<p>International Studies is one of the most respected/selective majors at the University of Washington, by the way.</p>
<p>Hey, mass comm is capped here, and legal studies is taught entirely by professors of law at Boalt. Although I don't think it's a good major for those interested in going to law school, it has its advantages, such as smaller classes and recs from law profs when rec time comes around. Peace and conflict studies might appear questionable, but requires two years of a foreign language, amongst other things. <a href="http://ias.berkeley.edu/iastp/pacs/requirements.html%5B/url%5D">http://ias.berkeley.edu/iastp/pacs/requirements.html</a> . All of the majors seem to have "regular" students in them, don't they? Yeah, some people really want to do American Studies at Berkeley, or PACS, and challenge themselves and go on in life knowing they took hard classes in college, while others try to cruise by.</p>
<p>How accurate is that website? If it is, are the schools listed those that Bush was interested in? If it's right, then I concede, Stanford gave him an offer.</p>
<p>The coaches could have made him an offer that the admissions team didn't allow to procede.</p>
<p>not criticizing the major... but just curious, how come legal studies isn't a good major for those interested in going to law school? i've heard about this before, but i haven't figured out why. </p>
<p>i actually found out about scout.com cuz it's usually cited in sports magazines or in the newspapers (along with rivals.com). rivals.com also cites stanford but i'm not sure if there's an offer (i'm not registered with them)
<a href="http://usc.rivals.com/viewprospect.asp?Sport=1&pr_key=8514%5B/url%5D">http://usc.rivals.com/viewprospect.asp?Sport=1&pr_key=8514</a></p>
<p>Well, legal studies majors, on average, do worst on the LSAT. Yeah, that's right, worse than every other sort of field. </p>
<p>Many studies exist, and they just tend to do near the bottom of each list. Now, it might be becaues greater numbers of people in legal studies take the LSAT than many other majors, but really, there is some sort of trend. Law schools want you to be challenged, and also, they want to brainwash you their way. They just tend to think of legal studies as less challenging as something like English, and they realize they're getting used goods, at least in the legal mind-set department. Now, if one doubles with something else at Berkeley, they get the advantage of law school-like classes, something one would also get in some departments such as some advanced Rhetoric or Poli Sci courses, but now you're being taught by a law prof (which is less common in those other disciplines, and you will get (if you so ask) law prof recs from a law prof teaching at a top 15 law school. That's not too shabby as an undergrad. I don't plan on doing it, but if one does, and this is their reasoning, it seems to make sense. Or perhaps a minor.</p>
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Agree. Doesn't prove this brand-name is the best. It is not because it comes about through marketing which tries to influence the public that a certain school is good. Thus it makes you ashamed like aries said if you went to a no-name university even if it has a good program. That is the evil of it. Brand-names finally perpetuate wrong information and we as a free capitalist society should always be in the habit of obtaining better and more accurate information for our own use.
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<p>But it's NOT wrong information. See below. </p>
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People who are not involved in education, or who are uneducated, still receive these brand name ideas of college simply by communication with others and the media. There is no way to clear up issues using this approach. What do you turn to? What if you have a question? It is not even a body of information. It is not researchable. The marketing which supports this is biased toward individual schools. Because one school has more money than another it can market more. All these factors do not agree with any sort of ideal for education and are at odds with what colleges really try to do: provide the best training for students so that they can contribute the best they can toward the work force.
