Turned down Berkeley

sakky · June 25, 2006, 4:51pm

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So you're saying someone in the tail end wouldn't be able to resist temptation for quick rewards, which may lead to poor results?

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I'm not just talking about who is on the tail-end. It happens even to otherwise very good students. After all, why do you think parents try to move out of bad neighborhoods? It's because they don't want their kids exposed to bad influences. Parents feel (correctly) that if their kid is exposed to gangs, drugs, and other social pathologies, then they will be tempted to adopt that lifestyle.

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What if those people never went to college? What if those people didn't come to Berkeley at all, but instead went to a community college or just into the workforce with a high school diploma. You think THOSE people are better peers than what they'd get at Berkeley? You think they'd make BETTER choices there, and see MORE success? Further, allowing a sub-par student to attend Berkeley isn't exactly leaving them in the trash bin. Not giving them an opportunity is doing just that, however.

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By this line of logic, why not just have Berkeley run open admissions? Throw Berkeley open to everybody, including newly released convicts, gangbangers, and basically everybody who wants to go. Why even have an admissions process at all? Just admit everybody.

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If they make bad choices, fine, they'll fail. Big deal.

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That's EXACTLY the difference between you and me. You think this is no big deal that good students will fail. I think this is a VERY big deal. I think most parents would think so too. Think of it this way. What are you going to tell a parent whose kid just got admitted to Berkeley and to one of HYPSM? You say that that kid might come to Berkeley and fail, and you don't really care. Well, if that's the attitude of Berkeley, then that's a very good reason for that parent to not want his kid to go to Berkeley.

Think about what you're saying. Every parent wants to put their child in a position where they have the greatest likelihood to succeed, and that includes minimizing the risks of failure. From what you are saying, you admit that good kids can come to Berkeley and fail, and you don't think that's a big deal. Do you think that really attracts people to Berkeley - that they might come and fail? People are naturally risk-averse. That's why people buy cars with airbags, ABS's, and car alarms. That's why people move out of bad neighborhoods. People want to be safe. What you are saying is that Berkeley is not safe. So why would people want to go to an unsafe environment, when they could choose something safer?

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Now, about dormmates. Your roommate might be a complete slacker. Completely irresponsible, does nothing, etc. You might bond with him, might choose to make him a good friend, or might not. Thing is, he's not your only choice. If you're in a suit, you have 9 others to choose from. If you're not, you've got a floor of people you're very near to choose from. I hang around with a couple of people from the dorms I was in last year who lived in my suite. The rest live elsewhere and we see them occassionally. I know I couldn't live with them, because they're very different from me. That's fine. I had a choice. You're talking about an extremely rare situation where every individual in your suite or on you floor is an idiot. While less likely to happen at MIT, it's already so unlikely here that the difference is negligible.

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But don't you see the difference? It's always better for your education to have 10 smart and motivated friends than to have 5 smart and motivated friends and 5 dumb and lazy ones. That's because with 10 strong friends, you can have double the number of interesting and educational conversation than if you only had 5.

Look, the basic issue is that nobody has an infinite amount of time to produce social capital. I can't go and meet and bond with everybody. Socialization is, by necessity, opportunistic. You have the best chance to bond with your roommate because, by necessity, you live with him. Sure, you can choose to invest the time to bond with the genius down the hall, but it's a greater drain on your time and energy, because you see each other less. It would be an easier investment of your social capital if your roommate was that genius. Simple proximity makes things easier for you. Hence, you have to put in more work as a Berkeley student than if you were, say, a Stanford student.

Basic psychology states that the more work something requires to get done, the less of it will get done. Let's be honest. People will work out more if they have a gym located conveniently next door than if it's far away. What is one of the first things you do if you want to quit smoking? Throw away all of the cigarettes in your house. If you want to lose weight, you throw away all of the junk food in your house. When something is closeby, you tend to interact with it more. That's basic psychology.

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Hence, the top bring the top up, the bottom force the top to be good, and nobody gets brought down.

