<p>Berkeley is the best public university in the world. Sure, the dorms may be shabby, the advising may be laggy, and the curves may be stabby, but Cal offers a world-class education to tens of thousands of students every year - what any college anywhere was meant to do. Plus, the student body has an Asian majority - something you will never find in those elitist Ivy Leagues or Stinkford because of the “holistic” admissions process (which is just an excuse to eliminate hardworking Asian students and promote a white majority on campus). In fact, the HYPS admissions process we know today was made so admission officers could curb the number of studious Jewish students - apparently too many were being admitted due to high test scores (<a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge[/url]”>Getting In | The New Yorker). Asians have unfortunately inherited that discriminative college process - we are the New Jews.</p>
<p>To me, UC Berkeley is a symbol of social justice. If you work hard, study hard, and write hard, there is a 99% chance you will get in regardless of your race. Go Bears!</p>
<p>@Lucyan, haha, I remember my parents asking me if I can count myself as a minority because we’re Jewish/Israeli. SMH.</p>
<p>It’s something I love about UC Berkeley. It’s all pretty much as fair as possible for freshman as far as I know, but they offer great opportunities for non-traditional students. I know for transfers there is even a program to help low-income and otherwise educationally disadvantaged students, which does help raise enrollment rates of minority students, first generation students, etc, but as far as I know it doesn’t give you actual priority, just a slight edge in admissions. It can also help Asian and White students who are disadvantaged for reasons other than ethnicity, so I think that’s great.</p>
<p>Berkeley is absolutely the number one public university. I can tell you as someone who wasn’t born in the states and visits family and friends living in Israel and in Europe pretty often, Berkeley is well known. When I told people I was applying there it was instant recognition. On the other hand, when we were still in Israel and a family friend went to go teach at Brown University, my parents had no idea why he was so excited until we moved here and learned about the ivy league. Outside of the US, it’s all about Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, possibly Columbia, and I reckon MIT, and no one would really see a difference between Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley. Well, as long as we call it Berkeley and not Cal, anyway.</p>
<p>"Berkeley will only become the best public university in the world when Cambridge and Oxford decide to fall off the face of Earth. "</p>
<p>While I admit that Oxbridge could be considered as more prestigeous than Berkeley by many people, I know for fact that someone has decided to go to CAL instead of Cambridge because CAL allows a more flexible concentration than Cambridge. I’ve begun to doubt the top value of the Oxbridge tutorial and supervisory system as it will depend on the quality of the tutors even though they’re considered the best in the subjects. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, in many respectable rankings, Berkeley was rated higher than Oxbridge.</p>
<p>Yes, in theory, it could be over 50% if enough of the two-or-more-races, unknown, non-resident aliens, and Hispanic/Latino students are Asian, but what is the likelihood of that?</p>
<p>@Lucyan: Very good/intelligent points made. It sure does seem that, with the USA struggling to rebuild its economy and world prestige, selective universities should be more worried about whether any given applicant is willing to work his or her butt off academically than whether he or she plays the violin. Not to say that music/arts are not important, just to say that they are not really that important for an applicant who knows that he or she wants to be an engineer, accountant, biologist, etc… The USA really does not have the luxury right now of trying to develop a bunch of Renaissance men and women. What we need to re-develop is a focused work ethic. Asians (which I am not. . . I am a Euro-mutt) have shown themselves to be leading the way in this regard. The rest of us should learn from their example. </p>
<p>^great post. This is exactly why China Owned the US in the 2008 Olympics and is currently owning the US in the 2012 Olympics.</p>
<p>We need hard workers, not lazy kids who get into top colleges because of their financial situation ( rich people can “donate” a couple million and get their kids in ) or race (affirmative action)</p>
<p>^ …excuse me? I’m well-to-do and white, but I worked my ass off and dealt with learning/social disabilities (ADHD/Aspergers) and depression for years. </p>
<p>My parents most certainly did not donate millions of dollars. I dealt with that assertion when I was a frosh, that I got everything handed to me because I was white. I personally find it offensive, because I was raised with a work ethic of you want something, work for it. You do yourself no favors saying things like oh, rich people can buy their way in (to Cal especially!) </p>
<p>Alright, now that I’m off my soap box, I agree that we need hardworkers. I deal with a lot of younger people (tail end of Gen-Y, and Gen-Z, as in generation Zombie) who have been coddled and trophied their entire lives. And what’s even worse, is they turn criticism, no matter how slight or constructive, into a reasoning for a blood feud. </p>