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<p>But all of that is NOT the point. From the perspective of the employer, the only thing that matters is that the guy who is hired is good. The employer doesn't care about WHY the guy is good. The only thing that matters is that he is good. </p>
<p>Let me give you an example. Let's say I want to open a nightclub and I need to hire some big strong muscular guys as bouncers. So I go to the local gym to find these guys. Now, is it because the gym is really good at helping guys build up their muscles, or is it just because guys who are already big and muscular just enjoy hanging out at the local gym in the first place? Probably a bit of both. But from my perspective, I don't care what the answer is. All I care about is that I will find big strong muscular guys at the local gym, and why exactly the gym happens to have lots of these guys is unimportant to me. </p>
<p>To give you another example. Let's say I'm making a commercial and I want to hire some beautiful models. So I call up the Ford Modeling Agency. Now is it because the Ford Agency is really good at making people beautiful, or is it because only beautiful people will get hired by Ford in the first place? Again, I don't care. All I care about is that I find some beautiful models, and I know Ford has them, and why Ford has them is unimportant to me. </p>
<p>So taking this back to the issue of brand names in education, if you want to use economic methodology, you can use game theory. This is basically a 2-party, 2-sided simultaneous game. Like I said, most prospective employees go to college because they want to get a decent job. Hence, they choose a college based on what they think the employers want. Employers also have to figure out where to recruit based on where they think the best employees are. Each party has to make a move without knowing what the other is going to do, and each party's "payoff" is determined by what both sides do. If both employer and employee choose Harvard, then they manage to find each other and they "win". If both choose the same no-name school, then that's also a "win". But if one choose Harvard and the other chooses the no-name school, then both sides "lose".</p>
<p>So those who know game theory will instantly recognize that while there are 2 Nash equilibria to the game, the game tends to strongly tip towards one of those equilibrium, namely the Harvard-Harvard equilibria. Basically, fair or unfair, the employee is going to choose Harvard because that's where he thinks the employers will choose. The employers will also choose Harvard because that's what he thinks the employee will choose.</p>
<p>The reason why each party thinks the other party will choose Harvard is because of the marketing. Right or wrong, Harvard can convince each party that that is where the other party will be. And that is of course where they end up.</p>
<p>Now you can subsitute Harvard for JHU SAIS or whatever other branding you want. But it's the same principle. Rankings are just another form of branding. </p>
<p>Some of you will argue that this game-theoretical outcome is not economically efficient because the other Nash equilibria (where both parties find each other at a no-name school) could also be a solution, and hence those Harvard marketing dollars are a 'waste' in the system. Au contraire. I think this outcome is highly efficient, because it reduces the risk that both sides won't find each other at all. The worst outcomes are the 2 'losing' outcomes where one party goes to Harvard and the other goes to the no-name school and hence no transaction takes place. Those marketing dollars therefore reduce the chances of no transaction taking place. </p>
<p>Some of you might also object to the determinism of the system. Doesn't this system basically mean that those schools that are highly marketed will always have a locked-in advantage forever. My answer to that is, not really. If you provide a good education and you market it well, then you will get recognition. Maybe not immediately, but you will get it. The market may not react instantaneously but it will react. Like I said, it wasn't that long ago that Stanford was considered to be a regional backwater school of little consequence. Now it is widely recognized as among the world's elite schools. Stanford engaged in a 2-prong strategy. Stanford both improved its resources, and Stanford also engaged in a widespread marketing campaign to draw better employers and students. The result is clear. </p>
<p>Hence, my take is, university administrators shouldn't just sit around and complain about Harvard's marketing reach. They should do something about it. If a school has top-notch programs that aren't well marketed, then the school should market them better. If people turn down your top-notch programs in favor of Harvard, and employers refuse to recruit at your top-notch program in favor of Harvard, then you need to do a better job of convincing both parties to come. If you don't do that, then you have nobody to blame but yourself. Stanford was able to do that, so why can't you?</p>
<p>I suppose it's my belief that education should not be about marketing. Providing the best marketing strategy is the goal, not the best information. These two do not have to and often do not coincide. Basically like you said it is a shortcut. Almost everyone in society agrees if you want the best, you will want to look at these top schools. That is not meritocratic because it is not a test at the time the decision is made. This next part is hard to explain but here goes.</p>
<p>Going to an agreed upon college (agreed by employees and employers) that is supposed to give you a high probability of being a good employer will work with any college. You mention Harvard a fine example. For the sake of argument, what if tomorrow all employers decide it is Claremont McKenna? So then all the brightest students go there. And you know what, employers will get damn good employees. </p>
<p>The point it is not the best they can be, therefore agreement alone is not sufficient. Any agreement is efficient, but some agreements are still better for society in the long run because the colleges <em>can</em> actually produce better employees.</p>
<p>About your weight room example, it is as if your strong guys are looking to get recruited and they think that you will recruit at gyms which they know aren't the best gyms. You recruit, there is success. The strongest men at this subpar gym are still the strongest just because they have that capacity. They are even stronger than those at the better gym. Yet, even so, something is lost. That something is the fact that the strongest men should not work out where people are looking to find them, but should work out at the best gym. Because these strong men know people can be wrong, and hopefully, only hopefully, if the strong men can resist the urge of common opinion, they will go to the best gym and people will eventually have to follow.</p>
