Is Cal considered a top university?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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<p>Some of what Sakky is saying sounds right, but there are many more factors of success in life than the ivy brand name. If your ambition is to go strictly into the corporate world, sure, an ivy will get you farther. Sakky used google management team as an example. Those people are in business positions, not the guys who actually created anything. In the world of tech startups for example, you will hardly find any ivy grad (not saying there aren’t any, but very rare). Even Harvard grads are a bit rare, they’re more in venture capital i guess. The guys starting the companies are all Stanford or Berkeley in silicon valley. And there’s definitely a ****load of money there, way more than what you’ll get by getting an ivy degree, going into ibanking or something. I know people who are berkeley grads who have started companies and walked out with hundreds of millions. Sure there’s much more risk in doing startups than graduating from an ivy and going to jp morgan to get 300k/yr for life, but for people who want to go into tech or be entrepreneurs, berkeley and stanford are winners over harvard yale princeton cornell upenn dartmouth, etc. In silicon valley, there are about as many berkeley alum startups as stanford alum startups. </p>

<p>Also, anyone consider the fact that 20-30 years ago, when today’s executives got their college education, the admit rates to the ivies were A LOT higher? so it makes sense that back then, people who might today get into berkeley and not the ivies, they’d hv gotten into places like princeton where eric schmidt is from. not eric schmidt maybe, but most of these fortune 500 execs are sales people. they don’t need any technical or problem-solving skills, just people skills. consider that they all look like athlete studs. same goes for ibankers. if yr larry or sergey, u’d want some pretty darn good salesppl in your company, and what better place to get a salesman than an ivy.</p>

<p>And sakky, u forgot to mention that the google guys did their phd at stanford, but their undergrad from michigan. but that wont serve your argument so you did not really forget. as far as undergrad education is concerned, berkeley’s a great great start for people who want to go the tech entrepreneurship route. i personally find the prospect of being an entrepreneur way more exciting than going directly into the corporate ranks.</p>

<p>i personally see myself as an entrepreneur, and that’s why i would only have picked stanford mit, or i guess harvard b/c of cross enrollment with mit, over berkeley. i’m not an aspiring doctor, lawyer, ibanker. for them i agree berkeley may not be the #1 place for undergrad.</p>

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<p>also, sakky, what is your alma matter? if you are from an ivy, why are not doing 100hrs/week at an ibank cashing in on your brand name degree instead of doing 10k+ posts on CC? :)</p>

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<p>[Corporate</a> Information - Google Management](<a href=“http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/execs.html]Corporate”>Google - About Google, Our Culture & Company News)
[News@Cisco</a> -> Executive Biographies](<a href=“http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/execs/]News@Cisco”>http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/execs/)
[Adobe</a> - Executive profiles](<a href=“http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/executivebios/]Adobe”>http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/executivebios/)
[Executive</a> Bios](<a href=“Hardware | Oracle”>Hardware | Oracle)
[Yahoo</a>! Inc. - Management Team](<a href=“http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/management.cfm]Yahoo”>http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/management.cfm)
[Oracle</a> Executives](<a href=“http://www.oracle.com/corporate/execs_content.html]Oracle”>http://www.oracle.com/corporate/execs_content.html)</p>

<p>take a look at these people before you start sucking up to the ivy league hype</p>

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<p>I think I agree with the general consensus here, which is that if you want to be technical, go to Berkeley or Stanford over almost anywhere else in the U.S. Working in a technical company doesn’t quite imply being very technical. </p>

<p>For the record though, I think Sakky respects Berkeley a lot, and it seems he has in some way been to the school before.</p>

<p>All said, I will mention that it is very likely nobody will give a damn where you did your undergraduate degree if you did your graduate degree somewhere else. Lots of Berkeley undergraduates seem to head to Stanford for graduate school, especially in EECS.</p>

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<p>^ I agree with your comment about sakky. I think he’s a credible person. But I think, sometimes, his constant attack on Berkeley has damaged Berkeley’s reputation on CC. :smiley:
Haven’t you noticed it that reading some of his posts can potentially damage school pride and optimism. Some of the posts he makes bring negative aurora to Berkeley and in a way, the students and alumni losses positive attitude towards the school, and probably life. His posts makes Berkeley eduction and its students and graduates average. Reading his posts discourages Cal alumni to support the school. But then again, his entitled to to his opinion and I think he’s credible. And, it’s weird that he has no counterpart from HYPSM, Ivies and other elite privates.</p>

