UChicago v. Berkeley?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

Would appreciate thoughts on the above choice – in particular from @JHS .

  • Berkeley cost ~ $35 k per year
  • UChicago cost ~ $60 k per year (small scholarship)
  • Cost difference is in theory manageable -- but it is real $$; Chicago probably would require small student loan
  • D much prefers UChicago atmosphere, campus, students
  • D is most interested in life sciences -- with an eye towards M.D.
  • D is interested in research opportunities while on campus -- maybe easier to find at Chicago
  • D is concerned about larger class size, larger university size, less personal attention / interaction at Berkeley
  • D is not 100% certain about M.D. route -- so if "Plan B" develops -- UChicago may offer better options
  • On the other hand, there is something to be said for learning to mix/deal with a larger cross-section of types of people/students
  • Trying to actually quantify the extra value from a UChicago diploma is non-trvial. Maybe it's something that can't really be quantified, though.

Thanks!

2

Personally, I think med school on the same campus is a big plus for kids like yours (who sounds a lot like mine). Impacted majors and difficulty getting courses also made me nervous about Cal for undergrad.

FWIW, I think she’d encounter a fairly diverse group of students at Chicago, with the common thread being academic intensity – which actually seems like a promising situation for fostering an atmosphere of reciprocal respect.

3

The answer is, of course, “it depends.”

As you’ve probably heard, medical school is a major expense. This may not be an issue in the long run, since your D isn’t sure about an M.D, but minimizing loans and maximizing savings is an important consideration.

Moreover, Chicago doesn’t have much in the way of grade inflation (for a long time, grade deflation was the zeitgeist), and that may be an issue for your D when she applies to medical school.

As with many cost-focused discussions involving Berkeley, the flip side is that Berkeley’s funding has dropped in recent years, leading to oversubscribed classes. That could make the question one of 5 years at Berkeley vs. 4 at Chicago.

If your daughter is 90% certain about the M.D, and a straight-A student in biology, Berkeley could be the better option due to cost. If she’s 60% sure about med school, the better choice might be Chicago. YMMV.

4

My two cents:

Berkeley and Chicago are both among the top universities in the world. You are not going to find $100,000 of difference in value between them in any kind of objective measure of academic quality. You also are not going to find any prestige difference with practical importance, especially if your daughter follows the MD career path. I doubt it’s easy to be a pre-med either place. Chicago does little or nothing to coddle its pre-meds – pre-professionalism and careerism are still looked down upon, if maybe a little less than in the past – it’s not likely to be a smoother, more certain path there. Anyway, people graduate from both universities and go to medical school every year. It’s something human beings can achieve with appropriate effort either place.

I don’t think there’s much question that there’s a huge difference in atmosphere between the two, although I suspect that there are plenty of intellectual subcultures around Berkeley where a kid can spend her time exactly as she would at Chicago. What she won’t be able to do is know that absolutely everyone around her has read (and likely cared about) a number of the same books, or that everyone in her Organic Chemistry class is also a fan of Plato. I don’t think it’s the case that Chicago students lack experience dealing with people who aren’t University of Chicago students or faculty, but there’s little question that they get to spend a lot of time in a community that is, in a number of respects, scandalously, luxuriously homogeneous, and that’s part of what they like about Chicago (if they like Chicago, which most but not all do).

Impacted majors, tough course selection, how far you have to travel to get to a lab, lack of on-campus housing – sure, those are all issues, and maybe annoying ones, but it’s not as though Berkeley doesn’t produce scads of graduates who have negotiated them successfully with a lot less trouble than $100,000 would buy.

I am a huge fan of Chicago, no secret about it. I will admit to paying an extra $100,000 – actually maybe a little more – so that one of my kids could go there, although it was economically irrational and only made sense – barely – in terms of family dynamics. (He’s very, very grateful, by the way. And he’s effectively still there, nine years later. But not as a doctor.) If you can afford it, and that kind of intellectual atmosphere and privilege is what your family values, it’s a wonderful gift to give your child. But you can’t justify it other than as an indulgence, a luxury.

