Cal's Prestige??

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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<p>....................whooo. </p>

<p>hahaha, OP here. </p>

<p>Completely forgot about this thread when there were about 8 responses in. Imagine my surprise to suddenly discover a 10 page discourse/debate. </p>

<p>Well, I merely skimmed the last 9 pages, mainly because most of it was waaay over my head, but I THANK you ALL for your responses. </p>

<p>To update y'all on my status, I've decided to attend UCLA, and am extremely happy and excited about my decision. Pretty much it all boiled down to where I'd feel more happier living. </p>

<p>well, thats about it.
carry on.
hahahaha. :)</p>

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<p>heins,</p>

<p>Best of luck at UCLA, and I wish you a great 4 years!</p>

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<p>UCLAri and sakky,</p>

<p>I am with you guys all the way. UCLAri, you forgot to bring out the # winners per capita for prestigous scholarships such as Rhodes..etc, wsj ranking, and med school placement rate..etc. </p>

<p>However, I don't have the stamina that you guys have to argue with those who seem delusional. ;)</p>

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<p>I thought that Berkeley does pretty well on the Rhodes? No?</p>

<p>I mean, I know that nobody beats Harvard and Yale (Princeton?), but that may also just be politics.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
I thought that Berkeley does pretty well on the Rhodes? No?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I guess it all depends on what you mean by 'pretty well'.</p>

<p>Berkeley has won 21 Rhodes Scholarships - the last in the 2002-2003 academic year (by Ankur Luthra).</p>

<p><a href="http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/spring2003/luthra.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/forefront/spring2003/luthra.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>This academic year alone (2006-2007), Harvard undergrad has won 10 (6 Rhodes winners who are Americans, 2 from South Africa, 1 from Canada, 1 from Zimbabwe, but they all go to Harvard undergrad). </p>

<p><a href="http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/02.01/03-rhodes.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/02.01/03-rhodes.html&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516638%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516638&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Yale won 5 in this academic year alone. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/19084?badlink=1%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/19084?badlink=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Princeton won 1, Stanford won 4 this year. </p>

<p><a href="http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2006/pr-rhodesweb-112906.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2006/pr-rhodesweb-112906.html&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/27/news/16725.shtml%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/27/news/16725.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The Princeton article actually decries Princeton's supposed deficit regarding the number of Rhodes it won lately relative to that at its arch-rivals, Harvard and Yale. The article points out that Princeton has "only" won 6 Rhodes since 2002, whereas Harvard and Yale have won many more. But of course, in that time period, * Berkeley hasn't even won one. *. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/27/news/16725.shtml%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/27/news/16725.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>MIT, the military academies (especially West Point), and Duke have also won a rather strikingly high number of Rhodes. Among the public schools, the leader, far and away, is Virginia, with 45 - more than twice the number that Berkeley has produced, despite being a significantly smaller school. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2004/21/rhodes.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2004/21/rhodes.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I think I understand exactly why this is. Berkeley like many other large public schools, simply doesn't have a structure set in place to produce large number of Rhodes winners. I am sure that within Berkeley's quite large student population, there are quite a few students that are Rhodes-caliber. But the school doesn't have a system to primp them and promote them to the Rhodes committee. </p>

<p>Here is an article about precisely what I'm talking about. The article has to do specifically with the University of Michigan and why it doesn't seem to produce many Rhodes relative to its size, but the same criticisms could just as easily be applied to Berkeley. </p>

<p>*The University's Rhodes drought seems to have more to do with having too few applicants than having too many nominees. </p>

<p>Monts acknowledged that the University has a hard time recruiting Rhodes applicants compared with schools like Harvard and Yale. </p>

<p>"We just don't have the mechanisms that some of the smaller prestigious private schools have," Monts said. </p>

<p>At schools like Yale, students interact closely with faculty for their whole college career. Small classes - ones taught by professors, not graduate students - are a regular feature of a student's schedule from their first day on campus. This close contact allows Yale faculty to identify outstanding students early, refer them to the Yale office of International Education and Fellowship Programs and encourage then to apply. </p>

<p>The University of Michigan does not have a similar infrastructure. The first time most students hear about the scholarships from the University is when they receive a mass e-mail from Lester Monts' office - an impersonal message that is neither signed nor has a reply address. Not surprisingly, few students attend the informational sessions put on by the council and even fewer apply for University endorsement. </p>

