<p>Haha, this is like having a ringside seat at a wrestling match. Popcorn, please!</p>
<p>^^^I’ll give you pom poms too since I know how much you enjoy talking about them.</p>
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No, you actually have an inside-ring seat. :)</p>
<p>phantasmagoric,</p>
<p>your original statement was this</p>
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<p>i.e. 200m goes to medical purposes.</p>
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this doesn’t support your argument for two reasons: 1) the funds are going toward a variety of things, including ‘charitable projects throughout the united states’ and ‘academic programs at UCLA’ which have nothing to do with medical research and 2) the amount of money which is going toward ‘medical research’ isn’t even mentioned, but considering all the things that the fund was set up to do, i highly doubt that the medical research will constitute a majority of the money.</p>
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<p>i think here, we are at a miscommunication. All i said was that if UCLA was founded at the same time as berkeley that it would ‘KILL’ it. I couldn’t have meant that it would kill berkeley in donations (since it already does.) What i meant was that Berkeley had nearly 50-60 years of funding (depending on whether you want to see UCLA as being “UCLA” starting in 1919 or 1927.) This amount of time also added to the prestige of the berkeley. </p>
<p>Stanford has become the powerhouse it has for essentially creating silicon valley. I don’t think there’s any university which has come close to doing anything like that before, or after it, but i believe that’s why it flourished. That’s also why i think its donations are as high as they are.</p>
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<p>i actually <em>have</em> the subject rankings for the top 10 schools, in addition to some other california schools of interest, in a spreadsheet. I originally made this spreadsheet because the HPI had all of the subjects listed on different pages and i wanted to consolidate them into one page. According to googledocs, i haven’t modified this page in 110 days, (although unfortunately it doesn’t show this in the link) It isn’t official, but it’s the best i can provide:</p>
<p><a href=“https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiIuqnwv1zHMdElSUWdSMG4xSkdfYWoxSWMydEN3LUE&authkey=CJ_O0o8G&hl=en_US#gid=0[/url]”>https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiIuqnwv1zHMdElSUWdSMG4xSkdfYWoxSWMydEN3LUE&authkey=CJ_O0o8G&hl=en_US#gid=0</a></p>
<p>(the average and median are my own and were not included in the original ranking.) </p>
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<p>Here i was more aluding to Drax12’s point about the industries and what they support. An industry like the film industry certainly needs people in film, but they also need lawyers, agencies, people in communications, etc. Although, just like anyone else, they’ll also indirectly support other agencies e.g. dentists, doctors, expensive boutiques (e.g. Rodeo drive), and so on. At a level like UCLA’s, it’s doubtful that anyone will seriously question the depth of any of its programs. However, i don’t see why we’re arguing about this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the best film schools (USC, AFI, UCLA at 1, 2, and 5 respectively) are in los angeles just like i don’t think it’s a coincidence that a majority of the best CS/engineering schools are norcal, with a close proximity to silicon valley. Sure there are schools in the tops in engineering that aren’t in california (e.g. MIT, princeton.) and the same for film (NYU tisch, beijing film academy) but this goes back to my point saying that berkeley can have good film schools, and UCLA good engineering schools. There’s obviously no restriction to a school being good or not and its proximity to a powerhouse industry – but i would say that it greatly increases its chances.</p>
<p>engineering: [Top</a> Universities for Engineering & Technology 2010-2011](<a href=“http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010-2011/engineering-and-IT.html]Top”>World University Rankings 2010-11 | Times Higher Education (THE))</p>
<p>film: [The</a> 25 Best Film Schools Rankings - The Hollywood Reporter](<a href=“http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/25-best-film-schools-rankings-215714]The”>The 25 Best Film Schools Rankings)</p>
<p>in regards to my medicine comment, i was just trying to list the schools/institutions that i felt make a university famous (this isn’t any different than me naming Haas or CoE for berkeley) which was my point about bringing up the film and med schools (which unfortunately aren’t even comparable since berkeley doesn’t have them)</p>
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<p>The ACM competition seemed US dominated since its inception (nearly 12 years) by the US. Since then, stanford has won three times, berkeley, Caltech and wustl twice, and other prestigious universities, tech (MIT) and non-tech (harvard, UCLA, john hopkins, etc.) have won once. I agree that we probably just don’t care. I think in fields like CS, other countries like russia and china (which have dominated lately in the competition) have much more to prove than we do. If the competition was taken seriously, we’d no doubt make an effort to go there since the administrators no doubt know about it.</p>
