<p>Of course the issue is money, CA is broke. I visited 3 UCs last year in addition to many top private schools. There was no comparison in terms of resources, access to professors (only schools where profs did not respond to emails), facilities and student satisfaction. It's sad, Ca had so much money during the dot com days and just blew it!!</p>
<p>They still managed to pickup a couple of Nobel prizes this year.</p>
<p>A lot of good that does the average student.</p>
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Of course the issue is money, CA is broke. I visited 3 UCs last year in addition to many top private schools. There was no comparison in terms of resources, access to professors (only schools where profs did not respond to emails), facilities and student satisfaction. It's sad, Ca had so much money during the dot com days and just blew it!!
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<p>Like I said, I don't think the issue is money. You said it yourself - even during the dotcom salad days when Cal had money, they STILL didn't spend it on maintenance.</p>
<p>What I sadly suspect the truth is that even if Cal had all the money in the world, they wouldn't spend it on cleaning the campus up. So it's not really about the money. It's really about the administrative culture. </p>
<p>I'll give you an example about another school. Let's talk about Harvard. Harvard is sitting on nearly $30 billion - more money, by far, than any other school in the world. So why don't they clean up the bathrooms in the Science Center? Why not spruce up Sever Hall? Why not fix the broken chairs in Emerson? It's not because they can't do it. It's because they DON'T WANT to do it. Again, it gets down to administrative culture. Just look at the difference in landscaping and maintenance of Harvard Business School compared to some of the other parts of Harvard and you can see the certain administrators care about having a beautiful campus, and others don't care.</p>
<p>Maybe Berkeley could start a major called Building Repair and Maintenance...hire Bob Vila as Department Chairman, and have grad students supervise undergrads in painting and plumbing projects. Either that or have Jimmy Carter and a crew from Habitat for Humanity come in and get some of those toilets working. Condi Rice doesn't have much on her plate; maybe she could get Somalia and Bolivia to send some aid.</p>
<p>Seriously, though...I'll bet there are thousands of Cal students doing community outreach stuff--and all the while their own university needs cleaning, painting, and repairs. Why wait around for some money to find its way from the taxpayers' pockets through the state government, through the UC system and through the UC-Berkeley administration? Oh, that's right...the last thing the Berkeley types want anybody to know is that things can get done without Big Government being involved.</p>
<p>Ok, so I chose to quote the passages that highlighted how dilapidated Berkeley's facilities are, but if you read the article, its ultimately a warning bell that there's a brain drain occurring at Berkeley as the institution doesn't have enough cash to fund certain research, nevermind whether the grass is mowed.</p>
<p>The grass being mowed and bathrooms working are serious considerations. Suppose you get word that you got picked for a Nobel. You go out and celebrate with your colleagues with a huge dinner at a Mexican restaurant. The next day at work the mountain of burritos and bucket of Dos Equis you consumed the night before have run their course. You dash to the powder room, and in the only working stall, a janitor is humming "Marche Slav" and reading a People Magazine. Next stop: Palo Alto.</p>
<p>I don't know... if the janitorial staff was familiar with Tchaikovsky, I'd figure the school must attract some bright minds.</p>
<p>You have probably touched on part of it--having union state employees doing the work means not much work gets done but no way they let anyone else do it--even for free.</p>
<p>Sakky, it's not just maintenance. Classes are getting bigger with sections being cut, profs are leaving for lack of funding and on and on, all as the student body grows.</p>
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Sakky, it's not just maintenance. Classes are getting bigger with sections being cut, profs are leaving for lack of funding and on and on, all as the student body grows.
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<p>But again, do you honestly think things would change if Cal had money? Again, during the dotcom days, Cal was flush with money. Yet even in those days, classes got bigger, profs left for lack of funding, and so forth. Like I said, you can have all the money you want, but if you have an administration that doesn't really care, then nothing will happen.</p>
<p>No, CA was flush with money, not the UCs.</p>
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MIT has a lot of money. Money is not the real issue. The real issue is that MIT doesn't want to spend the money to spruce itself up. In fact, MIT tour guides once even touted the campus's ugliness as a strength - that since they're clearly not spending much money on campus maintenance, they must be spending it on the education. I am convinced that even if MIT were to obtain the largest endowment in the country, they still wouldn't spend it on beautifying the campus. </p>
<p>Nor is MIT alone. You can look at Harvard. While parts of Harvard are gorgeous (for example, the campus of Harvard Business School looks like a country-club from heaven), others are shoddily maintained. The innards of the Science Center, for example, is quite grungy, and that bathrooms are sometimes scarily filthy. Some of the buildings around the Yard are not exactly well maintained - i.e. the classrooms in Harvard Hall ain't exactly examples of splendor. Harvard has more money than God, and even Harvard's campus is not exactly pristine.
