<p>I’m not exactly grasping to your argument either…which is Michigan teachers somehow as a whole “care” about undergrads more. That is very fuzzy and nebulous to confirm.</p>
<p>I say both faculties are large. You’re going to have some bad profs in both places. You need to show me some proof that Michigan profs care more. </p>
<p>The OP hasn’t visited Michigan’s campus and says he can’t. I wouldn’t want to commit somewhere I haven’t visited.</p>
<p>Who cares if campuses are separate? At least Cal’s engineering campus is contiguous and not a bus ride away…like Michigan.</p>
<p>“At least Cal’s engineering campus is contiguous and not a bus ride away…like Michigan.”</p>
<p>You could walk it…</p>
<p>UCBChemEGrad, Michigan and Cal have very similar faculties. The main difference is that Michigan does a bad job of retaining senior faculty (those that win awards). However, the number of young stars on the Michigan faculty is staggering. Unfortunately, due mainly to its pay structure, once those young stars prove themselves and are on their way to winning a major award, they end up leaving to either Cal, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford or Yale among others. By the time those professors make it to that level, they typically lose their appetite for teaching undergrads and rest of their past glories…those that they acquired and perfected as faculty members at Michigan.</p>
<p>That being said, in most departments, Michigan’s faculty, even at the senior level, will match Cal’s nicely. From a career point of view, the only program at Cal that will give the OP an edge academically or professionally is Computer Science. In all the other departments he listed, Michigan will offer as robust an education and equally good professional placement opportunities.</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, due mainly to its pay structure, once those young stars prove themselves and are on their way to winning a major award, they end up leaving to either Cal, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford or Yale among others.”</p>
<p>I’ve always felt that although A2 is a wonderful town, it is disadvantaged by not being closer to a world class city like those other towns listed above.</p>
<p>I spoke today to a neighbor who went to UCB. I asked, “Did you have much interaction with your professors?” He said, “Next to none. They totally ignored us. All we saw were TAs.” I have heard this from others too.</p>
<p>What Michigan has in place are more programs that produce interaction with professors: UROP, mentorship, Residential College, living learning communities, Honors program. Cal doesn’t have this sort of thing. I can’t promise that students don’t get ignored at UM too, but the school does more to prevent this.</p>
<p>As for top faculty, as rjkofnovi explained, this costs money. NYU over recent years spent 100s of millions on this. It comes at the cost of student programs. Berkeley spends this money too. Mich spends more on the students. Again, I don’t need Einstein to teach me physics. This is the whole problem with the Berkeley model. The real geniuses go to Cal. Tech, Harvard, and MIT. The Cal undergrad. population is very talented and motivated but they don’t need to learn Chem 101 from a National Academy of Sciences member who likely has no time for them.</p>
<p>The purpose of colleges is not to win awards, it’s to make a better society by educating young people and by producing research. Well Mich does plenty of research, second only to Johns Hopkins. And if you subtract the military research from JH, then Mich does the most.</p>
<p>You are talking disrespectfully about what is truly a wonder of a place in every regard as far as academia goes. It reminds me of how Mich. people often talk about MSU - disrespectfully of what also is a very impressive and important place. Let’s just appreciate these schools and not make a contest out of it. They each have their place. Question is for young people making decisions, which place is best for them?</p>
<p>Alexandre, if your assertion was true, how come Michigan doesn’t have any profs winning the Nobel Prize after their time at Michigan? They list quite a few winners who went to Michigan after the award:</p>
<p>[List</a> of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation]List”>List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>seaslipper, your neighbor’s experience is similar to that of any undergrad at a major research university, private or public, large or small, elite or not. My friends who went to schools like Columbia and Stanford also hardly ever interacted with faculty they freshman and sophomore years. Only when they took advanced classes within their major did they get the chance to interact with professors in any significant measure. In this respect, I suspect Cal and Michigan are identical. </p>
<p>I agree, however, that Michigan offers more unique programs aimed at getting underclassmen involved at an interactive level. Programs such as UROP and MRC, Residential College, Honors and the Living Learning Communities in general are excellent at that.</p>
