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</p>
<p>No Stanford. No Berkeley. No Claremont Colleges. No UCLA. NO USC, in the top 10. This further reinforces my previous claim that Vanderbilt isn’t a top target school for top California (or West Coast, in general) students. Its undergrad was over ranked by USNews.</p>
<p>@RML</p>
<p>Most people from California are not interested in venturing into the East Coast or South anyways thats true. Neither are people from the South really interested in moving to the West-Coast or the East. Infact only a handful of professional schools are truly what you would term national. That does not negate the fact that Vandy is a pretty good law school. USC, UCLA, Boalt and probably even Stanford have student bodies that are largely form California which is not too surprising.</p>
<p>As for Vanderbilt being overranked at the undergrad, that is a matter of personal opinion, that you are of course entitled to have, but is probably not relevant to the purpose of yoru thread.</p>
<p>I’m not sure about UCLA and USC, but I think both Berkeley’s, and most especially, Stanford’s professional programs are nationally prestigious with diverse students bodies coming from many States and countries across the world.</p>
<p>I’m totally fine not discussing undergrad on this thread. :)</p>
<p>“113 undergraduate schools represented. Most predominant are UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Harvard, UCSD, USC, Brown, Yale”</p>
<p>UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, UCSD, USC (5/8) of the schools considered to feed into Boalt are in California.</p>
<p>Why though?</p>
<p>Of course, RML. Is there really a post of us in which you’re not trying to convince anyone within earshot that everybody in the whole darn world just looooves Berkeley?</p>
<p>I mean, honestly, you’re the poster who said, in all earnestness and seriousness, that it matters to you what the drycleaner thinks of your sweatshirt.</p>
<p>BTW, congrats on uncovering the truth that everyone else already knows. <em>Every</em> grad school has a disproportionate amount of entrants from the same region of the country. <em>Every</em> school has a disproportionate amount of prestige in its own backyard. Yes, even Harvard, even Yale, even Stanford, and even Berkeley. If you stepped outside of California for a moment, you might realize that Berkeley isn’t revered universally across the country as much as it is there. Which isn’t a reflection on Berkeley’s quality. You often seem to mistake “quality” for “everybody oohs and aaahs over it.”</p>
<p>sefago, I said Berkeley’s and Stanford’s professional schools are “nationally” prestigious. That’s all. Whether or not their student bodies comprised hugely from the State of California does not make those schools less prestigious nationally. And the fact that Harvard, Yale and Brown (all East Coast schools) are in the top 8 as feeder schools to Berkeley Law is indicative to Berkeley Law’s national reach. </p>
<p>Of course, there are more Cali students that apply to and wish to enroll in Berkeley, because Berkeley is substantially cheaper for California residents. It is the same reason why there are way more British that apply to and wish to enroll in Cambridge/Oxford.</p>
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<p>If Harvard, Yale, Brown being in the top 8 as feeder schools to Berkeley Law is indicative of Berkeley Law’s national reach …</p>
<p>Then, the fact that Yale, Cornell, Princeton and Duke are in the top 8 as feeder schools to Vanderbilt Law must be indicative of Vanderbilt Law’s national reach.</p>
<p>What’s the difference, RML?</p>
<p>^ the difference is obvious. Berkeley Law is a solid top 10 law school. It has prominent alumni all over the world. I guess even you would not argue with that. I can’t say the same thing for Vanderbilt’s. Not one of Vanderbilt’s professional schools (law, med, engineering) has been ranked in the top 10. On the other hand, Berkeley law is top 9, business is top 7, engineering is top 3.</p>
<p>
Uh…try again.</p>
<p>In-state law schools like Berkeley are rarely a significant bargain over private peers. The tuition for Boalt ($44,244.50) is virtually the same as that of Harvard Law ($47,600) and only a little less than Yale Law ($50,275). </p>
<p>Rather surprisingly, Boalt considers itself worth more than Harvard and Yale Law for OOS students ($52,244.50).</p>
<p>You go to Berkeley to learn the law.
You go to HYS to know the future judges.
