<p>It’s not true that a BA in psychology can only get you a job in retail or food service. People keep saying this, but the vast majority of jobs (including top consulting jobs and the like) are open to major. You could get a job as a middle-manager or administrator in a lot of places with a BA in psychology (or history, or political science).</p>
<p>But moving on, your university might give you a slight edge in the sense that it is a known quantity. Very likely the top PhD programs have experience with students from Berkeley; they know that Berkeley turns out good researchers and students with strong content knowledge, and so that may give you a small benefit in the application process. But any benefit will be small, since graduate school admissions are more contingent upon what you do in university than where you go. So yes, you can go to a small non-prestigious school regardless of public status (I mean…you already DO go to a state school, UC Berkeley is a public university) and still go to a top graduate scool. Happens often; I’m at Columbia from a good top 100 LAC and I know people here from “where is that now?” to “Wow, how was Harvard?”</p>
<p>It also may help your admissions if you could spell the name right - there’s only one D in Stanford. I’m not just being snarky; I remember an admissions officer telling me that one year, they just decided to throw out the applications of everyone who couldn’t spell “Johns Hopkins” correctly (and left off the S in Johns). Although that’s an extreme example, it’s not unheard of for professors to look very unfavorably at people who can’t spell the name of their institution correctly.</p>
<p>I don’t think that GShine’s conclusions are 100% right - you also have to account for the fact that students who go to top schools are more likely to <em>want</em> to go to graduate school, so they are more represented partially because more of them applied and decided to attend and had the money to attend. Top schools have higher proportions of upper-middle-class students and families who can have the credit borrow the money to pay for graduate school (or the funds to pay partially out of pocket); they just also have more students who were exposed to the idea of graduate school and going. That’s at least partially responsible for the representation.</p>