<p>Hello there! So, here is my "dilemma." I know that ultimately I am going to end up majoring in one or two of the following (computer science, economics, public policy, or psychology). My goal is to explore all these fields in my first year of college by taking classes in each of these subjects until I discover what I want to pursue in college.</p>
<p>Thus, I want to apply to schools that are very good in all of these fields. I have good stats and scores (I believe good enough for some of the top schools in the country). </p>
<p>What schools do you believe are good fits for me where I could receive a great undergraduate education in any of these majors?</p>
<p>For example, one school that comes to mind is UC Berkeley (I would be out of state), but I heard that it's only beneficial to go there if you know exactly what you want to do going in. Is that true? What schools would allow me to explore these interests freely (besides a liberal arts school)?</p>
<p>Thanks you so much in advance for your help!</p>
<p>Besides LACs (you need to evaluate the CS programs as they are not uniformly strong at LACs), look at schools like Bucknell that are LAC-like but also have engineering. Bucknell, Lafayette, Union come to mind. Also, small universities are a good option - Case Western, U. Rochester, Tufts, JHU, CMU etc. Those are the examples I am most familar with.</p>
<p>Michigan-Ann Arbor is flexible with majors within the school of LSA (which includes CS, Econ and Psych). You do not have to declare your major(s) until the end of your second year, and there are no restricted majors in LSA. </p>
<p>The Ford school of Public Policy is separate and must be applied to once at Michigan, but it is not that hard to get into. </p>
<p>Michigan is strong in all four departments (top 5 in Psych and Public Policy and top 15 in CS and Econ).</p>
<p>Princeton University (Woodrow Wilson School has an interesting program)
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Southern California
University of Texas-Austin
University of Wisconsin-Madison</p>
<p>All of your proposed majors (except public policy, which is offered as a minor, but not a major, for undergraduates) are in the College of Letters and Science, where all freshmen enter undeclared, take the prerequisite courses for their majors, then declare their majors. A complication is that two of your majors (economics and psychology) are capped, so you need to apply and meet a college GPA threshold to declare them (see [Office</a> of Undergraduate Advising: List of Majors](<a href=“http://ls-advise.berkeley.edu/major/majorlist.html]Office”>http://ls-advise.berkeley.edu/major/majorlist.html) ).</p>
<p>The other thing to consider is that, at any school, your majors may have a lot of non-overlapping requirements, so you need to plan your schedule carefully to make progress in all of your majors until you eliminate one or more from consideration.</p>
<p>The main issue with Berkeley for out-of-state students is that the list price is over $50,000, and need-based financial aid will be $22,000 short (that is the amount of the out-of-state extra tuition).</p>
<p>Most reputable schools will have decent psychology and economics as these are both very popular majors nationwide. Public Policy is generally not offered at LACs (because it’s not considered a ‘liberal art’) and computer science depends on the school (as mentioned above.) Since that’s the case, I’d focus on finding schools that offer both public policy and good computer science. That should limit your pool somewhat. Use the CC search engine to get a preliminary list together.</p>
<p>I also would not recommend Berkeley to undergrads (a great place for grad school though!) The size makes it impersonal and classes are often enormous. You have to be highly self-directed and self-motivated. Personal relationships with faculty are going to be exceptions, not the rule. If you are an in-state applicant, there is at least the low cost and international brand name (based almost entirely on the grad schools). If you are OOS, you could get a much better education elsewhere for fewer dollars.</p>
<p>Another school that has strengths in all these areas is Carnegie Mellon, but I have no idea whether it offers public policy at the undergrad level or whether it’s possible to combine majors. Texas, NYU, and Duke are at least moderately strong in all four fields; again, you’d need to investigate what’s possible at the undergrad level.</p>
<p>To piggyback on what bclintonk typed, Duke is probably your best bet at the undergraduate level since its strong in all of these areas of study and gives you the most flexibility to double or even triple major in all of these subjects. There’s no internal application process to get into the School of Public Policy (Sanford) at Duke once you get admitted to the university like there is for UMich or Texas for instance.</p>
<p>Don’t know what methodology is being used to come up with ‘best undergrad teaching,’ but what we actually saw when we visited was a calc class that was so big it filled two auditoriums (and students in the second auditorium were watching the prof remotely). I can only imagine what popular intro courses like econ or psych are like. I’m not disputing that the profs are good - and maybe the army of teaching assistants they have to rely on are godly too - but I think for the money it would be nice to be able to get face time with the faculty when you want or need it. College faculty who are friends tell me classes aren’t getting smaller and the bureaucracy isn’t getting easier - so their kids are going elsewhere. </p>
<p>Berkeley might still work for student who was clear on what they want to study - they just have to bomb through those intro courses. But OP isn’t clear and wants to check out a few areas, which means he or she will be in those massive classes for probably at least the first two years. Not my idea of quality education.</p>