<p>[ACM</a> International Collegiate Programming Contest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“International Collegiate Programming Contest - Wikipedia”>International Collegiate Programming Contest - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>i only heard about it because it’s in our school newspaper. I think that facebook knows that caltech is a top school in the world, and invited UCLA to join too just since it wouldn’t be an inconvenience (i believe USC was taking finals at the time) I think overall in the competition, especially from UCLA, the facebook engineers were very surprised (at least that’s what i got from the article.)</p>
<p>I’m not surprised that you didn’t hear about it. It’s much easier for a stanford grad to get the attention of facebook than a UCLA grad. The competition was a much bigger deal for us. In competitions like this, we have much more to prove (analogize this with my earlier comparison with russia and china)</p>
<p>Nah, I would not want to deprive you in any way shape or form. </p>
<p>Don’t you have some Western Broncos to tame next week? </p>
<p>And then there is the release of Morse’s Opus. You never know, the PA might still be worth cheering for.</p>
<p>That’s quite alright xiggi, I won’t feel deprived at all. There are plenty of pompous, I mean pom poms, for everyone.</p>
<p>If you want to argue UCSF is still under teh aegis of UC or even Cal and is a public institutiion, then fine. But in name only. In fact, all the UC grad professional schools have essentially become privatized already, as shown by the fees charged regardless of geographic origin of student.</p>
<p>^ Why not charge market rates in an era of declining state support? The money has to come from somewhere.</p>
<p>I agree…</p>
<p>Wrt UCLA and Cal undergrad: if they were to become more privatized or even fully so, they would both have to reduce enrollments. </p>
<p>I don’t think that’s a bad idea: privatizing both, and keeping the other 7 UC undergrads at public, even rolling back prices if that were possible.</p>
<p>~ 185K undergrads at UC, reduced by ~ 50 of both UCLA and Cal = ~ 135 state-supported undergrads w/o adjustments. Significantly less state support… Add another 15 % full tution payers for the 7 = ~ 115K who have state support. </p>
<p>But not a fan of Blue and Gold Scholarship. Everyone should pay something unless it were, say, for true merit.</p>
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Heh! You’re right about the similarities, which for some reason I never caught before. Interestingly, I found this on Wikipedia:</p>
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Additionally, every UC school has some shade of blue and gold as its colors. Good grief. How boring! (And confusing.)</p>
<p>drax12,</p>
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<p>How is it backtracking?</p>
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<p>Its faculty is certainly not “just fine already.” UCLA has a long way to go; this isn’t even denied at all by UCLA leadership. It’s a Cal or Stanford or Harvard model in that it has a great breadth and depth. Meaning it has hordes of top faculty across all disciplines, and manages to be in the top 5 or 10 in almost every one of them.</p>
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<p>The burden of evidence is on you. You asserted it; support it. Don’t get mad at others when they ask to see a source.</p>
<p>The Bay Area has 7.5 million people, while LA has less than 4 (although counting Riverside and others brings that number up). You also did not explain how this is even relevant. The fact that the local area has more underperforming high schools says little: it doesn’t mean that the low-performing students at these schools are applying (these schools do have higher-performing students), it doesn’t mean that they are getting admitted, it doesn’t mean that they are choosing the local school. IIRC, Berkeley enrolls more students from LA than the Bay Area. </p>
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<p>This might hurt, but you need to provide a source for that. The ‘evidence’ that follows this statement is all your own personal rationalization. It’s well-acknowledged among experts in socioeconomic diversity in higher education that what defines at-risk has little to do with scores or GPA: it has most to do with income. The at-risk students are mostly those who are low-income or first-generation (though the two usually overlap). UCLA and Berkeley enroll virtually the same amount of low-income students.</p>
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<p>Yes it was - read the news article I linked to.</p>
<p>beyphy,</p>
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<p>I misremembered the last discussion about UCLA’s donations, but in that discussion, of the donations mentioned (including the Lincy Foundation one), only 1/3 of it was going to non-medical purposes. Regarding the Kerkorian donation, I did not say that medical research accounted for a majority of the money, but half. That’s what the news articles said; I can search around for the ones that specifically mentioned it.</p>