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Huh? How is it that nobody gets brought down? You just admitted yourself that the top gets brought down. You said that your grades will get brought down. I would argue that more than just your grades get brought down, but your overall level of understanding gets brought down. That's because you probably spent more time doing silly busy work and less time actually learning the lessons that the lab was trying to impart. The purpose of a lab is not to go through the mechanistic motions of performing a lab, but to actually learn the deeper lessons of the lab. You had to spend a lot of time going through the mechanistic motions of the lab. That is most likely not a positive experience.

I'll give you an example. I know a guy who was assigned to a group in a computer science project. Basically, he was the only guy who knew what was going on, as the other group members were either lazy or just not particularly talented at CS. So he basically ended up doing the whole project, and that was a MAJOR loss of time for him. The project involved a tremendous amount of busy work that really didn't teach him much at all. But since he got no help from his group, he was hosed.

The point is, any way you cut it, the top gets brought down. If you are a top student, then why would you want to get brought down, if you can go to another school where you won't be? Seriously, think about how you are going to sell that to a prospective student. You're telling them that there are some bad students, and you may get stuck working with them and basically having to cover for them. Is that something that is really going to attract the top students to come to Berkeley?

eudean · June 25, 2006, 6:35pm

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By this line of logic, why not just have Berkeley run open admissions? Throw Berkeley open to everybody, including newly released convicts, gangbangers, and basically everybody who wants to go. Why even have an admissions process at all? Just admit everybody.

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Would love to if this was logistically possible. We do force everyone to go to high school (or try, anyway). If we could afford to send everyone to college, or to rehabilitate every convict, I would say go ahead and try (and failure is still okay, but if we had unlimited resources, converting one idiot to a useful member of society is worth it, though entirely unnecessary if we had the resources in the first place, I'll admit). Fact is we can't. Doesn't make it a bad philosophy to follow.

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But don't you see the difference? It's always better for your education to have 10 smart and motivated friends than to have 5 smart and motivated friends and 5 dumb and lazy ones. That's because with 10 strong friends, you can have double the number of interesting and educational conversation than if you only had 5.

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Again, this isn't as clear-cut as you imply. Now it depends on just HOW dumb and lazy my 5 friends are, but if they aren't complete idiots, they often help me keep on top of my own game. When I'm in a class with one of my roommates, we help each other on homework. In EECS, I usually have a better grasp of what's going on than they do. So basically, I get to help my roommate try to understand some concept the professor went through in class by posing it in another matter or explaining it in a different way. That helps me, and it helps my friend.

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Look, the basic issue is that nobody has an infinite amount of time to produce social capital. I can't go and meet and bond with everybody. Socialization is, by necessity, opportunistic. You have the best chance to bond with your roommate because, by necessity, you live with him. Sure, you can choose to invest the time to bond with the genius down the hall, but it's a greater drain on your time and energy, because you see each other less. It would be an easier investment of your social capital if your roommate was that genius. Simple proximity makes things easier for you. Hence, you have to put in more work as a Berkeley student than if you were, say, a Stanford student.

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I agree completely. You think it's significant, I think it's negligible. If you become good friends with the guy down the hall, inevitably you'll be hanging out in each other's rooms a lot. If you want to talk to him, it takes an extra 10 seconds of walking to do so. I see that as a non-issue. I'm not going to lose a friend because he lives across the street from me rather than in my house. Didn't you have such friends when you were younger? Or was your family your only source of companionship? People will seek out the friends they want, and it may take a little more time in Berkeley than in MIT (though, realistically, you have way more people to choose from in Berkeley and have a really diverse set of friends, which I believe is another advantage of Berkeley), but it won't take so long that you will have to bond with an idiot (which, if you really are smart, won't happen anyway).

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Huh? How is it that nobody gets brought down? You just admitted yourself that the top gets brought down. You said that your grades will get brought down. I would argue that more than just your grades get brought down, but your overall level of understanding gets brought down. That's because you probably spent more time doing silly busy work and less time actually learning the lessons that the lab was trying to impart. The purpose of a lab is not to go through the mechanistic motions of performing a lab, but to actually learn the deeper lessons of the lab. You had to spend a lot of time going through the mechanistic motions of the lab. That is most likely not a positive experience.

