@CU123 Is Berkeley not ranked 20? Its clear due to it’s lofty PR score of 4.7( overrated imho) whats holding them back is finances and poor management.
And that is due to being a public state school…
That Cal continues to be ranked high and attract many, many bright minds despite it experiencing the typical struggles of a public university is a testament to what it has to offer - now and for so many years: excellent teachers, many research opportunities, access to resources and location in the beautiful bay area. BTW, unless you are getting some major $$ thrown at you from a private, it is hands down the best undergrad value for in-state students.
I can agree with that.
As an international student from Asia, I can assure you that Cal is very prestigious. People here choose Berkeley over Dartmouth, Duke, Williams, Amherst etc… all the time. Probably because there are so many asians haha
Sure have, but it’s been mostly black students who have decided not to apply there, not conservatives upset by the response of the U, though there have been some of those too. Mizzou hand;ed things so badly they managed to scare everyone away.
And honestly, Mizzou is nowhere near Berkeley in prestige, never was.
Until my kids began looking at colleges, the main thing I knew about Berkeley was that it was a major center for civil rights and anti-war protest in the 60s. IMO, if you were OK with that and not this I’d wonder why.
I was a kid in the 60s, as I assume you were as well. But in context, one was the birth of the free speech movement and the new protests were specifically to suppress free speech. Sort of a big difference there. Agree with you on Mizzou, both on how poorly the administration dealt with it and its prestige compared to Berkeley. Still, the effects have been more disastrous than anyone could have anticipated.
My perspective on Berkeley, however, is as a Californian where most of the UCs still draw their students. I’m quite sure there’s no damage to the brand internationally and it won’t be known for a while whether or how much damage there is domestically. What I can report is that a number of parents I know would be hesitant to send their kids to Berkeley while there’s no stigma whatsoever for UCLA. When I was growing up, UCLA wasn’t even close to being as prestigious as Berkeley. Now it receives many more freshman applications, has a lower admittance rate, and most ranking differences are negligible. And it’s not just the protests that hurt Berkeley–it’s the major homelessness problem right by campus, it’s the lack of undergraduate housing and affordable off-campus options, and it’s the perception of it being cut-throat. At least here in California, that gives some parents pause. I personally know two students who picked engineering at Cal Poly SLO over Berkeley. And the rise of certain other UCs, in both reputation and number of applications, is interesting too.
TTdd16, you appear to have issues with Berkeley that are personal to you. Every college has a sub-set of parents that do not want their child to attend the college for some reason or another. This is not exclusive to Berkeley. This includes UCLA. UCB is still a very prestigious university with top tier professors and academics. If you do not want your child to attend (if they can get in), then there are thousands of other applicants who would love the opportunity to attend UCB.
Disclaimer: Cal student. Chose Berkeley over USC w/scholarship, Cornell, Vandy, etc.
In the public eye? Yes, Berkeley’s prestige has gone down. Internationally I think its academic reputation is strong enough so that people don’t really care about the liberalism, but domestically Berkeley’s name (undergraduate, not so much for graduate studies) is burdened by budget issues, an abundance of California community college transfers who are nowhere near the level of Cal students, and an increasing acceptance rate for in-state students.
The effect that it’ll have on your degree will be extremely minimal, especially if you’re planning on doing CS, Math, Engineering, Business, or any of the other fields that Berkeley is #1-3 for in the nation. Also, Berkeley won’t be defunded any time soon just because some surrounding social justice warriors caused trouble for the university.
If I were in your situation, I would still choose Berkeley in a heartbeat.
^ The numbers seem to disagree with you there, regarding transfer students. Transfer students tend to perform just as well as their admitted-from-HS counterparts. I’ll post the stats when I find them. And why do you refer to the “transfer students” and “Cal students” as if they’re two separate entities? Once a transfer is admitted, she/he is a Cal student!
And to OP, Berkeley has always been seen as a “radical” school. Look up the protests from the 60s. That said, it is still a prestigious school. Might some super conservative folks assume you’re some SJW hippie if you go there? Maybe, but who cares what they think - they get that impression by watching fox news anyway.
@DonGately16 I’m not trying to completely bash on the community college transfer system in California or on transfer students in general, but it’s very hard to argue that it’s not a burden for California public universities as opposed to private schools like Dartmouth or WashU who are under no obligation to accept less-qualified transfer students. I can also tell you first hand that it’s a knockdown in prestige - many students in the high schools in my district who were rejected from nearly every UC school as senior applicants were able to find a backdoor into Cal, UCLA, etc. after attending a community college. Our counselors specifically suggested low-stat applicants to attend a community college for 2 years simply because of how ridiculously easy it is (compared to normal freshman admissions) to gain transfer admission.
