transfer from berkeley engineering to columbia engineering

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of California - Berkeley
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Actually, imblue, the "other" segment is not 2%, it is 31%. I think you've made a slight error in comprehending the graph, you're off by about 1,500% (hmm, legacy at the Farm?) I would suspect that Cal represents a big chunk of that biggest slice of your pie.

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<p>No, what they meant was that all other schools combined made up 31%, but no individual school made up more than 2%, and no more than 1% for any individual Pac-10 school. Suspect all you want, but 1% out of 31% is not a big chunk of pie.</p>

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All other universities that were mentioned did not represent more than 2 percent

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This is their quote, not mine. I would suggest reading the article again.</p>

<p>Berkeley's OOS acceptance rate (16%) is much higher than Stanford's (12%), but of course the OOS URM acceptance rate would be lower since Stanford practices AA. And I already said that a handful of OOS programs like EECS and business may have lower admissions rates as well.</p>

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What those figures don't show as well is that a lot of middle class or lower middle class kids that go to Cal don't even apply to Stanford. We have about 7,000 lower to lower middle class students at Cal (about three times the rate of Stanford, 6-7 times as many overall.)

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Let's suppose I agree with those figures. That still doesn't show that students prefer Berkeley over Stanford, only that think they cannot afford Stanford, which gives out a lot of financial aid to middle class and lower middle class students. As I've said before, the percentage of Stanford admits who choose Berkeley is in the low single digits.</p>

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Are you familiar with the concept of systematic bias?

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Sure, let's bump that 1% up to 2% or 3% then. It's still a low number, to be sure.</p>

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<p>"Berkeley's OOS acceptance rate (16%) is much higher than Stanford's (12%), "</p>

<p>Yes, that is much, much higher! A whole 4 points! Geez, I can barely wrap my head around that disparity.</p>

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<p>imblue, at the risk of further delving into statistical theory (Bayes), the perspective from article is a bit misleading. You need to see the picture from Cal's side in order to assess the true rate of crossover and preference for one school over another. That rate will be the percentage of Cal admits who end up going to Stanford. </p>

<p>Consider for example Princeton on your admit pie chart, a pretty small slice representing 8%. Stanford can boast that it's preferred to Princeton since only 8% of your admits end up preferring Princeton. However, if Princeton's own number of admitted but enrolled elsewhere also has a similar proportion of students going to Stanford with similar baselines, then it's a wash. I actually suspect that even at 8%, Princeton does a little better that Stanford in the common admits enrollment stakes.</p>

<p>Those figures assume that most of the students applying to one school will also apply to the other. That might be true between Stanford and Princeton, but is less the case between Cal and Stanford. But even then, you have to consider a high proportion of Cal students who don't apply to Stanford (Stanford has something like 20K applicants, to Cal's 42K...) It's not just that they can't afford it (which many can't), it's more likely that they don't perceive Stanford as being worth the price difference, whether they think it's better or not. Most Cal Engineers for instance don't think of Stanford as a better school. That's especially true among first generation immigrants, who make up a very large contingent of Cal students. Or students from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, who make up 32% of Cal's student body (vs 11% at Stanford, according to the Pell Grant data.) It's true of international applicants too, since Berkeley is at least as big a name overseas as Stanford.</p>

<p>I think it's also true that a large proportion of some particular socio-cultural segments (white, upper-middle suburbans) show a strong preference for Stanford and other top private schools over Berkeley. That's the segment that is most closely reflected on the pie chart. Even schools like Dartmouth or Brown which are somewhat less prestigious do well vs Cal within that student demographic.</p>

<p>There is also a strong qualitative preference which might preclude some applicants from applying to one school or the other. Some highly qualified prospective students don't find Stanford's environment very interesting and/or aren't swayed by the palm drive and Bloomingdale social cachet, while conversely many others find Berkeley's urban vibe too radical or too plebeian. In terms of perceptions and affinities, Stanford is much closer to USC than to Cal.</p>

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Consider for example Princeton on your admit pie chart, a pretty small slice representing 8%. Stanford can boast that it's preferred to Princeton since only 8% of your admits end up preferring Princeton. However, if Princeton's own number of admitted but enrolled elsewhere also has a similar proportion of students going to Stanford with similar baselines, then it's a wash.

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<p>I agree with the above. If we assume a perfect response rate and that 2<em>8%</em>1665/2486 = 5.3% of Stanford admits also applied to and were accepted to Princeton, then we see that the cross-admits are split 50/50 between the two schools, i.e. neither school is preferred over the other. The same is true for the other schools like Harvard, which destroys any other school for cross-admit enrollment. The key difference is that half of Stanford applicants are California residents, so it's reasonable to assume that most of them also applied to Berkeley (certainly much more than 5%). Further, other than a small fraction of OOS EECS/Haas students, the vast majority of Stanford admits are Berkeley admits, or would be had they chosen to apply, while a much smaller percentage of Stanford admits would get into HYPM.</p>

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<p>But for these sorts of calculuations, one must be admitted to both schools. What about those who don't get the choice? I know many a Stanford student who would rather be (or would have rather been) at Princeton, Harvard, or Yale (but didn't get in), just like I know a handful of Berkeley students who would rather be (or would have rather been) at Harvard, some at MIT, some at Stanford, one or two for some LACs.</p>

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<p>Exactly, that's why the percentage of Stanford admits that chose other schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT are very low even if those schools were preferred, due to their low admit rates. However, this argument does not apply to Berkeley since the majority of Stanford admits are also strong enough to get into Berkeley. That's why I interpret the fact that only a few percent of Stanford admits choose Berkeley to mean that Berkeley is in fact not preferred over Stanford.</p>