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<p>Looks like Stanford > MIT/Harvard in that regard. I felt pretty much the whole campus was like a well-maintained giant resort.</p>
<p>So what's the point of having an endowment if it just sits there?</p>
<p>An endowment doesn't just "sit there;" it's allocated into a variety of investments. The greater the amount invested, the greater the amount of return. For instance, an 11% return on a $2 billion endowment yields less than an 11% return on a $15 billion endowment. When institutions take from their endowment, not only are they spending saved money, but they are also hindering their ability to generate more.</p>
<p>Most spend about 5% of the total endowment and assume they can produce 8% growth or so. That way the base is always growing.</p>
<p>It's unclear which is true -- hype or reality. One thing is for sure, I would never trust a daily newspaper to have a sense of it. They are mostly picking up, in many cases, on their own biases, expectations, and what sounds ought to be right. The dailies have a LONG record of getting it wrong.</p>
<p>Berkeley and the UC as a whole have been on the verge of destruction for decades, if you believe these articles. Berkeley's model is clear: make investments, as much as possible, that keep the university tops in terms of grad programs. And its continual placement next to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. in the stratosphere across departments bears this out apparently. </p>
<p>Have you been to the Berkeley campus? They are always apparently out of money -- and then they throw up another state-of-the-art $100 bioengineering building. And I work for an ivy league school (which I will not name because it is my professional domain). I'll tell you we balance the new and glitzy with the decrepit at a rate I find pretty close to the Berkeley campus' rate.</p>
<p>I personally know a husband and wife professor couple wooed HEAVILY by MIT and Harvard, in the reverse order written here. And they looked and considered and stayed. Their reasoning: they like Berkeley, its quality, and its mission better. Some people would actually rather be part of a public enterprise, which may come as a big surprise to some, and these people had a strong notion of this. Also Bay Area vs. Boston = Bay Area won. Why weren't these people quoted? My point is that there are counterexamples. I just don't know how it all adds up.</p>
<p>Some people would say Berkeley's model happens at expense of undergrads. May be a big fat kernel of truth in that. On the other hand, pretty much all the big research universities seem to make this same trade-off. I went to a prestigious east coast university for grad school and the Berkeleys and Princetons did not prepare the students the best apparently, judging by my classmate. It was the likes of Amherst and Swarthmore and even in one case William and Mary. NOTE: Preparation vs. smarts was what I was talking about.</p>
<p>Another thing: Schwarzenegger actually supported the UCs as much as he could in light of his other decisions (which I didn't like), because he appeared to realize how important the UC's pre-eminence has been in driving economic dynamism in the state.</p>
<p>My vote is that California continues to be on the verge of dooming its educational system to inveterate squalor -- but this seems to be mostly the case with public education K-12. On the other hand, the UC and Cal State systems do need all the help they can get...</p>
<p>Also, UC's endowment is weak only in comparison to the absolute top ones, on an absolute basis at least.</p>
<p>But I am more curious about the poster. I question the motive of posting this, not to be spiteful, but because it seems to be a bit of schadenfreude. Or are you thinking about going to Berkeley after you graduate from USC? Or maybe you didn't get into Berkeley? Or maybe you chose USC over Berkeley? I am mostly just curious. 'Cause the motivations of the writers who wrote the LA Times article could figure in similarly, as to the reasons why a person would re-post the article.</p>
<p>Full disclosure: went to Cal undergrad. Loved it, but don't consider it be-all-end-all, just another option of which there are many great ones in the US.</p>
<p>arent they cutting tuition at all public CA schools from UCs to community colleges?</p>
<p>California private schools are still looking good though ;o)</p>
<p>The California Golden Bears are kicking ass on the football field - a few more years of this, and we'll have donors flocking!</p>