<p>^ Not a tangent when the discussion is on department strength. Faculty gives an academic program its distinction…not so much undergrads. Especially when UG student stats are nearly identical in the comparison of USC, Berkeley and UCLA.</p>
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The engineering students I knew were always taught from textbooks. These textbooks made their rounds at the various universities. This generally means that the material conveyed to the undergrads is recycled over and over because the material is so elementary in the field, in addition to helping the student in a step-by-step basis of foundational learning. </p>
<p>But these more complex concepts in the field for undergrads are still elementary in relation to the higher, more cutting-edge concepts in this field, which these academy members might promote. For these academy members to introduce these concepts to undergrads would be useless because the cutting edge would be beyond the students’ scope of learning.
This doesn’t match my experience at Berkeley.</p>