<p>I'm not sure we got into the reasons. Or, if we did, I can't recall them. </p>
<p>I'll ask him and get back to you, though. </p>
<p>Obviously, Berkeley is ranked high on the PGR, likewise for UCLA, but the PGR ranking is mainly a ranking of the professors, prestige-wise, at a particular university with regard to the training they can offer graduate students. </p>
<p>There is no ranking system that I know of that ranks the training undergraduates get at a university. It would be very difficult to come up with such a ranking, mainly because you'd have to probably look at where the students end up going, instead of at any inherent quality of the program. Different schools use different systems to train their undergrads.</p>
<p>UCLA, for instance, has a rather unique system. UCLA concentrates on rigor over breadth, and a 10-week course sometimes covers all of one article. I had two classes that concentrated on a single article. This training is intended to sharpen your philosophical eye (excuse the methapor). This is very much a skill, and, like most skills, it requires expert instruction, lots of practice, and some natural ability. What's sacrificed at UCLA is, again, breadth of knowledge. </p>
<p>Some professors, both at UCLA and not at UCLA, think that this isn't the best way to train undergrads. This particular skill is something, they say, that you should learn at the graduate level. I sympathize with this sentiment, but I cannot say that I would have preferred to have been given breadth over the skill I currently have. </p>
<p>The UCLA department sticks to its method because it has proven successful. Success, here, measured in how prepared its students are for graduate level work -- their success as philosophers beyond UCLA. </p>
<p>This isn't to say that there aren't drawbacks to the system. There are. The focus on rigor, on philosophical acumen, the philosophical eye, takes away from acquiring a broader understanding of some of the works of many famous philosophers, theories, and views you'd almost expect for a philosophy student to know. The focus on 3-5 page papers on the narrowest of topics makes it extremely difficult to grasp the bigger picture, how this little topic fits in with a general philosophical view. I must have written 30 or 40 such papers, so unsurprisingly that's all I know how to write. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, when applying to graduate school, you need to submit a work of 15-20 pages. This isn't something UCLA prepares you to do. In graduate school, you end up choosing your own topic and writing lengthy papers on it. Again, this isn't something UCLA prepares you to do. Now, what you learn at UCLA isn't so completely unrelated that you can't wing writing such papers. Many students can write such papers, as evidenced by their success in getting into good programs and by doing well there. But to say that UCLA trained them how to write these papers is to be more than a little charitable. </p>
<p>But I'll take the good with the bad in this case.</p>