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<p>No, you misread what I said then. I said that including UCSF in its donations total would put it far ahead of UCLA, and for some reason, you brought up their founding dates. I see now that you were trying to make a separate point altogether that wasn’t in response to mine.</p>
<p>I don’t think that having a difference in founding dates means all that much for finances. UCLA was actually founded in 1881, as the normal school. Even if UCLA were to have been founded much later, it wouldn’t have mattered much - as you pointed out, there are fundamental differences with public universities, whose funding comes from the state. Back then, almost all of it came from the state, so Berkeley’s older age didn’t confer much of an advantage. Even if Berkeley did have an endowment back then, it would not have lasted - most universities were put on equal ground after the Great Depression.</p>
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<p>Stanford was one of the top universities long before Silicon Valley. It was one of the founding members of the Association of American Universities (only the most prestigious schools founded this), and in the early 1900s had an endowment 6 times larger than Harvard’s. The reason for this was a) extensive stocks and bonds in the Pacific railroad, vineyards, and banks like Wells Fargo; and b) nearly a million acres of land in California, deeded to the university. These financial resources catapulted Stanford to the top. Silicon Valley just cemented it there.</p>
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<p>That’s from one single source. I know you put stock in that, because you talked about it multiple times. As I said, I put stock in a variety of sources.</p>
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<p>As I said in the last discussion on this in the MIT forum, it really just depends on whether the school fields a team that year, and whether that team is made up of the top students (who are more often than not doing something more important like research). Some years, they’ll place well; other years, not at all.</p>
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Correct…Silicon Valley has influenced Stanford as much as the other way around.</p>
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<p>For the record, I think that ‘After World War II, Stanford was in dire financial straits, with nothing like the reputation it enjoys today’ is a bit of an overstatement. Perhaps he’s simply indicating that Stanford’s prestige today is absurdly high. But before SV, it was still considered one of the best. I remember reading articles in the Google news archive from the pre-SV era, and it was noted by some that Stanford was one of the top 10, others that it was top 5 or 6.</p>
<p>@GoBlue81…Michigan and UVa are BOTH great schools; however, based solely on selectivity and the ability to gain entrance into the school, there’s no doubt, UVA is the more difficult of the two:</p>
<p>#25 UVA
90% in top 10th of graduating class
SAT Composite Middle 50%: 1830-2170
SAT Critical Reading: 600 - 710
SAT Math: 620 - 740
SAT Writing: 610 - 720
ACT Composite: 28 - 34
OVERALL acceptance rate: 30% (22% OOS)
Average HS GPA: 4.17
Princeton Review Selectivity Rating: 99</p>
<p>#29 UMich
84% in top 10th of graduating class
SAT Composite Middle 50%: 1840-2150
SAT Critical Reading: 590 - 690
SAT Math: 640 - 750
SAT Writing: 610 - 710
ACT Composite: 27 - 31
OVERALL Accepatance Rate: 51%
Average HS GPA: 3.76
Princeton Review Selectivity Rating: 97</p>
<p>“Michigan and UVa are BOTH great schools; however, based solely on selectivity and the ability to gain entrance into the school, there’s no doubt, UVA is the more difficult of the two.”</p>
<p>Once again Michigan had an acceptance rate of 41% this year.</p>
<p>Phantasmagoric,</p>
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<p>if you wouldn’t mind, i’d like to see it. Not to refute any claim you’ve made, but to learn about how the funds are being used.</p>
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I didn’t think about that, but it would make sense. Stanford’s endowment dropped like $10b during the financial crisis a few years back.</p>
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wouldn’t stanford have been leveled by the great depression as other universities were as well? granted you said “most” i’m just wondering whether or not stanford is in that most…</p>
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<p>the reason i keep putting stock in that source is because its authors claimed it as the closest thing to objective (not based at all on opinion, purely on numbers.) Some of the “sources” you rely on (e.g. QS rankings) have been shown to be erroneous; USNWR says in its methadology that “Rankings of doctoral programs in the social sciences and humanities are based solely on the results of peer assessment surveys sent to academics in each discipline.” In a program like engineering, nearly 40% is just based on what recruiters/employers “think” of a school. These rankings are ultimately dubious imo when compared to the one i provided, which is probably as close to objective as you can get.</p>