<p>UCBChemEGrad, the link from Wiki is not accurate. Most faculty listed in that link you provided taught at Michigan before winning the prize. You can even check the links yourself.</p>
<p>For example, Lawrence Klein (Economics) started his career at Michigan in the 1940s and early 50s and developed most of his models that won him the nobel prize in Ann Arbor. He was denied tenure at Michigan and had to leave the US to the UK during the McCarthy years (in the mid 50s), and when he returned to the US in the late 50s, he join the Penn faculty, where he remained until he won the Nobel Prize in the 1970s. </p>
<p>Joseph Drodsky (Literature) also taught at Michigan when he first moved to the US in the 1970s, and he won the Nobel in the 80s. </p>
<p>Donald Glaser (Physics) taught at Michigan in the 1950s, where like Klein, he did most of the work that won him the Nobel Prize in 1960. </p>
<p>Charles Huggins (Medicine) was an instructor of surgery at Michigan in the mid 1920s and won the prize in the 1960s.</p>
<p>Martin Perl (Physics) was a professor at Michigan in the mid 50s until the early 60s and did not win the prize until the mid 1990s. He did much of his early work with Glaser.</p>
<p>Peyton Rous (Medicine) was an instructor of Pathology at Michigan in the early 1900s and won the prize with Huggins in the mid 1960s.</p>
<p>Hamilton O Smith (Medicine) was a professor in the school of Medicine in the early-mid 1960s and won the prize in the lat 1970s.</p>
<p>Martinus Veltman (Physics) taught at Michigan throughout the 80s and 90s, and won the Nobel in 1999.</p>
<p>Somebody is not getting it. We don’t care about the Nobel Prizes. This is the College Confidential website. It is geared towards young people, mostly high school students, who are considering college. What’s the best place for their time and money? It’s not meant for the Guinness Book of World Records to find new material. School with most Nobel Prizes. Some people are so hooked into the prestige that they have lost any concept of education. </p>
<p>By the way, I went to Columbia U for grad school in Economics. Talk about getting ignored by professors. Even in grad. school they didn’t know we existed. When I tell people I went there, they always say, oh good school. I say, what does that mean?</p>
<p>Seaslipper, I’m just posting information that counter claims that Michigan and Cal’s faculty are nearly identical.</p>
<p>I’ve yet to see any data or info posted for your claims that Michigan cares about undergrads more.</p>
<p>UCBChemEGrad, I think that claiming that Cal’s faculty is vastly superior to Michigan’s, or that undergrads would actually feel a difference in the caliber of the faculty is overstating facts. Michigan’s faculty is universally counted among the top 10 in the US. Cal’s is among the top 3. Is there a difference in quality? Yes. Is it significant? Not under any reasonable definition of the term. Do undergrads benefit in any way from that insignificant difference in the quality of the faculty? Highly unlikely.</p>
<p>Here is a listing of Berkeley’s faculty achievements:
[Awards</a> held by faculty - UC Berkeley](<a href=“About - University of California, Berkeley”>About - University of California, Berkeley)</p>
<p>I don’t see anything comparable on Michigan’s website. I very much doubt it’s Top 10. UCLA and UCSD even have stronger faculties than Michigan.</p>
<p>UCBChemEGrad, you are looking at awards won by faculty only. Those faculty members number in the hundreds, while the total faculty numbers in the thousands. Even if UCLA and UCSD have more award winners, the vast majority of their faculty is unaccounted for. So what if the top 100 faculty at UCLA and UCSD are stronger than the top 100 faculty at Michigan (unlikely mind you)? What about the remaining 6,400 professors at Michigan? Can UCLA and UCSD (which have fewer than 4,500 faculty each) keep up? </p>
<p>I am surprised that you so confidently claim that UCSD and UCLA have stronger faculties than Michigan. If that were the case, they would have stronger departments across the board. In truth, Michigan is consistently as strong, if not stronger, across all disciplines. Below is how universities rank in various fields according to the latest USNWR:</p>
<p>HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES (average rating out of 5.0)</p>
<h1>1 Stanford University 4.77</h1>
<h1>1 University of California-Berkeley 4.77</h1>
<h1>3 Harvard University 4.75</h1>
<h1>3 Princeton University 4.75</h1>
<h1>5 Yale University 4.56</h1>
<h1>6 University of Chicago 4.50</h1>
<h1>6 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.50</h1>
<h1>8 Columbia University 4.42</h1>
<h1>9 University of California-Los Angeles 4.38</h1>
<h1>10 University of Pennsylvania 4.27</h1>
<h1>10 University of Wisconsin-Madison 4.27</h1>
<p>UCSD is not among the top 20</p>
<p>HARD SCIENCES</p>
<h1>1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4.93</h1>
