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You can't sell that to a prospective student. This is what you tell prospective students: there are 30,000 people here. You have choices. You can find your niche on this campus, and there will be a dozen kids there right with you, no matter how obscure the niche is.</p>
<p>You don't HAVE to get stuck with a bad partner. If you do, it's because you didn't make a friend in that class that was smart. It was because you didn't put in enough effort to not get a bad partner. You think in real life, when you're put into a company and have to work in a group that all your co-workers will be geniuses or something? At Berkeley, you almost always have a choice. If you don't, it makes life suck for a semester, but it doesn't hurt your education. If anything, it helps you learn to deal with that type of crap.</p>
<p>You somehow think that learning in this idealistic box of really smart people that never slack or anything else will somehow be better for an individual's education rather than being exposed to that type of box, but putting that box in the context of the real world and being exposed to that as well. If we lived in a utopia that may be true. On the other hand, I find it useful to know what the real world it like, and find it doesn't hurt me at all to experience that.
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<p>Like I said, we can leave that up to the readers and the general public to decide. I think the simple fact that at the undergrad level Berkeley loses the cross-admit battle to, say, Stanford or Harvard, speaks to what the public wants. You say that the supposedly "real" experience of Berkeley is a good thing. Yet apparently the majority of people disagree and would rather choose the 'less real' experience of other schools. Last time I checked, the graduates of those 'less real' schools seem to be doing extremely well for themselves, so looks like their lack of reality from their education didn't seem to hurt them. </p>
<p>For example, I have noticed that, according to the official classcard information of the students at Harvard Business School, there are far more Stanford alumni than there are Berkeley alumni, despite the fact that Berkeley has far more students and hence Berkeley ought to have more alumni just by weight of sheer numbers. Business schools admit people mostly on the quality of their work experience. So that either means that HBS is being dumb in admitting so many 'less qualified' Stanford alumni and not more of the underappreciated Berkeley alumni, or it means that Stanford alumni tend to have higher quality work experience than do Berkeley alumni. I doubt that it's the former.</p>