<p>Furthermore, Monts said the University does not an internal recruitment mechanism like that of Yale or Harvard. Many students, especially underclassmen, aren't close enough to their professors to get noticed.</p>

<p>"Many times we don't really discover the genius of students until they are nominated by faculty," Monts said. "In a way, our students are on their own the first two years." </p>

<p>The University does not lack potential Rhodes Scholarship winners. Every year, University of Michigan graduates gain places in the most prestigious graduate and professional schools in the world. </p>

<p>The quality of students is high, but the University still doesn't win its share of Rhodes Scholarships. </p>

<p>LSA senior Dan Ray is one example of missed potential. Ray, who will be attending Harvard Law in the fall and who teaches LSAT courses, won the University's most competitive merit-based scholarship. But even though the University singled out Ray as one of its top four students by awarding him the Bentley Scholarship, they did not make a significant effort to encourage him to apply for a prestigious British scholarship. </p>

<p>Ray simply received the same mass e-mail that every other 3.7 GPA student at the University does. </p>

<p>The University's lack of Rhodes infrastructure is not insignificant. Applying for a Rhodes, Marshall or Mitchell scholarship is a lot of work. An applicant must secure numerous letters of recommendation and be prepared for intensive interviews if they are selected as a finalist. The University does provide mock interviews and help with letters of recommendation for the students it decides to endorse. But the preparation pales in comparison to a nominee from Yale. There, applicants are walked through the process by a few employees who work full-time coaching Yale students for prestigious British scholarships. By contrast, the University hasn't dedicated even one full-time employee to the undertaking.</p>

<p>Monts said the students nominated by the University should have no trouble winning prestigious awards. </p>

<p>"We get people to the national levels," Monts said. </p>

<p>"And after the national level, it is a crap shoot."</p>

<p>There is a bit of subjectivity to all highly competitive, interview-based awards. </p>

<p>But the reason the University does not win more Rhodes Scholarships is not because of the random nature of the process, as Monts suggests. </p>

<p>Rather it is because the University does not make a serious effort to tap its vast potential of competitive Rhodes applicants and fails to give them the support they need to win.*</p>

<p><a href="http://media.www.michigandaily.com/media/storage/paper851/news/2007/03/21/TheStatement/The-Real.Reason.You.Didnt.Win.A.Rhodes.Scholarship-2783713.shtml%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://media.www.michigandaily.com/media/storage/paper851/news/2007/03/21/TheStatement/The-Real.Reason.You.Didnt.Win.A.Rhodes.Scholarship-2783713.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>For those Berkeley students who would object, I would ask - when exactly have you ever really seen Berkeley provide much support to its Rhodes candidates? I've seen the scholarship process and system used both at Harvard and MIT, and there's simply no comparison to what happens at Berkeley. In particular, I would argue that, if nothing else, at least Berkeley's University Medalist, which is basically Berkeley's valedictorian, should be a very strong candidate for the Rhodes every year, as should every University Medal finalist. But again, nobody from Berkeley has won the Rhodes since Ankur Luthra 4 years ago. I am quite convinced that if these people had gone to HYPSM instead, or maybe even Virginia, some of them would have won the Rhodes, because of the better systems in-place.</p>

<p>
[quote]
I mean, I know that nobody beats Harvard and Yale (Princeton?), but that may also just be politics

[/quote]
</p>

<p>But if it is political favoritism, that's just another reason to prefer to go to those other schools over Berkeley. After all, if the system is biased, then you want to be in a situation where the bias acts to help you, not to hurt you. If you lose out on the Rhodes, nobody is going to care about * why * you lost. You can't seriously go around telling people that you would have won the Rhodes, but you just happened to go to a school that was less politically favored. Nobody wants to hear that, as it just sounds like whining. </p>

<p>To use econ-speak, just think of the situation from a game theory perspective. If you really think that a particular choice is going to put you in an relatively unfavorable situation ex-post, then your rational response is to not make that choice ex-ante.</p>

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<p>Here's Ankur Luthra himself talking about the relative paucity of Berkeley Rhodes winners, and what Berkeley should do about it:</p>