<p>It’s absurd that we live in an era of science and that some of our rankings are based on nothing more than academic gossip. Sadly though, i will admit that, the prestige of a program does play a large roll in things like job prospects (even though it shouldn’t.)</p>
<p>Here’s one article that mentioned half:</p>
<p>[UCLA</a> gets another $100-million donation; Kerkorian foundation transferred to school’s control - latimes.com](<a href=“Archive blogs”>Archive blogs)</p>
<p>although it says ‘medical research and other projects’ - I remember another article that had specifically mentioned that $100m of it would go to medical research and activities. The press release from UCLA mentioned that all $200m goes to the Dream Fund, which appears to be for medical purposes - not just research, but charitable causes, academic programs, etc. The Dream Fund’s purpose doesn’t seem completely clear, but the suggestions in the articles on it indicate purposes related to medicine in some way (so it could be that all $200m goes to medical purposes or related ones).</p>
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<p>Like other schools who were well-off before the Great Depression, Stanford had used its financial resources to build a quality university with top professors, facilities, etc. (hence ‘catapulted’). After the Great Depression, many universities’ finances were in ruins, although they still maintained the quality they had beforehand (e.g. the professors). For many rich universities like Stanford, the quality was necessarily maintained during the depression because they offered a sanctuary of sorts from the economic turmoil - even though afterward, their financial resources were largely depleted and had to be built back up (by the 1950s, for example, Stanford’s endowment was $50-60 million).</p>
<p>In other words, the Great Depression put many universities’ financial resources on equal ground, but did not put the quality of the universities (as they were) on equal ground.</p>
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<p>Many rankings claim to be objective. For example, recently, some group in Asia started putting out rankings, claiming they’re the most accurate because they’re the most objective, although they’re no different from ARWU rankings and the like. There are plenty of ‘objective’ rankings by that standard. Funny thing is, even the subjective ones (like US News discipline rankings, which use peer review only) are an almost perfect reflection of the objective ones. There’s an obvious relationship there.</p>
<p>jc40 (post #454),
Not sure where you got your data but it is not official. The most recent CDS published by UVa is 2009-2010 so that is the one we will use for comparison:</p>
<p>< item > … <michigan>…< UVa >
SAT-CR … 590-690 … 600-710
SAT-M … 640-740 … 630-730
SAT-WR … 600-700 … 610-710
SAT tot … 1830-2130 . 1840-2150
ACT … 27-31 … 27-32
Top 10% … 92.2% … 89%
GPA … 3.75 … 4.11*
Acceptance … 50% … 32%
*UVa’s reported GPA is clearly weighted.</michigan></p>
<p>Other than the overall acceptance rate, it looks pretty even to me.</p>
<p>Admissions policies (e.g., use of waitlist) can have significance effects on the overall acceptance rate. I will readily conceit the point that UVa has a more effective admissions team. Btw, Michigan’s acceptance rate has dropped to 41% last year, the first year it adopts the common application.</p>
<p>p.s. Michigan’s top 10% students was indeed 84% in 2010-11, but that was an anormly. In 2006-2010, Michigan numbers were: 90%, 92%, 92%, 92%;
compared to UVa’s: 86%, 87%, 88%, 89%</p>
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<p>Yes but the one i’m emphasizing was based on citations. Citations seem, at least to me, to be much more objective than merely how good i think a program is, or PA. Just because many rankings claim to be objective doesn’t mean that none are, or that none come very close.</p>
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<p>@GoBlue…The data posted came directly from CollegeBoard and Princeton Review. </p>
<p>If you’re wanting the most current info for this year’s class (2015):</p>
<p>[Outstanding</a> Class Ready to Put Its Stamp on University of Virginia](<a href=“http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=15813]Outstanding”>http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=15813)</p>
<p>You will note that 91% of this year’s class was in the top 10% of their graduating class. Although you seem to think that the difference between 84% and 91% is marginal, I do not. Furthermore, you referenced UMich’s acceptance rate going down this year to 41%. Again, to you, the difference between 30% and 41% may not mean much – to me, it’s the difference for some between a low reach and a match or a match and a safety. In short, 11% is fairly significant. Michigan is also a hard admit for OOSers but not nearly as hard as UVA, UNC, or UCB.</p>
<p>I’m not arguing that Michigan isn’t a great school – it certainly is; however, I am arguing that it’s more or as selective as UVa.</p>