You go to Vanderbilt for ?</p>
<p>A good lawyer knows the law, the best lawyer knows the judge. :)</p>
<p>
So what? Vanderbilt Law and Vanderbilt Med are considered solid top 20 programs and most undergraduates at UCB would be thanking the heavens if they got into such amazing professional programs. Of course the absolute cream of the crop at Berkeley can get into more prestigious professional schools but so can the cream of the crop everywhere. Here in the US, the undergraduate prestige of a university is considered to be the greatest measure of its quality and Vanderbilt is arguably slightly superior to Berkeley in this regard.</p>
<p>What about Williams, Bowdoin, Amherst, Swarthmore, Middlebury?</p>
<p>What about them? They’re all great schools, obviously.</p>
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</p>
<p>Yes. And frankly, RML, that’s how it is over here. U-grad prestige is considered to be the greatest measure of quality and for great swathes of the country, Berkeley is just seen as a vaguely-hippie school in California and isn’t on a lot of radar screens. Which doesn’t make it not a fine school. It’s just you persist in this notion that everyone across the country thinks about Berkeley all the time fondly when frankly – they don’t.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not true at all. In a survey of the most prestigious universities, Berkeley comes out far ahead of Vanderbilt:</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> Number One University in Eyes of Public](<a href=“Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public”>Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public)</p>
<p>Where Berkeley is in the top 5 and Vanderbilt is nowhere to be seen.</p>
<p>When you look at international prestige, again Berkeley comes out top 5, Vanderbilt very far below.</p>
<p>When you look at peer assessment, Berkeley is a 4.8, Vanderbilt a 4.0.</p>
<p>Layman’s prestige, academic prestige, etc. all place Berkeley far ahead of Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>Now you could say that this is more “grad prestige,” but IMO anyone who purports to know “undergrad prestige” is attempting to take a measure of something that doesn’t exist. There is only university prestige, and even if there were measurable differences, you’d be hard-pressed to measure it and accurately separate the prestige that a grad program adds.</p>
<p>The only way that I could see “undergrad prestige” being measured is with US News rankings, which put Vanderbilt and Berkeley about the same, not enough to give Vanderbilt a material advantage. But honestly I don’t see how anyone could know “undergrad prestige”; perhaps you meant “undergrad quality.”</p>
<p>
Sorry, les. I really want to believe that, but all the figures and data we have would indicate that Vanderbilt undergrad “can’t hold a candle” against Berkeley when it comes to prestige to the opinions and views of top grad/professional schools. Look at the data. Berkeley always appear in the top 10, (top 5 at Harvard Law and JHU Med) even beating Duke at many more top programs and schools. On the other hand, Vanderbilt is ALWAYS nowhere to be seen in any list of schools as a top feeder school to top professional schools, and Duke and Vanderbilt aren’t really different in terms of size. </p>
<p>Vanderbilt
Undergraduates: 6,879
Postgraduates: 5,835</p>
<p>Duke
Undergraduates 6,504
Postgraduates 7,744</p>
<p>That, to me, is indicative that Vanderbilt isn’t really a top undergrad school. Duke, however, is.</p>
<p>Having looked over the Johns Hopkins Medical list that was posted at the beginning of the thread, it actually seems to DISPROVE the prestiege whores’ arguments. Sure, there are a lot of admits from the Ivy League and other top schools, but most of the universities on the list are state schools that most people on CC would consider second-tier, or Asian Universities that are prestigious in their respective countries, but which nobody in the West has heard of. Now, most graduates from the latter are doing PhDs or post-bac or post-doc work rather than pursuing MDs, but the point still stands. The take-away from that list seems to be that as long as you work hard in undergrad, take the right classes, get good grades, and get a good MCAT score, you can get into a top medical school.</p>
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<p>This is obviously incorrect. There are way more Berkeley grads getting into top professional schools that there are any schools you considered elite, save for HYPSM. Berkeley undergrad competes head-to-head with the lower ranked Ivies, top LACs, super elite privates and top-ranked State Us. That, to me, indicates how superior the Berkeley name is.</p>
<p>Excellent post, phantasmagoric. But you left out one survey that truly measures the value of Berkeley’s brand name – <a href=“http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Journals/THE/THE/10_March_2011/attachments/Brand%20focus.pdf[/url]”>http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Journals/THE/THE/10_March_2011/attachments/Brand%20focus.pdf</a></p>
<p>As the report would show, only Harvard, Stanford and MIT names are more valuable names than the Berkeley brand name. </p>
<p>Harvard - 15,851
Stanford - 10,692
MIT - 5,156
Berkeley - 2,315
Cambridge - 1,967
Oxford - 1,467</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>So Harvard’s value is between Coke and Pepsi, interesting. I thought its value was imaginary between wine and beer. 
Where is google when amazon and yahoo are there on the list?</p>
<p>RML, now you are pushing it…</p>