<p>On topic: As viewed internationally, Berkeley is considered a top 10 school, and enjoys prestige only attained by Stanford, MIT, Yale, Cambridge, Caltech and the like.</p>

<p>In the US, it seems Berkeley isn’t that well regarded though. It’s weird to think how’s that made possible.</p>

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<p>Yeah, I’m pretty sure by now, most people form their own opinions, so I doubt people would really be gloom about life because of one person’s opinions.</p>

<p>And personally, I think Berkeley isn’t seen as all that great maybe because they take preference over Cal kids than anyone else, which makes it seem a bit easier. I’m sure if they were free to choose, it’d be a lot more competitive, like what OoS kids have to face.</p>

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<p>The key to gain more prestige and respect is maintaining a high selectivity standard. Thus if Berkeley will admit only 12% (or lower) of its applicants, it would gain respect substantially. I think that if we have to trouble shoot this school, that’s the first thing that we should do.</p>

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<p>^^ RML, Sakky and Mathboy unite on this point :)</p>

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<p>^ I have huge respect for you and sakky. I think you’re both highly credible posters/members. Sakky is very informative, frank and detailed. I just wish sakky has counterparts from the elite privates. I’d love to know what they really are too (good and bad sides) so then we can analyze carefully based on those information. At the moment, we’re not aware of the negatives of the elite privates because no one is talking about them, whilst Berkeley gets bombarded quite heavily almost every minute. :D</p>

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<p>300k a year? That’s poverty wages for an experienced Ibanker. We’re talking more like 3mm a year, or for the superstars, 30mm+ a year. Heck, even now, in the midst of one of the worst financial crises in modern history, one star banker at Citigroup may still be paid a year-end bonus of $100mm. </p>

<p>[WSJ</a> Scoop on Citi’s $100 Million Man : CJR](<a href=“http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/wsj_scoop_on_citis_100_million.php]WSJ”>WSJ Scoop on Citi’s $100 Million Man - Columbia Journalism Review) </p>

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<p>Facebook was founded in the Harvard dorms. </p>

<p>Then of course there is a software company in Redmond Washington founded by a certain guy who dropped out of an Ivy. Granted, he wasn’t a Ivy grad, but he was still an Ivy student. </p>

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<p>I purposefully chose not to mention Sergey and Larry at all, for like you said, while they didn’t go to an Ivy or Stanford for undergrad, they didn’t go to Berkeley for undergrad either. See below. </p>

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<p>That’s an interesting assertion regarding Google management. Those Ivy people really are all in business positions and don’t actually create anything? Looking through just the engineering management ranks of Google, I see Alfred Spector, VP of Research and member of the National Academy of Engineering and who founded several startups himself. He did his undergrad at Harvard. I also see Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat and also member of the National Academy of Engineering, who did his undergrad at Cornell. I hope these guys are actually involved in the creation of new technology, for if they’re not, then that begs the question of why Google even bothers to employ them at all. More importantly, as I said before, I don’t see a single Berkeley undergrad engineer in all of Google management, whether we are talking about sales/finance management or engineering management. The only former Berkeley undergrad is a finance guy. </p>

<p>[Corporate</a> Information - Google Management](<a href=“Google - About Google, Our Culture & Company News”>Google - About Google, Our Culture & Company News)</p>

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<p>But that’s precisely my point: where are all these successful startups started by former Berkeley undergrads? Now, granted, I agree, there are some, i.e. Gordon Moore and Intel (but that was 40 years ago, back before anybody had even invented the personal computer or the Web). But certainly not the kind of dominance once would expect given Berkeley’s sheer size and proximity to the Valley. Note, Apple and Woz don’t count as Woz went to Berkeley years after he left Apple. </p>

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<p>Ha! Well, I could just as easily ask you, why are you spending time posting here instead of starting your own company, or, heck, even bothering to graduate from Berkeley at all? As you may know, lots of successful entrepreneurs never finished college. In fact, if you have a great idea, it may behoove you to pursue it right now rather than actually try to graduate. In the worst case scenario, your company fails. Oh well, you just re-enroll in college.</p>

<p>Consider Paul Graham’s take on Bill Gates</p>

<p>*I can’t imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He’d have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he’d been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not.</p>

<p>And yes, while it is probably true that you’ll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you’d learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too.</p>

<p>The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I’m supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I’m 23? That’s four years. That’s more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair.</p>