5

Agree about luxury/indulgence and, for me, the flip side is if the kid won’t feel indulged, don’t do it. Lots of these X vs. Chi threads, posted by the applicants themselves, suggest a kind of indifference (rather than price-sensitivity) and, in those cases, I tend to think that if you don’t affirmatively want the distinctive thing U of C is offering, all else being relatively equal, choose the other option. But this is a case where it sounds like the student falls in the affirmatively wants it category. At which point it comes down to how much it’s worth to everyone involved. Which is a really subjective and situational judgment call.

6

As a current premed student at Chicago, soon to apply to med schools, I will be biased and vouch for UChicago’s premed experience, which I feel receives a lot of undue criticism. I’ve looked up some data on other schools, which is referenced not to bash those schools but instead to highlight the quality of what UChicago has to offer. This doesn’t help resolve the cost issue or the to-be-or-not-to-be premed dilemma, but I hope to establish UChicago as a solid choice for anyone looking to be premed.

The premed career advising office, UChicago Careers in Health Professions (UCIHP), is solid gold. Several of the advisers are former admissions officers at top medical schools (Pritzker and Yale) and draw on a wealth of experience reading top-notch applications to properly advise students. One of the advisors currently sits as President of the National Association of Health Professions Advisors, which is no small honor. Additionally, we have 4 advisors dedicated full-time to premed advising, which combined with the slightly smaller premed population at Chicago means that students rarely have trouble scheduling appointments with their advisor. This is in marked contrast with several peer institutions - for reference, Harvard and Yale have only 2 and 1 premed advisors serving much larger premed populations. UCIHP has a huge budget, sponsoring several lecture series and numerous competitive summer internships. To keep things short, I’ve linked a UCIHP brochure here:

https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/pdfs/uci_health_professions.pdf

Regarding coursework: yes, it is not easy, but the days of grade deflation are long gone. You will get A’s in your core courses with a modicum of effort, and science classes are very doable, especially the upper level electives. One thing most premed discussions fail to consider is the importance of rec letters, which play an outsize role in med school admissions once past the interview stage. Smaller class sizes in core HUM/SOSC and upper level science courses facilitate closer interactions with the professor and ultimately stronger letters of recommendation. To echo what has been said above, getting involved with research is extremely easy and the hospital is literally on the other side of the street, letting students shadow physicians and volunteer easily. There is a lot of institutional funding for more or less anything undergrads would like to do, from founding and running clubs to supporting summer research to making health-related internships accessible exclusively to UChicago students through the Jeff Metcalf program and the alumni network.

I can’t speak to anything about Berkeley but I would hazard that it doesn’t offer a similar degree of support for its premeds. I have several UChicago friends in medical school, and each of them say how easy med school is in comparison to undergrad, which is something I have never heard from students of any other university and is a testament to rigor of the undergrad curriculum. This may not be published, but I have confirmation from the UCIHP office that the med school admit rate last year was 80-85%, close to Ivy Peers and certainly higher than Berkeley according to their self-published data:

https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/MedStats/Annual-Acceptance-Rates-by-Year.pdf

7

@JHS

That is the best darn summation of UChicago I have heard!! My wife and I are having the same conversation right now. However to just plain admit that the choice is essentially an indulgence, a luxury, feels so inappropriate and entitled, that I almost feel ashamed to think about it :slight_smile: but that is exactly what it really is, so I am glad you held a mirror up to me :slight_smile:

8

That said, if you’ve got that kind of money, of all the things you can blow it on, education isn’t a bad pick. (Cf weddings, a Tesla).

9

@ramboacid

Thank you for that perspective. I found it very interesting

Can’t these numbers be manipulated though? Many schools aggressively weed out students. So maybe only a small percentage of students who came in thinking “pre-med” remain on that track. Schools don’t count those students when they report these numbers, which could dramatically alter the admit rate percentages and appear to make those schools very successful in their placement. So looking at the admit rates doesn’t tell the whole story or even the right story, when comparing schools.

Any sense if this is happening at UChicago? Are students dropping like flies from the pre-med track and hence the ones that remain are gaining acceptance in large numbers, or are most of the folks who come in with the aim of becoming physicians surviving through graduation. Pre-med retention would be a very telling statistic

10

OK, @ramboacid , I’ll stop saying things like “Chicago does little or nothing to coddle its pre-meds.” As the father and prospective father-in-law of erstwhile Chicago pre-meds, I thought I knew that, but clearly there has been a lot of evolution in CCIHP recently, and maybe in the general attitudes toward pre-anythings. Good to know!