<p>"* Ankur Luthra, Berkeley's most recent Rhodes Scholar, is also the campus's first in 14 years. Though Berkeley had Rhodes winners in both 1989 and 1988, prior to that there had been none since 1964. Luthra thinks it’s great that he won, but less admirable that “an elite institution” like Berkeley makes such a poor showing in the Rhodes competition year after year.
The senior, a double major in business administration and electrical engineering and computer sciences, radiates personal confidence — a characteristic that, he’s convinced, worked to his advantage during the long, gruelling selection process for the Rhodes. That confidence extends to his conviction that not only should more Berkeley students be applying for the Oxford education the Rhodes supports, but the institution should be more active in identifying potential selectees and guiding them through the process.</p>

<p>That neither of these things are happening to the extent he’d recommend, Luthra says, is easily accounted for. Berkeley undergrads, he believes, tend to “psych themselves out” about their chances of winning a prize that they see as awarded more often to their private-college counterparts than to public-university students. Yet as a group, he insists, his peers are far more accomplished than they give themselves credit for — with nothing to fear from competition with the Ivy League types who are selected for the Rhodes on what sometimes seems a revolving-door basis. (Harvard, for example, placed 5 students among the 32 selected nationwide this year; last year it placed 6.) </p>

<p>The second discouraging factor, according to Luthra, is that Berkeley faculty aren’t doing as much as they could to encourage qualified students to apply. </p>

<p>"The fact that Berkeley has sent precisely three students to Oxford in just under 30 years, with long intervals between each winner, has a self-fulfilling aspect to it, Luthra believes. “There’s a slippery slope of self-confidence,” he says, “that you encounter when someone hasn’t won from here in two years, then three, then thirteen. I was talking to some juniors who I thought would make great candidates, and they believed no one from Berkeley had ever won! “"</p>

<p>Though one or more Berkeley students advances to the state-level round in the selection process each year, it’s admittedly rarer for one to move on to the district level (the U.S. is divided into eight such multi-state districts), let alone be among the 32 national winners. </p>

<p>The selection process is daunting simply to describe; to follow it all the way through to selection consumes applicants for the better part of a year. Would-be Rhodes Scholars submit an application to the campus Scholarship Connection Office, which relays them to a subcommittee of the faculty-run External Scholarships Committee. That subcommittee considers the applications of students who wish to contend not only for the Rhodes but for two other prestigious scholarships, the Marshall and the Mitchell, that likewise send U.S. students to British and Irish universities for a year or more of graduate study. Some number of these Rhodes applicants advance to an interview with the subcommittee, which then endorses a still smaller number of them as state-level applicants from Berkeley.</p>

<p>Though the campus’s role in selection of candidates for the Rhodes ends there, the subcommittee quickly shifts gears to help counsel and guide the endorsed applicants as they head toward the next stages of the process — the state and district selection committees. Members of the subcommittee typically have personal experience with the British educational system, and are in many cases former Rhodes Scholars as well, so their guidance is both well-informed and pointed — consisting in part of mock interviews with very tough questions, much like those the candidates will encounter at the state and regional levels. They also help students with such mundane but essential drills as fine-tuning personal essays, statements of purpose, and the like.</p>

<p>But while subcommittee members are deeply involved in the process of identifying and aiding the most motivated candidates, other faculty, Lukra believes, aren’t taking the key initial step in the process: encouraging qualified candidates to apply in the first place.</p>

<p>“The level of faculty awareness about the scholarship itself is tremendous, obviously,” Luthra says, “but it’s at the next level — where a faculty member decides to actually nominate a student or two, or to approach qualified students and tell them about the scholarship — that the steps aren’t being taken. They have a huge role to play, probably the biggest role in the process — since so many students will never hear about the Rhodes in the first place if a faculty member doesn’t tell them about it and encourage them to apply.”</p>

<p>There’s more to faculty involvement in Rhodes candidacies than that, of course — including the writing of letters of recommendation , which to be effective must show a more detailed familiarity with a student’s academic skills than is acquired at the podium in a 600-seat lecture hall. But it’s a vitalpart of the process, and one that, according to Alicia Hayes, program coordinator of the Scholarship Connection Office, contributes more than Luthra acknowledges to the reluctance of Berkeley students to follow through on their impulse to apply for a Rhodes or other prestigious scholarship. </p>

<p>“I don’t think that our students here at Berkeley believe there’s a bias against public universities,” she says. “Their fears stem instead from the requirement of getting recommendation letters from faculty members. I see that frequently; I think it’s the most challenging aspect of applying for these kinds of scholarships at a big campus like this.”</p>