<h1>2 University of California-Berkeley 4.87</h1>
<h1>3 Stanford University 4.85</h1>
<h1>4 California Institute of Technology 4.72</h1>
<h1>5 Harvard University 4.58</h1>
<h1>6 Princeton University 4.47</h1>
<h1>7 Cornell University 4.37</h1>
<h1>8 University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign 4.28</h1>
<h1>9 Columbia University 4.27</h1>
<h1>10 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.18</h1>
<h1>11 University of Chicago 4.17</h1>
<h1>11 University of Texas-Austin 4.17</h1>
<h1>11 Yale University 4.17</h1>
<h1>14 University of Wisconsin-Madison 4.15</h1>
<h1>15 University of California-Los Angeles 4.05</h1>
<h1>16 University of Pennsylvania 4.00</h1>
<h1>16 University of Washington 4.00</h1>
<h1>18 University of California-San Diego 3.98</h1>
<p>As you can see, Michigan is #6 when you combine the 12 traditional disciplines, which speaks directly to the strength of the Michigan faculty. UCLA is roughly equal but UCSD is not as consistently strong. If you add Engineering and Medicine to the equation, Michigan </p>
<p>ENGINEERING (Peer Assessment Score)</p>
<h1>1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 4.9</h1>
<h1>2 Stanford University 4.8</h1>
<h1>2 University of California-Berkeley 4.8</h1>
<h1>4 California Institute of Technology 4.7</h1>
<h1>5 Georgia Institute of Technology 4.5</h1>
<h1>5 University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign 4.5</h1>
<h1>7 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.4</h1>
<h1>8 Carnegie Mellon University 4.3</h1>
<h1>8 Cornell University 4.3</h1>
<h1>10 Princeton University 4.2</h1>
<h1>10 Purdue University-West Lafayette 4.2</h1>
<h1>10 University of Texas-Austin 4.2</h1>
<h1>13 Northwestern University 4.0</h1>
<h1>14 Johns Hopkins University 3.9</h1>
<h1>14 University of Wisconsin-Madison 3.9</h1>
<h1>16 Texas A&M University 3.8</h1>
<h1>16 University of California-San Diego 3.8</h1>
<h1>16 Virginia Tech 3.8</h1>
<h1>19 Columbia University 3.7</h1>
<h1>19 Harvard University 3.7</h1>
<h1>19 Pennsylvania State University-University Park 3.7</h1>
<h1>19 Rice University 3.7</h1>
<h1>19 University of California-Los Angeles 3.7</h1>
<h1>19 University of Maryland-College Park 3.7</h1>
<h1>19 University of Minnesota-Twin Cities 3.7</h1>
<h1>19 University of Southern California 3.7</h1>
<p>MEDICINE (Peer Assessment Score)</p>
<h1>1 Harvard University 4.8</h1>
<h1>2 Johns Hopkins University 4.7</h1>
<h1>2 Stanford University 4.7</h1>
<h1>2 University of California-San Diego 4.7</h1>
<h1>5 University of Pennsylvania 4.6</h1>
<h1>6 Washington University-St Louis 4.5</h1>
<h1>7 Duke University 4.4</h1>
<h1>7 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.4</h1>
<h1>9 Columbia University 4.3</h1>
<h1>9 University of Washington 4.3</h1>
<h1>9 Vanderbilt University 4.3</h1>
<h1>9 Yale University 4.3</h1>
<h1>13 Cornell University 4.1</h1>
<h1>13 University of California-Los Angeles 4.1</h1>
<h1>13 University of California-San Diego 4.1</h1>
<h1>13 University of Pittsburgh 4.1</h1>
<p>In terms of overall faculty strength, I think Cal (top 3) has the edge over Michigan (top 10) and Michigan has the edge over UCLA (top 15) and UCSD (top 20). All four universities have excellent faculties though.</p>
<p>MEDICINE (Peer Assessment Score)
#1 Harvard University 4.8
#2 Johns Hopkins University 4.7
#2 Stanford University 4.7
#2 University of California-San Francisco 4.7
#5 University of Pennsylvania 4.6
#6 Washington University-St Louis 4.5
#7 Duke University 4.4
#7 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.4
#9 Columbia University 4.3
#9 University of Washington 4.3
#9 Vanderbilt University 4.3
#9 Yale University 4.3
#13 Cornell University 4.1
#13 University of California-Los Angeles 4.1
#13 University of California-San Diego 4.1
#13 University of Pittsburgh 4.1 </p>
<p>Corrected #2 to Berkeley’s De facto medical school. :-)</p>
<p>You can add up NAE, NAS and Institute of Medicine members for each. I would say UCSD and UCLA have more members than Michigan. Pretty sad the supposed #2 flagship public trails Cal’s extension campuses. 
This thread from 2005 could be updated:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/86111-universities-most-distinguished-faculty.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/86111-universities-most-distinguished-faculty.html</a></p>
<p>Michigan has a weak faculty compared to comparable universities, especially in the sciences…even with an in-house medical school. You’ve acknowledged this issue in the “Is Michigan Weak” thread.</p>
<p>Berkeley>San Francisco</p>
<p>UCLA>>>Los Angeles</p>
<p>UCSD>>>San Diego</p>
<p>Michigan>Detroit</p>
<p>Hmmmm. Which university has the weakest location? Lets face it, most of the leading research universities in this country are located either in major liveable cities or nearby.</p>
<p>That’s a good point. San Diego is kinda boring though.</p>
<p>^^^^Compare San Diego and Detroit. There is no comparison.</p>
<p>I’m curious where the OP decided to attend. I think I’ve digressed enough. ;)</p>