<p>And he’d be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we’re suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn’t have been better for him.*</p>

<p>[Hiring</a> is Obsolete](<a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html]Hiring”>Hiring is Obsolete)</p>

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<p>I’m not sure those links help your cause, because, like I said, where are all the Berkeley undergrads? Again, I seem to find more Ivy undergrads than I do Berkeley undergrads. </p>

<p>Take the following company profiles that I gleaned from just a few minutes of poking around.</p>

<p>Google:
Eric Schmidt, CEO, Princeton
Stu Feldman, VP, Princeton
Daniel Alegre, VP, Princeton
Susan Wokcicki, VP, Harvard
Alfred Spector, VP, Harvard
David Eun, VP, Harvard
Kent Walker, VP, Harvard
David Rosenblatt, Pres, Yale
Ben Fried, CIO, Columbia
Kai-Fu Lee, VP, Columbia
David Girouard, President, Dartmouth
Dennis Woodside, VP, Cornell
Sanjay Ghemawar, Fellow, Cornell
David Fischer, VP, Cornell
Mark Fuchs, VP, Berkeley</p>

<p>Yahoo:
Jeff Russakow, SVP, Princeton<br>
Hilary Schneider, EVP of Yahoo North America, Brown University. </p>

<p>Oracle:
Jeff Epstein, EVP and CFO, Yale.
Thomas Kurian, SVP, Princeton</p>

<p>Cisco:
Nick Adamo, SVP, Columbia.
Mark Chandler, SVP, Harvard</p>

<p>Now, to be sure, I’m quite sure there have to be some more former Berkeley undergrads in those exec ranks, as I didn’t perform an exhaustive check. But the point is, there seems to be a remarkably low percentage of them, considering the fact that these are Silicon Valley companies, of which the Ivies are not local, but Berkeley is, and that these are all tech companies and Berkeley is supposed to be a better tech school relative to the Ivies. Nevertheless, there really aren’t that many former Berkeley undergrads occupying the management ranks of those Silicon Valley tech companies, even the tech management ranks.</p>

<p>Now, granted, most of those managers went to neither Berkeley nor an Ivy for undergrad. I doubt that that should be surprising to anybody, considering that Berkeley and the Ivies represent less than 1% of all of the schools in the United States alone, and that’s not even talking about all of the international schools. Nevertheless, the point stands that I don’t see how the information on management teams supports the argument that you should prefer Berkeley over an Ivy, for if anything, the exact opposite seems to be true. Far more executive managers at even Silicon Valley tech companies seem to have done their undergrads at the Ivies rather than Berkeley. </p>

<p>Perhaps this is a general problem of the Berkeley experience. Maybe Berkeley doesn’t impart the proper leadership and people skills that you need to become a manager. Maybe Berkeley doesn’t arm you with a strong social network that you can leverage to find the best management jobs. {For example, Steve Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft basically because he was Bill Gates’s old poker-playing buddy in Currier House at Harvard.} But whatever it is, I think it’s clear that Berkeley should be doing better.</p>

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<p>that much money in ibanking?!??!?</p>

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<p>Sure, if you want to go technical. But I think that’s the real question. Plenty of people - even those who are technically trained - do not actually want to take technical jobs, probably because they realize that nontechnical jobs pay better and offer better career opportunities. For example, I think we can all agree that MIT is arguably the best technical school in the world. Yet the fact is, nearly 50% of all MIT undergrads who enter the workforce won’t take technical (i.e. engineering) jobs, instead taking jobs in, you guessed it, consulting or finance. </p>

<p>Consider the poignant and sad words of MIT chemical engineering student Nicholas Pearce:</p>

<p>Even at M.I.T., the U.S.'s premier engineering school, the traditional career path has lost its appeal for some students. Says junior Nicholas Pearce, a chemical-engineering major from Chicago: “It’s marketed as–I don’t want to say dead end but sort of ‘O.K., here’s your role, here’s your lab, here’s what you’re going to be working on.’ Even if it’s a really cool product, you’re locked into it.” Like Gao, Pearce is leaning toward consulting. “If you’re an M.I.T. grad and you’re going to get paid $50,000 to work in a cubicle all day–as opposed to $60,000 in a team setting, plus a bonus, plus this, plus that–it seems like a no-brainer.”</p>

<p>[Are</a> We Losing Our Edge? - TIME](<a href=“http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1156575-6,00.html]Are”>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1156575-6,00.html)</p>