<p>In your example, you are leaving out something. For the analogy to work, you have to assume the strong muscular guys not only want to get strong but want to be hired for it. The reason they are there is both because they want to get strong and they want to be hired. They could be at that particular gym precisely because they know you will look there, even if it compromises their strength. They should however ignore you and only work out at the best gym and you will have to look for them there.</p>
<p>The conclusion is that employers must all the time be the chasers and judgers. Any sacrifice to this, even if monetarily more efficient, is a sacrifice to our capacity as humans. I won't be on the earth forever and I am not going to waste my time where the best people are expected to be, rather than where the best people can become the best they can. Probably won't respond to your other posts.</p>
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I suppose it's my belief that education should not be about marketing. Providing the best marketing strategy is the goal, not the best information. These two do not have to and often do not coincide. Basically like you said it is a shortcut
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<p>I don't necessarily see what the issue is. If the educational program of a school is supposedly so good, then that school ought to be able to properly market that fact. If they don't do that, that's their own darn fault. </p>
<p>It's like many of the tech startups I see that created technically brilliant products but didn't sell anything because of bad marketing strategies. Then I hear about how their engineers complain that their products were so good that they shouldn't have needed to market their products, customers should just have bought their products anyway. That's a dangerously naive mentality. If a company creates great products but the company fails because it didn't market those products properly, then the company has nobody to blame but itself. Marketing is part of business. </p>
<p>Besides, think of this. There isn't a school in the world that doesn't do marketing. All those glossy brochures, all those snazzy advertisements that I see in the backs of magazines (including from such educational luminaries as Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, etc.), that's all marketing. There isn't a school in the world that doesn't do this. All schools try to market themselves. Hence, you can't really "blame" HYPSM for simply doing it better. </p>
<p>I furthermore don't see what is so bad about it being a shortcut. Almost ALL of the techniques of modern economics can basically be classifed as 'shortcuts' in the sense that they are techniques used by players in the market to obtain a more economically optimal solution. </p>
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Going to an agreed upon college (agreed by employees and employers) that is supposed to give you a high probability of being a good employer will work with any college. You mention Harvard a fine example. For the sake of argument, what if tomorrow all employers decide it is Claremont McKenna? So then all the brightest students go there. And you know what, employers will get damn good employees.
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<p>Ah, but you discount the sheer difficulty of getting all those employers to switch over to another school. This all gets down to economic tipping points and making your decision based on what you think other players are going to do, which gets down to the heart of game theory. To give you another example, consider the market for video game consoles (Xbox, Sony playstation, Nintendo Gamecube/Revolution) Customers want to buy a console that will have a large variety of good games. Gamemakers want to write games for the console that will have lots of customers. Hence, each side has to make its decision based on what it thinks the other side will do. Hence, the goal of the console-maker (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) is to create the feeling of 'inevitability' in the market that its product will be popular. The more that gamemakers think that there will be lots of Xbox customers, the more inclined the gamemakers will be to write Xbox games. The more that customers think that there will be lots of Xbox games, the more that customers will want to buy Xbox. That's the tipping point. The more customers you get, the more game developers you get, which will draw even more customers, etc. This is why each of the 3 consolemakers spend so much money trying to create buzz and hype about their consoles. For example, I think Microsoft is about to spend several hundreds of millions of dollars just on marketing the new Xbox, and that doesn't even include the cost of actually developing and making the Xbox itself. </p>
<p>That's really no different than Harvard creating marketing buzz about its brand in order to create a sense of inevitability. It's all the same idea. Like it or not, the market for economic branding is a market with a strong tipping point. The stronger you get, the stronger you get. </p>
<p>If anything, I would argue that the market for education tips even more strongly than does the market for video game consoles. After all, like I said, education is not just about lectures and labs. Education also has to do with the other students. Surely we've all had classes that consisted of round-table discussions where it's the students themselves who are expressing and debating ideas, with the prof or TA serving as a mediator. When the other students in your class are brilliant, you tend to learn more. But when the other students are lazy or not very bright or haven't even bothered to do the reading, you tend to learn less. Also, most students spend most of their time hanging around with other students (as opposed to being in class), and I think that's where much of the REAL education is. You end up talking to other students about ideas in after-class social settings, and that's where you can really learn a lot. </p>
<p>Hence, the point is, part of getting a better education is going to a school where you think there will be lots of top students. Hence, that's a ** second and reinforcing ** tipping point. </p>
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The point it is not the best they can be, therefore agreement alone is not sufficient. Any agreement is efficient, but some agreements are still better for society in the long run because the colleges <em>can</em> actually produce better employees.