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Are you implying that grades are the same as education? My grades being brought down does not mean that I learned less (in this scenario; naturally, if your grades came down as a result of bombing a final, that may be different). Now, I completely disagree that a person's understanding would be reduced as a result. The person that gets stuck with the work had better understand the work, and if s/he doesn't, had better learn it really quickly. Pressure forces people to do excellent work. It may suck, and isn't the way things should happen, but it doesn't hurt your understanding of the material. And don't bother with another anecdote, I've got my own on this and they mean nothing.

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The point is, any way you cut it, the top gets brought down. If you are a top student, then why would you want to get brought down, if you can go to another school where you won't be? Seriously, think about how you are going to sell that to a prospective student. You're telling them that there are some bad students, and you may get stuck working with them and basically having to cover for them. Is that something that is really going to attract the top students to come to Berkeley?

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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.

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.

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.

DRab · June 25, 2006, 11:31pm

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Well, I didn't want to say it so explicitly, but, basically, yeah. Seriously, if you've been at Berkeley for awhile and you haven't noticed some undergrads who just aren't serious about becoming educated, then I would have to say that that may be because you don't WANT to notice them. It's like somebody from East Oakland claiming that there's no crime there.

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I do think that there are students at Berkeley who don't want to become educated, and I bet there are more of them (both in total numbers and percentage wise) at other top schools, but I do think you make it seem like 1) they are everywhere at Berkeley, 2) they don't exist elsewhere, and 3) they're somehow different than those at other schools. I think these are false, and the last one is the most important here. I think many students at other, so-called (and perhaps even actual) better schools are lazy in the same way that some Berkeley students are lazy- they work when they have to work. Those that don't work when they have to work often flunk out at Berkeley and often elsewhere.

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Oh, come now, Drab. You are falling into the trap of articulated rationality. Just because a phenomenom cannot be defined to the point of perfect scientific precision doesn't mean that the phenomenom does not exist. Like the famous legal saying regarding the definition of obscenity as "you know it when you see it", the fact, is most social categories cannot be defined absolutely. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just because not even our best legal jurists have been able to cleanly define the line between obscenity and art doesn't mean that obscenity does not exist at all. Similarly, just because nobody can give you a precise definition of laziness does not mean that laziness does not exist. In fact, most of the social sciences (of which I would include the field of education) are inundated with terms that have never been truly precisely defined on a purely numerical level.

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Sakky, I'm falling into no trap. I'm a philosophy major. I deal with complicated concepts in often non "absolute, precision, scientific" terms, but when I do, I still define them, and more so than just "y'know what I'm talking about." I'm not asking for an absolute definition, I'm not asking for complex studies, but I am asking for some working definition.

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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.

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As long as you tell them 23k or so undergrad and 10k or so grad/professional students.

sakky · June 26, 2006, 10:58pm

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Would love to if this was logistically possible. We do force everyone to go to high school (or try, anyway). If we could afford to send everyone to college, or to rehabilitate every convict, I would say go ahead and try (and failure is still okay, but if we had unlimited resources, converting one idiot to a useful member of society is worth it, though entirely unnecessary if we had the resources in the first place, I'll admit). Fact is we can't. Doesn't make it a bad philosophy to follow.

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Well then, at least we're clear about what we're talking about, in that you don't believe that Berkeley should be selective. In other words, in a perfect world, Berkeley should throw its doors open to anybody who wants to come for undergrad, no matter how motivated or how talented they are. Well, at least you're consistent.

Besides, think of it this way. 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.

But the state decided not to do this. Instead, the state decided to create and fund 3 separate public school systems (the CC's, CSU's, and the UC's), with numerous campuses at each. That's because the state decided that it wanted to maintain gradations of selectivity and prestige. Berkeley was maintained as the flagship and the most selective and prestigious of the entire system, and those who were not as good could go to other schools. Students at Cal State East Bay are not allowed to call themselves Berkeley students, and are not allowed to freely take advantage of Berkeley classes and Berkeley academic resources, because those resources are reserved for Berkeley students. But from what I gather from what you're saying, this is wrong, and the state should have just had one super-huge school.

