<ol>
<li>UCLA has a business econ major for only the top students, every one is pre business econ until they get in.</li>
<li>ALL of the UCLA econ faculty is star status, you are speculating on them teaching seminars, you pulled that notion out of absolutely nowhere. The top faculty teaches in lecture halls, and mind you, the average econ faculty at UCLA is already better than UCI’s top econ faculty, so the top faculty…you can only imagine what they are like…</li>
<li>UCLA classes are smaller than UCI classes. Like by, like, a significant amount. Check their registrar if you don’t believe me. This quarter there is not a single econ class at ucla with greater than or equal to 400 students.</li>
</ol>
<p>lol @ anyone at UCLA being able to become a business econ major, that only shows you are speculating. Argue with facts.</p>
<p>By the way, I have actually looked at the web pages/alma mater lists of some of the faculty of the required courses for business econ…let’s just say you’re in for a big surprise if you actually look.</p>
<p>Well when you apply to college, there is a place where you can click your major. Anybody can click on economics major. You can have a 3.8 gpa or a 4.4 gpa or 10.0 gpa, and be accepted to it. Colleges know that you will likely change majors, so they accept students by college, not major. I will tell you something based on my experience as an economics major: nobody does it because they love economics (well at least its very rare), most people don’t know what they want to do, hence they select economics. I guess you are right in that it is competitive in the sense that a whole bunch of people don’t know what they want to do with their lives and fall back on the econ major and it adds up to be a lot of people and there you go: competitive.</p>
<p>How much can one human being speculate? YOU CAN’T CHANGE YOUR MAJOR AT UCLA AFTER YOU TRANSFER unless the major is not impacted. No one “falls back” on econ at UCLA, UCI is a completely different story. And again, you are speculating when you compare UCI students to UCLA students. People who get into UCLA damn sure know exactly what they want to do with their lives, look at the average for getting into econ as a transfer, lol @ the idea of someone “falling” into a major with a 3.9 GPA.</p>
<p>If you want to talk facts, show me that quality of econ graduate programs= quality of econ undergraduate programs. If you can show me that, then there is no point to the discussion.</p>
<p>actually, the averages for both econ and business econ were 3.8 for transfers. That is a higher GPA than the average UCLA transfer accepted student. That should tell you something. STOP SPECULATING.</p>
<p>Use your own two eyes and you will see. The better the faculty, the more they expect from students and the more knowledgable they are. Otherwise, community colleges could have better quality of education than universities. It’s simple logic, no one needs to prove that, it’s a given. Better faculty and grad students is what DEFINES a better program.</p>
<p>But ponder why its so high. Is it because it is a top notch program or maybe because there are so many kids in that program that they can only take in x amount of students, thus making the gpa higher. You have to consider that there are other reasons for a high gpa for economics at ucla than just besides the fact that these kids are elite/smart students. Think about the bureacracy of the UC system. Let me also tell you another point: if these transfer students don’t finish their prereqs for econ they will not be selected. Now based on your point, they should still be selected because they are so smart because this kid as a 10.0 gpa. UCLA will have no problem dropping this kid because he didn’t finish it like he said he would on his app. Why is this? There are a million kids in the major and they don’t need anymore of them. In other words, they don’t want that kid doing lower division econ classes while he’s there because there are too many new/freshman students in the first place.I’m still waiting for the study that proves quality of grad program = quality of undergrad program.</p>
<p>That’s like waiting on the study that proves that the sky is blue, when all along you can just look out the window.
For the 4th time, quality of faculty and grad students is what defines a better program.</p>
<p>do you not realize the fallacy in your logic? why would any program have high average GPA’s for getting in? its ALWAYS because of limited spots. you arent arguing anything.</p>
<p>So, to answer the original question: how much does prestige matter? Not nearly as much as the subtle intricacies between the econ programs at UCI and UCLA, apparently.</p>
<p>I wonder how much employers really know about the strength of depts. of each school vs. the strength of school as a whole. What I mean is if an employer (for any job really) is looking at two applicants and one went to a more well known school that has a dept. pertaining to that job that isn’t as good as the rest of the school vs. an applicant that went to a lesser known school that has a dept. pertaining to that job that is outstanding do many employers even know that and take it into account? I would guess not, it would seem to me an employer would more likely look for who went to the better school overall, maybe I’m wrong though.</p>
<p>Jrmorse, if that were the case, UCSD students would NEVER have the upper hand in getting into life science PhD programs because of recognition of the program alone, which certainly isn’t the case. In the case of UCSD, although its not a highly ranked school nor has a reputation even close to UCLA, a UCSD biomedical engineer will be far more likely to get hired than a UCLA biomedical engineer. This is because the program itself matters the most. What good would “overall” quality do for an employer in the first place?</p>
<p>Everybody here has a skewed perception because we’re all students and we are (or just were) in process of shopping for schools and marketing ourselves to academic institutions. You may know a lot of little details, some that you’ll forget and some that will obsoleted by the time you’re done caring and busy focusing on <em>your</em> studies at the institution <em>you’re</em> attending. And during that time, your future employers will be gaining even more real world experience working with people who’ve graduated from all over the place. So by the time you’re the ten-thousandth applicant to step into their office, they’ll know better than to place all bets on the manufacturer of your degree(s), and hopefully, you’ll have more than that to offer them.</p>
<p>Yea, I think the dept. matters more when you are dealing with fields like engineering, biology, physics ect. I guess my point more pertains to social science and humanities majors, like in my case I’m a poli sci major at UCSD, which the poli sci dept. is up there with a lot of ivy league schools, but when I go into the job market I would assume someone who went to lets say Cornell or Brown would have the upper hand on me.</p>