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<p>I see from your arguments that you think that marketing is just all hype with no substance. Au contraire. I think we can all agree that Harvard a pretty darn good education, in addition to being a very well marketed education. You talked about about people should go by rankings. Well, I pick up USNews and I see that Harvard is the #1 ranked university in the country. </p>
<p>Look, even after all my talk about marketing, I would be the first to agree that marketing isn't everything. You still have to have some substance. Business history is replete with examples of products that failed utterly despite massive marketing, simply because the products were terrible. General Motors, for example, has managed to produce a number of cars that were extremely highly promoted yet utterly failed because they were bad cars. </p>
<p>The truth is, even if marketing had nothing to do with it, schools like HYPSM would still be some of the best schools in the country. </p>
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About your weight room example, it is as if your strong guys are looking to get recruited and they think that you will recruit at gyms which they know aren't the best gyms. You recruit, there is success. The strongest men at this subpar gym are still the strongest just because they have that capacity. They are even stronger than those at the better gym. Yet, even so, something is lost. That something is the fact that the strongest men should not work out where people are looking to find them, but should work out at the best gym. Because these strong men know people can be wrong, and hopefully, only hopefully, if the strong men can resist the urge of common opinion, they will go to the best gym and people will eventually have to follow.</p>
<p>In your example, you are leaving out something. For the analogy to work, you have to assume the strong muscular guys not only want to get strong but want to be hired for it. The reason they are there is both because they want to get strong and they want to be hired. They could be at that particular gym precisely because they know you will look there, even if it compromises their strength. They should however ignore you and only work out at the best gym and you will have to look for them there.</p>
<p>The conclusion is that employers must all the time be the chasers and judgers. Any sacrifice to this, even if monetarily more efficient, is a sacrifice to our capacity as humans. I won't be on the earth forever and I am not going to waste my time where the best people are expected to be, rather than where the best people can become the best they can.
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<p>And what you have talked about is exactly what has happened throughout history. Some dominant player comes along in a tipping market and dominates the market, but then eventually some other player comes along to tip the market in another way. Harvard wasn't always top dog in the world, you know. In fact Harvard's reign has been relatively brief. Maybe for the last 75 years, but that's it. For a long time the top dogs were Oxford and Cambridge. Harvard's quality became so strong relative to Oxbridge that it inevitably forced the market to tip.</p>
<p>Similarly, I would point to the example of Stanford. Stanford rose from nothing to being an elite school in the space of 60-70 years. I would argue that if there is one school in the world who might cause the world to tip away from Harvard, it would be Stanford. It won't happen anytime soon, but it could happen. </p>
<p>How did Stanford rise from nothing. Simple? Stanford did the hard work of getting top students and top employers to come, despite the lack of an established brand name. It took a lot of marketing and skillful management to do that. Eventually, Stanford's reputation for top graduates and top employers became undeniable and Stanford was recognized as elite. </p>
<p>So, yes, I agree employers are always chasing employees. And employees are always chasing employers. And "employees" are chasing other "employees" (because students get a better education if the other students are good). </p>
<p>You seem to be quick to blame all this marketing for all these imperfections of the market. The truth is that the market would be inefficient anyway simply because of the lack of information in the market. Marketing is not causing the inefficiency. If anything, marketing is actually ** reducing ** the inefficiency by creating information signals that do not otherwise exist. However, imperfect those signals are, they are better than nothing.</p>
<p>sakky,</p>
<p>Dude, I spend a lot of time on the site...but how on earth do you find time to write your novellas? I'm impressed.</p>
<p>It doesn't take that long. I type pretty fast and it's not like I have to come up with new ideas. I already have the ideas in my head.</p>
<p>Fair enough. </p>
<p>Wait...you have the ideas in your head? You're thinking about this stuff way too much. ;)</p>
<p>(It's a joke. Don't pull a sakky.)</p>
<p>Sakky you must have explained the Stanford example 3 times minimum. You don't need to explain how basic marketing works. Never said Harvard wasn't a good education. Because Harvard is a good education and they market, doesn't mean market should exist. We don't have many rankings, or good ones, because we don't rely on them. The better than nothing argument is not sound because anything is better than nothing, therefore doesn't say why marketing is a good option.</p>