<p>^^ LOL, I like how goldenboy mixes and matches rankings to have Duke come out in the best possible light. I’m not sure why, but Duke’s public policy program isn’t even ranked by NRC. Goldenboy give the US News ranking for “public policy analysis” a specialty within the broader public policy/public affairs field; in the broader public policy/public affairs ranking, US News has Duke at #16. And Duke doesn’t fare quite as well in the US News grad program rankings in the other fields: #27 computer science, #19 economics, #23 psychology, certainly good scores, but not stellar.</p>
<p>I think you need to take all these rankings with a large grain of salt, but I think it’s particularly disingenuous to cherry-pick them and report only the rankings that reflect most favorably on a particular school.</p>
<p>Penn might be another place to look if you trust the NRC rankings, where it ranks quite high in all 4 fields (but somewhat less so in the US News rankings). Penn doesn’t list public policy as an undergrad major but it does say its undergrad Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) program “prepares its graduates for careers in public policy, public service, business, and law as well as graduate study in any of the participating disciplines.”</p>
<p>Public policy is pretty rare and might make a good limiting factor in your search. Here’s the number of graduating majors from each college I compiled from IPEDS a while back:</p>
<p>172 Duke
141 USC
85 Princeton
76 UNC Chapel Hill
70 Cornell
58 Michigan
46 Georgia State
41 Chicago
31 Northwestern
29 Virginia Tech
28 Trinity (CT)
28 William & Mary
26 Stanford
25 Brown
20 Georgia Tech
20 Hobart & William Smith
19 Ole Miss
17 UC Riverside
17 Vanderbilt
16 Washington State
15 Carnegie Mellon
15 DePaul
14 Hamilton
13 RIT
13 SMU
12 Penn
11 Pomona
7 Denver
6 Dickinson
6 St. Mary’s College of Maryland
4 Rice
2 Pitzer
1 ASU
1 Scripps
0 Gettysburg
0 Swarthmore
0 URI </p>
<p>Not all of these programs are created equal. For example, Duke’s public policy is an undergraduate program within the Sanford school of policy, so students are taking courses with dedicated public policy faculty. Chicago, on the other hand, limits its public policy school to graduate students, and the public policy program in the undergraduate college is a mishmash of offerings from econ and sociology professors – a very different beast. </p>
<p>Additionally, some of these programs are in consortiums and therefore offer more courses and resources than their individual programs would suggest; these include the Claremonts, the Quaker schools, and Duke and UNC.</p>
<p>Check out programs carefully, and don’t rely on rankings to give you the information you need. They can be particularly misleading with a major like public policy that is sometimes housed in a graduate school; the degree to which undergraduates have access to public policy faculty and resources varies widely. Additionally, some public policy programs - like Ford at Michigan and Woody Woo at Princeton - are selective, and admission to the major is not guaranteed.</p>
My parents told me that Michigan is very good “for a state school” and doesn’t really have that much prestige (yes, prestige is sort of a factor). Would you recommend UMichigan over a private school?</p>
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<p>Yes, exactly. Berkeley sounds like a fantastic school, but also a bureaucratic mess especially for someone who is unsure of what they want to do going in. I think I will go to grad school there (if I go to grad school) because it’s grad school is supposed to be amazing.</p>
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<p>Yes, Duke sounds like it would be great for me to explore my interests and it sounds like it’s a lot less bureaucratic than Berkeley! I just don’t know how good it is in computer science and psychology. Are there any schools (also on the east coast) like Duke (in that they have the prestige and are private) where the psychology and computer science programs might be better?</p>
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<p>I think Penn would be good in all of these fields. However, I have two concerns. If I major in economics I would probably want to pursue a career in business. I feel like as a non-wharton economics major I would be completely overshadowed by people in wharton (by employers and in the college itself). Are the non-wharton economics majors looked down upon because they didn’t go to Wharton? Second, I feel like it is really cut-throat compared to a school like Duke. Is that true?</p>
<p>Depends on the college but Berkeley is generous with AP credits, allowing a student to bypass the large introductory classes. Prof contact in introductory science and math courses isn’t necessary. Upper division courses and liberal arts classes are much smaller. If interested in computer science, being located in the SF Bay Area for recruiting is a plus.</p>
<p>“My parents told me that Michigan is very good “for a state school” and doesn’t really have that much prestige (yes, prestige is sort of a factor). Would you recommend UMichigan over a private school?”</p>
<p>I would not worry about that for now. You need to apply to schools with varrying levels of selectivity. Once you have acceptances on the table, your parents and you can decide which university is best for you.</p>
<p>Let me guess – you live in the northeast? Because that is where most of the posters who seem to think “private is always better than public” seem to be from.</p>
<p>Re: very large introductory courses</p>
<p>Popular introductory courses in commonly taken subjects like economics, psychology, chemistry, math, etc. tend to be large at any college (and, as a practical matter, there is not a lot of difference between 100 and 700 in terms of in-class interaction with the instructor). Some smaller colleges (commonly called “liberal arts colleges”) split up the enrollment in such courses into small faculty-led sections, instead of teaching all of the students in one or a few large sections.</p>
<p>If class size is a concern, the various schools’ on-line schedules of classes may be of interest, although not all of them show the actual enrollment in each class.</p>
<p>As a practical matter, the useful AP credit for the majors in question at Berkeley would be:</p>