I think it's fairly clear that if the state had created that super-huge school, the quality of that school would be rather mediocre. It would be an averaging of the quality of all of the public schools in the state.

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Again, this isn't as clear-cut as you imply. Now it depends on just HOW dumb and lazy my 5 friends are, but if they aren't complete idiots, they often help me keep on top of my own game. When I'm in a class with one of my roommates, we help each other on homework. In EECS, I usually have a better grasp of what's going on than they do. So basically, I get to help my roommate try to understand some concept the professor went through in class by posing it in another matter or explaining it in a different way. That helps me, and it helps my friend.

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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?

Then, like I said, there are those friends who encourage you to take up bad habits. Again, I give you the example of that guy I know who got ruined by falling in love with an extremely lazy and irresponsible woman, which made him become extremely lazy himself. There are students at Berkeley who have fun but destructive habits, and they tempt you to adopt the same destructive habits. For example, I know people who have basically become marijuana addicts while at Berkeley, and have accumulated a drug conviction record that basically disqualifies them from ever a good job in their life. They never smoked out before Berkeley. They got into the drug lifestyle because they saw other students at Berkeley who were into that lifestyle. It's the same reason why children of smokers are far more likely to themselves take up smoking than are children of non-smokers. This is about people setting bad examples for impressionable people to follow. This is why parents try to steer their children away from known troublemakers because they fear that their children will be tempted by example to become troublemakers themselves.

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I agree completely. You think it's significant, I think it's negligible. If you become good friends with the guy down the hall, inevitably you'll be hanging out in each other's rooms a lot. If you want to talk to him, it takes an extra 10 seconds of walking to do so. I see that as a non-issue.

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The key phrase in that above statement is * if you become good friends *. The question is, how do you do it? To do that, you first have to have an opportunity to talk to each other to decide whether you can be good friends. For example, I could say that if a beautiful blonde sitting at the end of the bar were to really know me, then she would be dazzled by my wit and intellect, and maybe she could become my future wife. The problem is, how would she really get to know me in the first place? In other words, how do I "pick her up"?

The same thing happens with social relationships. Somebody could be your potential best friend for life, but you first have to break the ice. And let's face it - a lot of Berkeley students are shy and lack confidence in their speaking skills, and they don't have the personality to just walk up to somebody and start gladhanding them. Being a roommate forces you to know people by simple virtue of sharing the same room. That's the ice-breaker right there. If the guy lives down the hall, you have to come up with your own ice-breaker, and let's face it, a lot of Berkeley students don't have the wherewithal to do that, just like most guys don't have the guts to approach a gorgeous woman in a bar and try to pick her up.

To use a simple chemistry analogy, the lower the activation energy, the more that a particular chemical reaction will proceed in the forward direction.

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If you want to talk to him, it takes an extra 10 seconds of walking to do so. I see that as a non-issue. I'm not going to lose a friend because he lives across the street from me rather than in my house

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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?

I'll tell you this. Where I live (an apartment building), I barely know any of my neighbors. The people who live upstairs, I've only met once, and then, only casually. The people who live in the buildings around me, I haven't the slightest clue who they are. Sure, some of them might actually turn out to be the greatest friends in the world, but how would I know that? Am I really going to pound doors of all the buildings around me just to meet the people inside? I think people would think that I was behaving extremely forwardly, so much so, that some of them might call the cops, or even threaten me with physical harm. I know that back home, where my parents live, my parents know next to nothing about some of their neighbors, not even their names. Those neighbors might be the greatest people in the world who would be our friends forever. But how would we know that? The activation cost is just too high.

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Are you implying that grades are the same as education?