No need to post the stats. I know of the numbers which you refer to; they’re paraded like an award over almost every page regarding transfer admissions, and they have to do with the graduation rate of transfer students compared to standard freshman admits. Those stats are bogus and are handpicked by the administration, as they don’t account for many other factors, such as the fact that two whole years of weeder classes are being skipped and that a much larger portion of transfer students are majoring in humanities majors such as political science and English and not the majors that 4-year students choose I referred to in my previous post. Even then, transfer students and 4-year Cal students have around the same graduation rate, which is definitely saying something. The difference between transfers and 4-year students is even more obvious when you’re actually a student here. I’ve noticed that the outliers in my computer science and EE labs/discussions are almost always transfer students who aren’t adequately prepared for the rigor of the major they were admitted to.
If there were data available for comparisons on upper division GPAs, graduate school matriculation (usually an indicator of research, significant contribution to the campus and such), this would be significantly more obvious. Of course, this data won’t ever be released as long as we retain our identity as a public institution.
It’s not just the problematic transfer system that’s holding Cal back. The fact that we are a public institution is why our undergraduate prestige will never quite exceed private schools who are around the same level as we are. They have endowments, legacy admissions, and huge donors that aren’t really possible for us to achieve without violating our underlying identity as a public university.
To the OP: In summary, Berkeley’s prestige isn’t “going down” - it’s just not rising up as fast as some other universities while lagging behind in a few, such as undergraduate education. Our research and graduate programs are what allows us to maintain prestige and a reputation internationally, not really campus life/protests/etc.
People are prestige whores and wish that the UC could be exactly like big private schools like Stanford and the Ivies. Well that will never happen and I’m glad. This school system was created to serve residents of the great state of California. How incredible is it that you get a second opportunity to attend a top ranked university through a community college? I love it. Not everyone is fortunate or privileged enough to be able to do it in high school.
Luckily, you’re given a second chance at CCC to pick yourself up and try again. People can spout their anecdotal observations all they want, but the numbers don’t lie like said above: graduation rates and GPA are virtually identical. Simply saying they’re “bogus” isn’t a valid counterargument. I don’t think Cal or any of the UC’s are being “held back” by transfers. Transfers enrich the school and bring diversity. I think the school is being held back more by snotty kids with bratty attitudes who wish they were at an IVY instead. Well guess what, this is a PUBLIC school with a mission to serve the PUBLIC, not stroke egos when you compare yourselves to your private school counterparts. In this sense, Cal isn’t being held back at all. It’s doing what it was set out to do all along.
God bless community colleges, they are a godsend – one of the remaining ways for poor folks to crawl into the middle class.
Edit: and thanks everyone for the insights and responses.
Putting down a class of people (in this case transfer students) would not help anybody!
@yinuos That was a very good explanation, and illustrates why public schools will always have a difficult time competing with private schools. I will add in the area of STEM, and more specifically engineering, public schools seem to be holding there own. Personally I believe that its because I view engineering as a trade, and large public flagship universities are very good at training their students, albeit it’s a sink or swim system. BTW I majored in EECS and I couldn’t tell you anything about the humanities/social sciences/classics even though I took the classes since they were relatively easy A’s.
Berkeley definitely has challenges to face, and hopefully they will. Budget pressures, tuition freezes,and increasing calls from California residents to increase the the number of in-state admissions places Cal in a really tough position. Coupled with the fact that as a public school it cannot take many of the actions that a private school can to address these challenges. Don’t know how they’ll handle it, but best wishes to them.
(Cal Class of 2021 here)
I feel that perhaps Berkeley’s prestige is starting to go down. The acceptance rate for Berkeley has been INCREASING while all other prestigious schools have the trend of decreasing acceptance rates. There is also a serious lack of funding for majors like Public Health.
Acceptance rate is a really shallow way of gauging prestige.
@anxiousenior1 Well yeah it may be but the trend is that all the prestigious names (Ivies, Stanford, MIT) have low acceptance rates. It’s a common trend but it may not always be right
@astrophysicistx Isn’t one of the reasons Cal’s acceptance rate is going up is because there is a mandate to increase California students across the board into the UC system? I don’t think they are going to forgo OOS tuition $$ to accommodate more in-state students - they are just increasing the # of bodies overall.
As for transfer students, the UC system is very committed to them, and I don’t think that those students drag down the “prestige” as a group. As prestigious as the ivies are, I don’t know that you are necessarily getting a better education.