<p>I'm a prospective Eco major trying to find out how reputed the berkeley undegraduate economics program is. I've searched the web a lot and all the ranking i've found so far are either for the graduate level or for some other field like engineering or business. </p>
<p>what do you guys think about the eco dept in berkeley? How is the research opportunity and graduate school prospect? how reputed do you think is it? pls try to give a quantitative answer instead of a qualitative one ... like top 5 top 10 etc etc.</p>
<p>Good question. I’ve been trying to find that out too, and I get the same results (graduate field, etc.). I think University of Chicago has the #1 undergrad Economics program. Does anybody know?</p>
<p>They do not rank Econ undergrad like they rank other programs.</p>
<p>But Econ here is at the top tier (top schools are UChicago, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Upenn, Northwestern, UCB, CMU)</p>
<p>The amount of research available is low, but econ is not science (you can’t just work in a lab). However, you can do independent faculty-guided research through seminars and your thesis.</p>
<p>The graduate school prospects are good provided you have a very high GPA and you did well in all required courses (upper div math, stats, and econ).</p>
<p>Berkeley’s Econ department/programme is very well respected internationally. It’s considered by many as one of the very best in the world or top 10 in the world. </p>
<p>Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Princeton and Cambridge are probably the top 5 in the world.
This is both for undergrad and postgrad education.</p>
<p>A lot of berkeley programs seems to be among the very best - engineering, business, chemistry, economics, MCB etc etc. And these btw are the more “important” subjects. If this is indeed the case i dont understand why USNWR would rank berkeley 21st in the national rankings.</p>
<p>^ USNews has a different set of criteria for overall national ranking. things like financial resources, endowment, SAT scores, graduation rate, etc are measured by USN to rank schools. In effect, it really does not measure the caliber of the program, only the convenience of the undergrad students. </p>
<p>Subject strengths are based purely on the rigour and reputation of the subject/department.</p>