<p>One faculty member with extensive experience in the Rhodes application process agrees with Hayes. Steven Botterill, associate professor of Italian Studies, chaired the Rhodes/Mitchell/Marshall subcommittee this past year. “At Ivy League colleges, with their smaller student bodies and more intimate faculty/student ratios,” he observes, “the process of grooming potential Rhodes Scholars begins early on in a student’s undergraduate career. By the time students at Berkeley make closer contact with faculty, it’s often their junior year – and that’s a bit late to be building the kind of close intellectual relationship with a faculty member that supports the recommendation the Rhodes committees want to see. We’ve seen it year after year here: With the best will in the world, Berkeley faculty don’t get to know students as individuals when they’re teaching large lower-division courses with 700 or 800 students.” *</p>

<p><a href="http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2003/02/19_rhode.shtml%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2003/02/19_rhode.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>The bottom line to me seems to be quite clear - that there are some students at Berkeley who don't win the Rhodes (or any of the other major scholarships) who could have won if they had gone to another school. Sad but true.</p>

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<p>=(............</p>

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<p>“You’d be stupid if you came to Harvard for the teaching,” said Mr. Billings, who will graduate this spring and then go to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. </p>

<p>Harvard Task Force Calls for New Focus on Teaching and Not Just Research </p>

<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=6d6a0858faf06733&ex=1178942400&pagewanted=print%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=6d6a0858faf06733&ex=1178942400&pagewanted=print&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>I don't think anybody has ever seriously argued that Harvard is a great school * for the teaching *. I certainly have never argued that. Harvard, like Berkeley and other such schools, are * research institutions *, where, by definition, teaching tends to take a backseat to research.</p>

<p>But I don't see how this point is relevant to the topic at hand. Harvard is not a great * teaching * institution. But, frankly, neither is Berkeley. At least Harvard provides other things that Berkeley does not - i.e. the support services, the closer interactions with the profs, the counseling/coaching machine that churns out Rhodes winners and winners of other major scholarships like clockwork, the killer name brand, the access to some of the most exclusive recruiters in the world.</p>

<p>Speaking specifically about the Rhodes process, I think the evidence is very very clear - Harvard has a system in place that produces far far more Rhodes winners than Berkeley does, despite having far fewer students to begin with. Even Ankur Luthra himself alluded to the fact that some Berkeley students might have won the Rhodes if they had access to better support, and by extension, it means that if they had gone to another school, they might have won.</p>

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<p>From <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=6d6a0858faf06733&ex=1178942400&pagewanted=print%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=6d6a0858faf06733&ex=1178942400&pagewanted=print&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>"As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.”</p>

<p>Hmmm!!!! ......what a closer interactions with the profs, indeed.</p>

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<p>One question I often ask myself, and I just can't seem to grasp, is why, other than the fact that berkeley is public, does the administration blow so much. why are there so many problems with the system. why can't it have a better system in place for rhodes scholars, why can't the ENTIRETY of the berkeley adminstistration stay open past 4, as for is the time most people are getting back from classes. why can't berkeley update its antiquated telebears system, just recently there was a telebears problem where everyone from the waitlist was removed. how ****ty is that if you number one on the waitlist! Berkeley has one of the strongest cs programs in the country, so why does telebears have to suck so badly. why does the school not have more research opportunities for first and second year students. everyone says it, berkeley is a research insitution, so let the undergraduates who are motivated benefit from it. </p>

<p>yes, if you are movitated enough you will emailed 50 professors, hope for a few responses, and then try to do research for them. but why shouldn't there be a better system in place. Many professors don't even know what urap is!</p>

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<p>
[quote]
"As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.”</p>

<p>Hmmm!!!! ......what a closer interactions with the profs, indeed.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>All I have to say is - Harvard won 10 Rhodes this year. Berkeley hasn't won one since the 2002-2003 academic year. Hence, there's clearly something positive going on at Harvard.</p>

<p>Besides, I don't think anybody here has ever said that Harvard was a perfect school. That's not the point. The point is, what problems can Berkeley fix to make itself better? Pointing out problems about other schools is not going to make any of Berkeley's problems disappear.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>The difference is that at Berkeley, rather than some, a very large majority of undergraduates will not develop this sort of relationship. Sakky's point is that Harvard does more, not that Harvard is achieving perfect success.</p>

<p>I agree with Sakky 100% here, and I don't do that very much :)</p>