<p>TheBanker - No matter how much I wish you were right, I cannot deny the importance of College Rankings in my decision process. In my family, no one has ever heard of an American university except Harvard. (I am the first kid going abroad.)
So this is how a conversation usually goes,</p>
<p>Relative: “Engineering right? Studying for IIT?”
Me: “No. Am going abroad. UC Berkeley”
Relative: <em>Blank Face</em> “Where’s that?”
Me: “It’s in California. It’s #3 in the world for my course.”
Relative: “Oh really?!! Well Done!”</p>
<p>So for them, and even my parents, rankings is the only criteria to judge a university.</p>
<p>Is the fact that your family might not have ever heard of Berkeley or other schools going to truly impact your future? Are they the ones who are going to hire you for jobs? Broaden their horizons. Disabuse them of the notion that there is only one school–Harvard–worthy of attending simply because it is a familiar brand name. Change the conventional wisdom so that they WILL be impressed when you wear a Berkeley hoodie, since the awe of the laymen seems very important to you.</p>
<p>^^ I never said that they have the notion “that there is only one school–Harvard–worthy of attending”
It’s just that they are unfamiliar with US colleges and Harvard is the only college they have heard of. As a result, rankings become their only way of measuring any other college.
And no, they won’t be the ones hiring me but they are the ones paying my tuition, which is considerably higher than IIT’s annual tuition of 3500 USD.</p>
<p>I am not complaining or anything. All I am trying to say is that Rankings and Prestige do matter to me because it is a big decision to go abroad.</p>
<p>Where I live, Berkeley is one of the few schools considered to be worth leaving the country for. And definitely has more wow than Brown or UPenn, let alone Cornell or Dartmouth. But Columbia is about at the same wow level.</p>
<p>"It’s just that they are unfamiliar with US colleges and Harvard is the only college they have heard of. As a result, rankings become their only way of measuring any other college.
And no, they won’t be the ones hiring me but they are the ones paying my tuition, which is considerably higher than IIT’s annual tuition of 3500 USD.</p>
<p>I am not complaining or anything. All I am trying to say is that Rankings and Prestige do matter to me because it is a big decision to go abroad."</p>
<p>Then tell them that Berkeley is an awesome school and everyone in the U.S. knows about it. Both are true.</p>
<p>You want to go to Berkeley because you will get a top notch education there.</p>
<p>(And I’m the one who said that it’s a safety school.)</p>
<p>I just looked – Berkeley is currently ranked 21 (overall) by USNWR. Although USNWR has many faults, it probably has Berkeley slotted in correctly as far as overall reputation is concerned. Of course, “reputation” is completely subjective, and results in MANY heated debates on these boards.</p>
<p>IMO</p>
<p>Certainly lower in overall rep that HYP
Certainly lower in overall rep than schools like Stanford, MIT and Chicago
Certainly lower in overall rep than the other Ivies (including the so-called lower Ivies)
Probably lower in overall rep than the Ivy Peers – Duke, Hopkins, Northwestern, Vandy, etc. (one can make arguments here).</p>
<p>On par or better with anyone else.</p>
<p>If you’re considering engineering – probably a better rep than any of the Ivies (though one could argue that Cornell is equal or at least very close).</p>
<p>In other words – Berkeley is a pretty darned good school, with a great reputation.</p>
<p>I live in Quebec… as I know it, Canadian universities are more homogenous as far as educational quality is concerned; the gap between any one of U Toronto/McGill/UBC/U Montreal (the Canadian HYPS, putting U Montreal there since it is the best one in French and it on par with the other three to many’s eyes on a pan-Canadian level, but none are nowhere near as selective as even UCSD, let alone Berkeley) and, say, Lakehead or Thompson Rivers is nowhere near as great as the difference between, say, Keene State and Berkeley.</p>
<p>Hah, even the Canadians have their biases.
A couple of our Execs will take umbrage with you excluding Waterloo (they matriculated from Waterloo).
They probably have somewhat low opinion of UBC (party school)
I guess the situation of Waterloo is like Cal? Good engineering schools but who cares? :)</p>
<p>Texasteen - I wouldn’t say Berkeley is not well known outside of CA, since it was picked as a top ten “dream college” in the 2013 Princeton Review survey.</p>
<p>That said, OP I would pretty much ignore status and rankings. Berkeley is an excellent school. My husband went to Cal Poly for undergraduate, Stanford for his masters and finished his PhD at Berkeley, because he wanted to work with an advisor who had an international reputation in the field he was researching. My husband worked for years at both Lawrence Berkelely National Lab and at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) and wrote hundreds of research papers many co-written with PhD’s from Yale, Harvard, etc, but also many from top state schools that have very little “prestige”. People simply don’t care as much about where you graduated from, as whether you can do the work required.</p>
The best line in this otherwise dragging thread…anyone who has researched any college or serious about any college knows Berkeley (it just is in the news too often ;)…) kids who haven’t heard of it are lying or dont watch tv, are not news savvy and stay in their 20 mile radius…</p>
<p>Please remember that all the ranking are biased toward the quality of grad school, not undergrad. Berkeley’s undergraduate engineering has class sizes of up to 6 or 7 hundred…</p>