11

@VeryLuckyParent I haven’t heard of anyone being actively discouraged from applying to med schools by the premed advisers. The premed advising office does not discourage students from applying to medical schools, but the advisers don’t sugarcoat when telling students whether their school list is impractical or if a gap year would improve one’s application. There is attrition on the premed path, but it has a lot to do with the many attractive alternatives at a school like Chicago with strengths in many areas. For instance, it is extremely common for first-year premeds to have one foot in general chemistry and the other in Econ 198, and more than a few jump ship to that major which lacks in lab reports and advertises several lucrative exit opportunities. A few of my premed friends are taking “gap years” in consulting or banking, but I’m not sure whether they’re coming back. :slight_smile:

In terms of raw data, I’ve looked up class sizes for the non-honors sections of general chemistry (CHEM 111-112-113) and organic chemistry (CHEM 220-221-222) as a proxy for the number of potential premed students in a class as a function of time. This is a flawed metric for many reasons, most notably because a sizable fraction of the classes are not premed (especially so with general chemistry, which is used by math/cs majors for their physci major requirement), but as two whole quarters of gen chem are required for any physci credit and all premeds will need to continue from the first to the second quarter, it is instructive to look at the numbers. I’ve pulled class sizes for one premed cohort that started general chemistry in Autumn '14:

Autumn '14 CHEM 111: 301 (Everyone and their cat is registered; not all are premed)
Winter '15 CHEM 112: 294 (Almost everyone sticks around, indicating that first-quarter grades were not a deterrent)
Spring '15 CHEM 113: 274 (This is when math/cs majors tend to drop off, and for sure after the end of the quarter)

Autumn '15 CHEM 220: 195 (Uncommitted premeds and Molecular Engineering majors don’t return for OChem)
Winter '16 CHEM 221: 180
Spring '16 CHEM 222: 146 (Spring quarter is optional for bio majors and premeds that take Biochem)

We see that there is attrition over the course of a year in each class, but the largest source of attrition is over the summer before organic chemistry. I take this to mean that most students who drop premed aspirations do so not in a GPA-induced fit of desperation halfway through a schoolyear (as it is often portrayed) but rather in a controlled fashion, away from the pressures of school, when students do some soul-searching - perhaps in some cases partially GPA-induced - and realize that there are other satisfying careers besides that of a physician.

What is encouraging is that premeds that make it past OChem are very likely to follow through with their premed aspirations: the latest AAMC data states that 158 premeds applied to medical school from the University of Chicago during the 2015-2016 application cycle, which includes some alumni applicants and students from the honors sections of chemistry courses (<20 per year). This is in line with Princeton’s most recent count (168 applicants) but also much less than Harvard’s (280) and Yale’s (266). I cite my data here for those who are interested: https://www.aamc.org/data/facts/applicantmatriculant/86042/factstablea2.html
The discrepancy between HY and CP probably does have to do with stricter grading at both schools, but it might have to do with the greater proportion of students interested in other majors. Princeton and UChicago are also far stronger draws for students with hard quantitative backgrounds and interests in physics, math, stat, and economics (especially for UChicago). Yale, at least, boasts far less prestige in more quantitative fields (not that it has none, just less) and so the matriculant pools at each school may self-segregate to a degree, where premeds with a choice end up at HY and quant types end up at CP. One is far more likely to run into someone majoring in a quantitative field on campus here than one interested in government or law; I suppose the opposite is true at H and Y, and at P to a lesser degree.

@JHS Glad I could be of help! Your initial assessment is not misguided; the premed advising office was pretty deplorable until a change of leadership took place in the office in 2012. It was at that point that the former admissions counselors joined the office and there was an explosion of new opportunities and support for premed students. While the rigor of classes may not have changed much over the last few years, the rest of premed experience has certainly undergone a renaissance.

12

Thanks @ramboacid your posts have been enlightening.

13

@ramboacid Thank you so much…you do not even know how impactful your comments have been. I am between UChicago and Harvard, but your comments (although not the sole factor) truly solidify my inclination to commit to UChicago!

14

Thanks for all the input. D chose UChicago based on feel/atmosphere/culture.