<p>UCLAri, I thought we've been over this. NO JOKES!</p>
<p>Oh yeah. Since you admit what colleges market is not perfect, and I think it is very far from perfect, explaining how <em>marketing</em> works only goes so far. You must explain why what they market is better than other things they could market. Marketing as an idea is obviously untouchable, of course I just don't like what and how they market, not the concept. Thought this was clear but obviously it forced you to add like 20345834934 words to your post.</p>
<p>Sreis, ANYTHING that injects information into a information-deprived market is a good option. Marketing and branding are ways to do that. </p>
<p>I think you're missing the basic point that rankings are just another form of branding. People don't know how good a program is, so they rely on branding as an information substitute. Rankings are just another information substitute. Think of it this way. If you had deep knowledge of a particular field, you wouldn't need to look at rankings. You would already know what the strong programs are. Rankings are just another way to improve your decisions when you don't have good information. Hence, they're really just another kind of branding By touting rankings, you are really just touting one form of branding for another. </p>
<p>If you don't like Stanford, fine, there are plenty of other examples. Plenty of other schools rose from nothing to greatness. Caltech rose from nothing to become elite in tech before most other US schools - before Stanford, before the Ivy League, before Berkeley, and arguably even before MIT. It did so through excellently marketed programs. Caltech went around building out huge facilities and hiring big name-brand profs and then went around basically bragging about how Caltech had top-notch programs and how those who really liked science should ditch the Ivy League for Caltech. That's marketing. And it worked. MIT itself marketed itself extremely well as an "anti-Harvard", in other words, the "other" school in Cambridge to go to if you were truly serious about studying science (this was before Harvard itself became a science powerhouse). The same could be said for all the other 'young' top schools - Duke, Chicago, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Northwestern, Rice, UCLA, etc. All of them, to various extents, used marketing to vault them to their current position.</p>
<p>UCLA is an excellent example. According to my boss, in the 1980s, while UCLA was a hot campus, it wasn't a Berkeley. Today, however, UCLA is effectively taking students from Berkeley because of perceived value. A combination of marketing, having great and noticeable sports programs (also helped Cal and Stanford and Duke) and buying good professors has helped UCLA go from being "a good UC" to "a top school."</p>
<p>Just ask UCLA grads from two decades ago.</p>
<p>You can just explain the concept, the examples aren't necessary. This also begs the question. If marketing and branding are ways to inject information into an information deprived market, what are other ways? Let's look at those and compare them.</p>
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<p>It's because law schools don't want students with preconceived notions about the law. Law school is where you learn about the law, not undergrad. Hence, they want you to obtain skills that can help you practice law as an undergraduate but not actually learn about the law.</p>
<p>Never major in legal studies unless you want to be a paralegal, but not an actual attorney.</p>
<p>
Communication Studies at UCLA is competitive to get into, and Global Studies is actually one of the more demanding majors offered. very few athletes take these majors, if any. Seems like most are in Sociology, with some in History and some even trying to get into the competitive Business Economics major. (haven't seen a single person do the individual field major). sociology may be the creampuff of the "real" majors, but it's still a normal major with regular students in it. on the other hand, i'm wondering about "legal studies" and "peace and conflict studies" at berkeley.
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<p>This wasn't directed towards me, but I'll make a metaphor. Any country that is named "People's Republic of ___" or any country that has to tell you it is democratic isn't really.</p>
<p>Hence any major that has to tell you that it's a "study" probably doesn't require much studying.</p>
<p>haha delicatess, i like that.</p>
<p>but i still contend that global studies at UCLA isn't easy. it for sure is more demanding than political science in almost every aspect; the requirements for global studies is equivalent to earning departmental honors in political science and more. and communication studies is very competitive to get into... although i'm not sure about how hard the actual major is after you finish the pre-reqs.</p>
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"People's Republic of ___" or any country that has to tell you it is democratic isn't really.
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<p>Yet, if you drop the 'People's' (a false moniker placed by Marxist/Leninist/Maoists) you get "Republic of" and you get many democracies that still want to tell you that they're a democracy. Like Ireland and France.</p>
<p>Sorry, I was just bored.</p>