reasearch going on which the government will pay the bill whereas undergrad has to depend on state money (CA isnt doing that well in this regard) and for UCB and schools which want to keep there grad programs tiptop there going have to cut somewhere ie UG</p>
<p>I've heard that argument before too, 2bad4u. While plausible, even that argument doesn't survive close scrutiny. </p>
<p>For example, most of the graduate funding that you refer to go mostly to hard-core science, engineering, and medical departments. That's where you get substantial funding from places like the NSF, the NIH, and the DoD. When people talk about government funding for academic research, that's what they're usually talking about.</p>
<p>On the other hand, far far less government funding goes towards the humanities and many of the social sciences. Except for the relatively minor funds you can get from the NEA and other related programs, the funding landscape for graduate departments in, say, English, or in foreign languages is pretty barren. Incidentally, this is why PhD students in the pure sciences and in engineering can almost always get stipends as research assistants, because of the general availability of research money in those fields. Hence, very few PhD students in those fields ever pay a dime towards their educations. Not so in the humanities. Not so in many social sciences. Apart from TA-ships and general university-wide fellowships, funding sources are few and far between. </p>
<p>Or consider the professional schools, especially Law and Business. The UC law and business schools don't get much if any government research money. And they're also public programs, which means they're dependent on Sacramento. Yet the state budget problems haven't really hurt them too much. Heck, the Haas MBA program may be the strongest it has ever been in its history - it just earned its highest USNews ranking ever (tied for #6). I believe that the UCLA Anderson MBA program may also be the strongest it has ever been in its history. </p>
<p>The point is, if less public funding was really the cause, then shouldn't ALL the public programs be having problems? More specifically, why should some of those programs be able to weather the storm better than others. Or, more tellingly, if the Haas MBA program can continue to improve despite less funding from the state, then why can't the Berkeley undergrad program do that? What's their excuse?</p>
<p>However, I think it is your last phrase, 2bad4u, that contains the real truth. UCB has kept its graduate schools elite because it wants to keep its graduate schools elite. On the other hand, UCB's undergraduate program, while pretty good, is not elite because UCB doesn't really want to make it elite. When push comes to shove, UCB is not really willing to put in the hard work necessary to boost the ug program.</p>
<p>{To digress, some of you might ask me what UCB could do to make the undergrad program better presuming it wanted to do that. Well, one simple thing would be to take a good hard look at those ug majors that are notorious for their lack of rigor where you never have to study and never have to do much of anything and you'll still get high grades. I am not going to name those majors, but we all know what they are. On the one hand, Berkeley complains that it doesn't have any money, and then on the other hand, it turns around and continues to fund these majors where plenty of students are doing nothing. Since money is tight, money should be going towards those majors where students are ready and willing to work and study hard, not to those majors that are full of kids who just want to get an easy, do-nothing, no-need-to-study, Berkeley degree. I think UCB needs to seriously think about getting rid of these majors, or at the very least, doing something to ensure that only those students who are genuinely interested in the material are the ones in those majors. The taxpayers should not be subsidizing students who just want to sit around and do nothing while getting an easy Berkeley degree. }</p>