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No, I am implying that for some people, grades are what are important.
Go ask the premeds and the prelaws just how important grades are to them. I think you have to agree that your story about having your grade lowered because you got paired with a fool only serves to deter those people who want to go to med or law school from choosing Berkeley.

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Now, I completely disagree that a person's understanding would be reduced as a result. The person that gets stuck with the work had better understand the work, and if s/he doesn't, had better learn it really quickly. Pressure forces people to do excellent work. It may suck, and isn't the way things should happen, but it doesn't hurt your understanding of the material. And don't bother with another anecdote, I've got my own on this and they mean nothing.

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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.

sakky · June 26, 2006, 10:59pm

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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.

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.

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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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.

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.

sakky · June 26, 2006, 11:08pm

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I do think that there are students at Berkeley who don't want to become educated, and I bet there are more of them (both in total numbers and percentage wise) at other top schools, but I do think you make it seem like 1) they are everywhere at Berkeley, 2) they don't exist elsewhere, and 3) they're somehow different than those at other schools. I think these are false, and the last one is the most important here. I think many students at other, so-called (and perhaps even actual) better schools are lazy in the same way that some Berkeley students are lazy- they work when they have to work. Those that don't work when they have to work often flunk out at Berkeley and often elsewhere

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I have never disputed that there are bad students at other schools. Of course there are. George Bush and John Kerry have both admitted to being bad students while at Yale.

The difference is in degree. For example, I think nobody can dispute that there is far more violence and crime in South Berkeley than there is in North Berkeley. That's not to say that there is no violence/crime in North Berkeley.

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Sakky, I'm falling into no trap. I'm a philosophy major. I deal with complicated concepts in often non "absolute, precision, scientific" terms, but when I do, I still define them, and more so than just "y'know what I'm talking about." I'm not asking for an absolute definition, I'm not asking for complex studies, but I am asking for some working definition.

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I can use a simple definition - all of those students who were academically expelled are probably pretty lazy and immature. If a student shows up to cless than a quarter of the time, then that's a pretty good indication of laziness. Anybody who takes more than 7 years to graduate is probably lazy. I can understand taking 5 years, maybe 6, but come on, 7+?

But look, just because something cannot be defined precisely, or even not given a good working definition, does not mean that one can make no useful categorizations at all. To paraphrase Sowell, any reasonable definition of national borders would have to concede that Beijing is part of China and Moscow is part of Russia.

DRab · June 27, 2006, 3:41am

I know you don't dispute it, but sometimes you make it sound as if that isn't the case. This is what happens when you go on and on about it at one place without mentioning or implying it happens elsewhere.

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I can use a simple definition - all of those students who were academically expelled are probably pretty lazy and immature. If a student shows up to cless than a quarter of the time, then that's a pretty good indication of laziness. Anybody who takes more than 7 years to graduate is probably lazy. I can understand taking 5 years, maybe 6, but come on, 7+?

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Well, this provides something with which to work.

eudean · June 27, 2006, 3:03pm

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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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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.

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.

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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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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."

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.

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.

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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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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.

[quote]

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?

[/quote]

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.

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.

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.

[quote]
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?

[/quote]

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.

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.

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

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.

sakky · June 30, 2006, 10:17pm

[quote]
And Berkeley grads also seem to be doing extremely well for themselves, so it looks like having a tail end doesn't hurt us.

[/quote]

That depends on how you define 'extremely well'. Better than the average college graduate? Of course. Better than the average UC graduate (from all of the UC's)? Sure. But better than the average graduate of the top private schools? That's a stretch.

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

I never said that it necessarily proved that it provided a better * education *. But it clearly does prove that it proves a better * something *, whatever that something is.

[quote]
If you think about it logically, though, Berkeley does deliver what the public wants.

[/quote]

Uh, no, I think I proved that Berkeley does not provide what the public wants. If that were really true, the the public would prefer Berkeley over all other schools. This is clearly not happening.