<p>It’s a sad testament to the state of the country that many of the best engineering students in the country do not actually want to work as engineers. Engineering jobs - except at certain ‘sexy’ tech firms such as Google, Facebook, or Twitter - are now often times (sadly) viewed at the top engineering schools as jobs you take just because you weren’t good enough to get a better job in strategy consulting, venture capital, private equity, Ibanking, and the like. Put another way, engineering companies themselves would rather pay more to bring in outside consultants and bankers than they will to their own engineers. Can you then blame people that don’t want to work as engineers?</p>

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<p>Note, I did say experienced Ibankers. The guys right out of undergrad won’t make that. {But then again, you said they would make $300k a year for life. If you stay in Ibanking for life, you will eventually be making far more than $300k a year.}</p>

<p>Here are the pay figures for 2009. Note that even in the worst year in decades for the financial services industry, Ibankers are still very well paid. By the time you make 3rd year associate (that is, MBA + 3 years experience), you’d be making $300k a year, and your pay would go up from there. And of course as the financial sector recovers as it surely will, the pay will increase dramatically. </p>

<p>[Careers</a> in Investment Banking > Salaries](<a href=“http://www.careers-in-finance.com/ibsal.htm]Careers”>http://www.careers-in-finance.com/ibsal.htm)</p>

<p>The point is, these are the kinds of pay packages that, even with a shriveled financial sector, that engineering companies just can’t or won’t match. That’s why, even now, people are still attracted to Ibanking.</p>

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<p>what are profiles of some of these people who are making 10m+ ?</p>

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<p>Oh, come on now. I’m quite sure I’m not that powerful. If Berkeley’s reputation can really be damaged by just one anonymous guy on the Internet, then that reputation must not have been that strong in the first place. </p>

<p>And I certainly don’t think anybody should lose their positive attitude towards life just because of anything I say. If that really is the case, I would say that perhaps some professional counseling is in order. Nobody should be so diffident as to lose their outlook towards life just because of some words on the Internet.</p>

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<p>Guys who have the wherewithal to generate highly profitable business for their firms. {Or, at least, what the firms thought was profitable, as evidenced by the millions in bonuses paid to traders at the division that brought down AIG, including over $300mm over a 20 year period to Joseph Cassano, who was fired in 2008 yet was still being paid a $1mm/month ‘consulting fee’.}</p>

<p>[The</a> Executive Who Brought Down AIG - ABC News](<a href=“http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=7210007&page=1]The”>The Executive Who Brought Down AIG - ABC News)</p>

<p>But I digress. The point is, banking offers the possibility of making kingly sums that regular people could never even dream of making. An experienced banker can make more money in a single year than an engineer could make in his entire lifetime. Remember, we’re not talking about the special case of entrepreneurship, for bankers too have the opportunity to start their own firm, and the founders of successful hedge funds, boutique banks, and private equity firms, make the Ibankers look like paupers. For example, in just the year 2008 alone, James Simons, the founder of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, made $2.5 billion. </p>

<p>[Top</a> 25 Highest-Earning Hedge Fund Managers](<a href=“http://iimagazine.com/Alpha/Article.aspx?ArticleID=2165638]Top”>http://iimagazine.com/Alpha/Article.aspx?ArticleID=2165638)</p>

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<p>I highly doubt that Berkeley would ever get as selective as HYPSM because it’s a public school and its mission isn’t exactly to educate the brightest, but those who pay the California taxes. The only thing Berkeley can do to maintain or improve its prestige is to recruit more well-known researchers as faculty. It’s the nature of the beast.</p>

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<p>Well, some of the brightest people exist in California, and if you lowered the acceptance rate, a higher percentage of them would definitely be very bright. </p>

<p>Berkeley has just as bright folks as the HYPSM schools, just not in the same concentration at all. </p>

<p>As for faculty, well it kind of already has done that; our graduate programs and faculty are sort of orthogonal to the whole undergrad thing – grad programs recruit undergrads from all the best schools, HY… included, and internationals included. Not much of a public school system outlook.</p>

<p>Some of us believe the entire orthogonality relationship between the undergrad and grad/academia philosophies is where most problems with Berkeley’s educational experience stem. While it need not be exactly as selective, it could be similar.</p>

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<p>At an orientation at Cal Day, the chair of the EECS department pointed out that the admit rate for undergrad EECS students was 5% this year. That’s twice as selective as Harvard or Princeton (overall).</p>