<p>Just got in with honors at UCLA, so I'm going to assume Berkeley will be good news and now I have a choice to make.</p>
<p>I plan to major in economics, and am most interested in environmental economics. After browsing the elective courses at both schools I was much more impressed with Cal's choices. UCLA's seem a bit general, for example "International Finance, Development Economics, etc." Cal's are more like "The Chinese Economy, Economics of Innovation, etc." Cal also has the College of Natural Resources, and the Environmental Economics and Policy Major, which seems like what I want.</p>
<p>I also read somewhere (students review dot com perhaps) about a self-critique done by the econ department, and they admitted themselves that they had too many students, and not enough professors to offer all the courses they would like.</p>
<p>Has anyone heard anything about this? How should I compare the two departments? Thanks for any help!</p>
<p>if cal has too many students and too few professors, i can't believe that ucla would be any different. they have a larger student body and a more compact campus. jk, those don't mean anything, but my point is that unless you know for sure that ucla isn't overcrowed, i wouldn't bet that it's any different from berkeley's situation.</p>
<p>also, berkeley's econ (at the grad level, since i don't know where to find undergrad rankings) is ranked #2 in the country, tied with yale, stanford, etc. ucla lags behind in this dept, although i'm sure they're still good. i subscribe to the trickle-down theory, so for me, it's berkeley hands-down. (i'm an econ major and i've had some great and very accomplished/renowned profs, although i will admit that taking econ 1 with 800 other people was quite an experience. then again, ucla has huge intro/weeder classes as well, so there you go.)</p>
<p>UCB econ is definitely more known and both campuses are large with many students. I actually believe in terms of student body size, ucb is smaller. I remember reading on the same website that UCB has 31,000 students, while UCLA has close to 38,000.</p>