<p>I mean, it might be exaggerated, but there are teachers and professors who get threatened with lawsuits or having their tenure terminated if they didn’t give a student an A, even if they were, D, D- students.</p>
<p>@dragoon: to be fair, I don’t think there are THAT many rich folks rich enough to “donate a couple million” to get their kids in lol. Race-based and legacy-based affirmative action is probably a much bigger factor. </p>
<p>Now, about work ethic in general: Americans seem to be crazy about anything EXCEPT the “hard sciences”: math, physics, engineering, etc. Literally everyone I knew at my high school wanted to do a) business b) pre-med. With some random language as a back-up major or something.</p>
<p>And as far as Asians doing better? I can’t begrudge them for having a culture that not only actively rewards hard work, even to the point of grinding, but places higher emphasis on academic achievement than American. We try way too hard to be well-rounded here in the States sometimes. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the idea that a lot of younger kids parents have now that, that having their kids do more than 4-5 math problems a night and constantly reducing the amount of homework as to not interfere with their playtime is really doing us no favors. I remember when I was in high school, back in the hallowed days of the 90s and early aughties, we had anywhere between 50 to 200 problems for math, labs for science, several essays for History, English, and other humanities based courses on top of the chapters or books we were assigned to read. Per week. Depending on the intricacies, etc. And we “liked” it. And we did it on top of our athletics, extracurricular activities, and social lives.</p>
<p>The U.C. system is pretty immune to the temptations of parental financial donations in exchange for admission (that is, if you don’t count the temptation to admit out-of-state students to get more tuition dollars). </p>
<p>As far as high-end private schools go, the simple and unfortunate fact is that they, for the most part, tend to foster the status quo (i.e., caucasians with money). The simple fact is that it costs lots of money and time to have your son or daughter become a maestro, a gymnast, or a star quarterback by the age of 17 (when college apps are submitted). Money and time are far more available to the well-to-do family with one working parent than to the family where both parents work to struggle by. The net result is that the “holistic admissions” process of the ivies and other similar schools generally favors the “haves” over the “have nots.” There are, of course, exceptions, but the trend is definitely there. </p>
<p>Hence, schools like Cal tend to have a high quotient of academic “hard cores,” while high end privates have a much larger presence of “life of leisure/privilege” types. Not to say that all Yalies are fluffballs, just that a fluffball is more likely to end up at Yale than at Cal.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure it takes just as much “money and time” to develop the “academic hard core.” That probably explains why Harvard and MIT split the American math olympiad team every year . . . . </p>
<p>Schools like Berkeley cannot compete whatsoever with “high end privates” for students with extremely high academic ability so you can’t possibly say that it has a higher quotient of the “academic hard core.”</p>
<p>@caiacs: Well, that’s probably true at the undergrad level, but only because “high end privates” can “nit-pick their crop” as much as they’d like. If Cal became a private school tomorrow, I’m sure it’d be on par very quickly. Its graduate school programs are a good indication of this I think.</p>
<p>"Schools like Berkeley cannot compete whatsoever with “high end privates” for students with extremely high academic ability so you can’t possibly say that it has a higher quotient of the “academic hard core.” </p>
<p>Not sure how to interpret that, I know that some people got into Columbia and Cornell but rejected by Berkeley. All these applicants seem to have top high school scores and impressive extra curricular activities. It could be the recommendations and personal statements that make the difference, my shallow insight. But I believe that a good portion of Cal students are just as smart as the HYPSM kids.</p>
<p>However, some parents and students also complain that homework can be voluminous, but with too many “busywork” problems apparently aimed at giving C students more practice on easier types of problems, but not enough other types of problems for the topic being covered, or problems challenging enough for B and A students to be interested and feel a sense of achievement in solving (remember the * and ** problems in you high school math books?).</p>
<p>I.e. instead of 10 or 20 similar easy problems, a better homework assignment could have 4 or 5 problems of different types for the topic being covered and/or different levels of difficulty.</p>
<p>I would not be so sure about that. Berkeley is large, and there may be an “embedded Caltech” student cohort surrounded by otherwise very good but not super-brilliant students who make up the rest of the students.</p>
<p>But also schools like Berkeley may pick up students who are brilliant, but not the kind of students that the super-selective privates would admit. I remember some brilliant math majors who were taking graduate level math courses as juniors or sophomores (maybe even freshmen). But none of them seemed to be the type who would be given a positive recommendation by an alumni interviewer for a super-selective private school (they would not interview well with anyone except a mathematician).</p>