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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.
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<p>And Berkeley grads also seem to be doing extremely well for themselves, so it looks like having a tail end doesn't hurt us. Again, if someone chooses school A over school B, heck, if the vast majority choose school A over school B, that does not show school A provides a better education than school B. That's what you're arguing, and it's a false premise.</p>
<p>Further, go ahead and read my post in the other thread if you want my response to what "the public" wants. The basic point is, you've shown that for cross admits, they prefer the other school. Nothing else. If you think about it logically, though, Berkeley does deliver what the public wants.</p>
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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.
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<p>This is a terrible argument. Find the proportion of Harvard Business School alums that are Chinese or Indian. They should be 10 times the number of US alums, since China and India collectively have 10 times our population. That's the type of reasoning you're using. "Let's assume everyone at Stanford and everyone at Berkeley are equal...Look! Berkeley kids are so much worse than Stanford kids."</p>
<p>There is a spectrum of students at both universities. Stanford's spectrum ends at some intermediate point between Berkeley's top and Berkeley's bottom. We go farther down. The people below that point won't be contributing much to Harvard's Business School number for obvious reasons. It IS a relevant point that more Stanford students attend Harvard Business than Berkeley students, but not because Berkeley has more students than Stanford.</p>
<p>However, even ignoring that argument, this statement needs more to mean something useful. You need to provide some statistics from more than just one business school. If Berkeley has more students than Stanford at another top business school, then it's a wash. If you can get data from the top 10 business schools showing that Stanford has significantly more students in those schools than Berkeley, then I'll concede the point, because you'll have one.</p>
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California does have the money to send far far more people to Berkeley, or at least, it did. Why not just shut down all of the other UC's, all of the CalStates, and all of the community colleges, and just redirect all of that money to Berkeley. For example, instead of building UCMerced, the state should have just made Berkeley bigger. Instead of building all of the other state universities, the state should have just made Berkeley bigger and bigger. Heck, you wouldn't have even needed to kept building in the same area. Lots of schools have multiple campuses. For example, CalState East Bay could have just become "UCBerkeley, Hayward campus". San Franciso State could have become "UCBerkeley, San Francisco campus", and so forth. In this way, Berkeley could be educating a LOT more undergrads than it does now.
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<p>The fact that this didn't happen shows that we don't and/or didn't have the money to do this. If we could educate an equivalent number of students that are already receiving some college-level education in California at a campus with a faculty and resources equivalent to UC Berkeley's, we would. That's a "no duh". If you think we have that money, prove it. Think of it this way: to do that, we'd have to convert every non-UC Berkeley school in California (i.e. all community colleges, Cal state schools, and other UCs) into UC Berkeley equivalents. That doesn't sound like an affordable task to me, and it shouldn't to you, either.</p>
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Come on, now, you're just quibbling. When I say dumb and lazy, I mean dumb and lazy. You talk about how it helps you to explain concepts to some of your less capable friends, but that is predicated on the assumption that that friend actually wants to understand those concepts. The sad truth is that some students at Berkeley are sadly not interested in learning the material. Instead, they're far more interested in playing video games, or drinking/smoking weed, or going to San Francisco every day, or just lounging around and watching TV, and basically doing nothing. I've known plenty of people like that. Honestly, how do people like this help your education?
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<p>I've known plenty of people that can play video games, drink, smoke weed, watch TV, go to SF (not every day, but weekly), and still want to learn. These things are not mutually exclusive. You're saying there are people at UC Berkeley that genuinely don't want to learn. You don't have to tie it to any other habits.</p>
<p>The people you describe, that have no desire to learn anything--I don't know them. I don't know anybody that truely does not want knowledge. The people I know that ditch class find they don't learn much by going to lecture, and will review the material on their own later. I mean, the type of person you're talking about would have to actively sign up for the classes with no type of educational value, not buy any books, not study, not do anything that may involve learning. That doesn't happen.</p>
<p>Even if a student such as this WERE to exist, we can agree that almost EVERY student wants to pass a class. That means that they must want to learn at least that bare minimum. That's enough to make it worth your time to help him/her out.</p>
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There it is again - the question of 'if'. How do you know if you want to talk to him? You only know that if you know him, which comes back to the question of icebreakers and activation energy. Your analogy of your friend moving across the street is also chronologically inaccurate, because you are assuming that the guy is ALREADY your friend. What if he's not? What if he's a stranger across the street?
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<p>People live in the dorms to make friends. Otherwise, dorm food sucks, the rent is expensive, and you don't have a great choice of locations (although they are generall close to campus, which is nice). The first thing people do when they move in is introduce themselves to their neighbors. That doesn't happen when you're an adult moving into a new apartment because, well, people lose that college mentality. I have no problem knocking on the door of someone that lives 10 feet from me and asking if they want to go do something, because that's how college works. If you have a floor of antisocial freaks, then you have a problem, but again, the likelihood of that is nil.</p>
<p>Further, the across-the-street analogy is relevant. My best buddy when I was growing up (no longer so for various reasons) lived across the street from me. We started out as strangers, as all human beings do. How did we become friends? We met one day, talked, and that was that. It can happen later in life, too.</p>
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I am simply answering your anecdotes with mine. But I would leave it up to the readers. All things equal, would they prefer to be paired up with smarter and harder-working people, or with dumber/lazier people? I think very few people would prefer the latter, and those that are are often times themselves rather lazy.
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<p>Would you prefer to have 10 million dollars in the bank and never have to work again, or would you prefer to have to go to college and hope to get a job afterward, making a moderate income? Lots of people would pick the 10 mil. Not many of them would end up well-educated. What I want and what is best for me are not always the same. I'll admit, I hated having that partner last semester. I would avoid it again if possible. I also concede that doing the project myself and having to explain what I was doing to my partner helped me really understand what the heck I was doing.</p>