I think it's more accurate to say that for those particular members of the public who are just not good enough to get admitted to those other school, then Berkeley provides what these people want. But that's a far cry from saying that Berkeley truly provides what the public wants. If I want to see Xmen3, and the theater is sold out, I may choose to see Mission Impossible 3 instead, but that doesn't mean that I stop wanting to see Xmen 3. I still want it, I just can't get it.

[quote]
This is a terrible argument. Find the proportion of Harvard Business School alums that are Chinese or Indian.

[/quote]

Uh, actually, no, I think you are proving my point. The fact is, on the whole, the average levels of education within China and India are worse than that in the US. Obviously the very best Chinese and Indian students can compete with anybody. But there are vast millions of poorly educated Chinese and Indians. India, for example, has only a 65% adult literacy rate, where literacy is defined to be literacy in any language, including their native language.

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

Ok - let me tell you that at Kellogg, Sloan and Wharton, again, there are more Stanford grads than Berkeley grads on a per-capita basis, as well as an absolute basis. While I can't prove it, I strongly strongly suspect that at Stanford GSB, there will be more Stanford grads than Berkeley grads. In fact, of the top 10 B-schools, I think the only one where this will not be true is at Berkeley itself (Haas), and even there, I'm not entirely sure that it's not true.

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

But you just proved my point! Don't you see what happened? It basically meant that California segregated its students and stated that certain students are 'special' and therefore worthy of the best public education in the state, and they get to go to UCBerkeley. Others are 'less special', and they end up in the lower UC's. The ones who are even less special than that are shunted to the CalStates, and the rest are bundled into the community colleges.

Hence, your notions of 'fairness' and equality have not been adhered to by the state of California. California has in fact behaved in a rather 'elitist' manner in that certain students are provided with a better college education than others are. Hence the state is * already * behaving in a non-egalitarian manner. Not everybody who wants to study at Berkeley gets to go. You have to apply to Berkeley, and only the best applicants are admitted.

Hence, my point is, Berkeley is already quite selective and exclusive. Hence, if Berkeley is selective and exclusive already, then I don't see anything wrong with being even more selective and exclusive. It's not like Berkeley is open-admissions today.

You said that the worse students at Berkeley can learn from the better students. Well, by the same token, Berkeley could have simply expanded its seats so that the even worse students (the ones who couldn't get in and had to go to other UC's), could be admitted, and these students could also learn from the better students. But the state of California decided not to do that. Instead, the state created other, weaker, UC's for them. Why? Because the state realized that doing so would inevitably dilute Berkeley's academic resources and the state wanted to reserve those resources for its better students.

[quote]
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

[/quote]

By the same token, I know a guy who smoked 3 packs a day and still lived to be over 90. But that doesn't mean that smoking isn't dangerous. There are no binary decision factors here. This is not a yes/no categorization. This is simply a matter of correlation. The more you smoke, the less healthy you tend to be. Similarly, the more leisure activities you tend to enjoy, the less you tend to enjoy learning.

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

The question is not about whether they don't have any desire to learn anything * at all*. Rather, it's a spectrum. It's about how much of your leisure time and enjoyment are you willing to forgo to learn something. For some people, the answer is 'not much'. In other words, they may want to learn a subject until it actually gets hard, and then they simply don't want to push through the difficult sections. If something is easy, sure, they'll learn it. But they don't want to invest a lot of their time into learning something.

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

And do you learn a lot by helping such a student learn the bare minimum to pass the class?

I'll put it to you this way. I remember back in high school how some of the jocks basically paid other people to do all their homework for them. Do you consider this a positive learning environment?

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

Again, you're talking about the ideal. Maybe it's easy for you. Maybe you're a highly social guy. But trust me, there are a lot of Berkeley students who are shy, who don't have the self-confidence to just go up to strangers and talk to them. Come on, you know what I'm talking about.

Look, if you really don't think there are any antisocial people at Berkeley, why don't you visit the computer labs at Soda Hall at around midnight during the regular semester. You will see some VERY antisocial people. Heck, some of them haven't even bathed for several months.

[quote]
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.

[/quote]

Yeah, but wouldn't it have been better to have had a partner who was on-the-ball and could have taught you something?

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