<p>“Couple that with the fact that a lot of Berkeley undergrads either didn’t get into and/or couldn’t afford Stanford but would probably want to spend a semester or two there just to get a taste of the Stanford experience that they couldn’t get otherwise. Heck, I would have done that.”</p>
<p>Sure, so would I likely. This would be very cool actually. Though, I have to wonder if most [diehard] undergrads at either of these school would actually suppress the feeling of rivalry and go try out the different departments. I know for a fact there are classes + professors I’m interested in at Stanford, even as a hopeful math Ph.D. student. </p>
<p>I guess one reason the grad students get the privileges [other than the fact that they obviously are valued more] is that the classes often may be of comparable size? Totally a wild guess though. This year the Berkeley math Ph.D. program supposedly is likely to have a class of 20 or fewer, when the size used to be a bit larger earlier. I think STanford’s is probably slightly less than 20 on average. So it’d obviously be very easy to arrange things I guess. Couple that with the fact that the fields Berkeley specializes in are often not the same ones Stanford does, and you have all the more reason for a mixing between schools.</p>