<p>4+ on English language or literature = first half of College of Letters and Science reading and composition requirement
5 on English literature = both halves of College of Letters and Science reading and composition requirement
3+ on calculus AB or BC = Math 1A (however, students with scores less than 5 should consider carefully whether to skip Math 1A) (needed by CS and economics majors)
5 on calculus BC = Math 1A and 1B (needed by CS and economics majors)
4+ on economics micro and macro (both) = Economics 1
4+ on psychology = Psychology 1
4+ on biology = one biological science prerequisite for psychology major
4+ on US government or comparative government = one social studies prerequisite for psychology major
4+ on statistics = quantitative requirement for psychology major</p>
I used US News for Public Policy since the NRC didn’t rank Duke in that area because I think the subject it was trying to measure was too broad to pencil Duke in there as Sanford is strictly a “Public Policy” school. Sanford doesn’t offer an MPA for instance (only an MPP) so I’m guessing the program doesn’t really fall into the confines of what the NRC is trying to measure. This also affected Duke’s overall ranking since it doesn’t offer an entire half of the “Public Policy/Public Affairs” curriculum and doesn’t have faculty that tackle issues specifically in Public Affairs.</p>
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But let me guess, Michigan fares better in US News so by default it trumps all other rankings which are considered more authoritative like the NRC right? I’ve found that US News puts too much weight on the past reputation of a field of study at a university and what high-ranking figures in the field think rather than considering important variables like Student Outcomes and Research Productivity. A lot of older faculty members in a certain subject area are unlikely to change their mind about a school’s reputation at a rate fast enough to keep up with the actual advances that said department has undergone in terms of boosting its faculty strength and graduate placements. US News is also outdated (subjects were either ranked in 2009 or 2010) so a newer version is likely to be slightly different.</p>
<p>A larger problem with the US News graduate rankings is that they present rankings in a strict linear order instead of grouping them in ranges for different areas of study like they really should. No one can say with certainty that a certain Economics department is the “2nd best in the country” or “the 9th best in the country”. For all we know, there might be a clear top 5 Economics departments in the country and a steep drop off to the next 10-12 departments in the ranking in terms of actual reputation. A precise ranking would never capture such a difference and instead forces consumers to obsess over minor differences in rankings.</p>
<p>What all of this means for undergraduate education, probably diddly squat. After all, Dartmouth has almost no top 50 departments and you can bet your bottom dollar that Princeton’s doctoral program in Philosophy will give no extra weight to an application from a Rutgers graduate (who went to a school with a top 3 philosophy department) over an application from a Dartmouth College graduate even if the latter had professors who were “inferior researchers” in the field.</p>
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I don’t know anything about Psychology in particular but in the field of Computer Science: there’s Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, and the University of Illinois which dominate the field with about 10-12 other universities coming right after certainly including Duke. Between schools like Texas, Duke, Brown, Michigan, etc., there will be certain sub fields in CS in which one school excels at over the other. I wouldn’t focus so much on the ranking at that point since you can get a fine education at any of these places.</p>
<p>The only East Coast schools I can think of with superior Computer Science and Psychology graduate departments than Duke hands down is Princeton and to a lesser extent Penn and Harvard.</p>
<p>I would definitely go to Princeton if you can based on your goals. If that doesn’t end up being an option though, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose Duke over Brown or Penn or whatever if you feel like the school is a better fit in the other areas that matter: social life, environment, class sizes, sports, etc.</p>
<p>“Let me guess – you live in the northeast? Because that is where most of the posters who seem to think “private is always better than public” seem to be from.”</p>
<p>Not necessary UCB, you have those sorts of prejudices everywhere. Most top universities, including some Ivies, will fall short of some people’s expections. Besides, in some parts of the Northeast, Michigan has a very strong reputation, particularly in NYC/tri-state area.</p>
<p>“But let me guess, Michigan fares better in US News so by default it trumps all other rankings which are considered more authoritative like the NRC right?”</p>
<p>Not quite goldenboy. Michigan fares equally well in both the USNWR and the NRC. According to both, Michigan is a top 10 university. But the NRC has many strange outcomes. I would say that the USNWR is a forced ranking while the NRC is more of a rating. Either way, Michigan comes out on top, which is not surprising given the quality of its faculty and availability or resources.</p>
<p>“A larger problem with the US News graduate rankings is that they present rankings in a strict linear order instead of grouping them in ranges for different areas of study like they really should. No one can say with certainty that a certain Economics department is the “2nd best in the country” or “the 9th best in the country”.”</p>
<p>That’s what most of us have been saying, but you are one of the few on CC that insists that the USNWR ranking of colleges, which are far greater in number and therefore harder to separate, is accurate and beyond reproach. I suppose if it serves your purposes, the USNWR is accurate, but otherwise, it is too “linear”.</p>