<p>you buy a japanese car and learn how to make it have 5000 horsepower</p>
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i'm not bashing berkeley. i simply don't hold it on a pedestal like some other people do. its a great school, but there are a lot of great schools.</p>
<p>infact...i don't even think i even made a reference to berkeley being bad in this thread.
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<p>Alright, that's fine. I don't like it when some people hold it on a pedestal either (california1600 comes to mind). I just see constantly statements on these boards like "Berkeley has huge class sizes" or "Berkeley is bad for undergrad", or in the case of this particular thread, "UVa kicks Berkeley's butt in every regard." I just wanted to give people a more fair assessment of things, that's all.</p>
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. I wouldn't say berkeley is better than princeton.
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<p>Well for graduate programs, i'd say it definitely is because Princeton's graduate programs suck. It also produces very little research. No offense, but Berkeley is in the top 3 in the world for graduate programs. (Stanford and maybe Harvard comprise of the other 2.)</p>
<p>needadvice, </p>
<p>the very problem with your statement is among the very problem with 95% of people who venture to this website. This website is primarily for people persuing an undergraduate education. Notice how there are boards on the main discussion page entitled pre-med and medical school, law school, business school - MBA, and graduate school. If you post on another part of the website, it should be assumed that you are speaking about undergraduate. </p>
<p>If you wish to discuss Berkeley's graduate programs, thats fine - please bring it to the appropriate board. the UVa forum is not the proper place to discuss how berkeley's graduate programs are better than princeton's, and therefore is more prestigious and or better than UVa for an undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Saying Berkeley's outstanding research and graduate programs make it a top 3 (or 5, or 10) undergraduate school is like saying Amherst and Williams suck because they don't have any research or graduate programs.</p>
<p>No, it is nothing like saying that as the same faculty teaches all levels excluding law and med schools. Thus the quality as measured by the graduate schools is a decent proxy for undergrad strength--at least for the faculty and support facilities for comparisons of schools with grad and ug programs. You just can't use them to compare universities to LAC's.</p>
<p>"it is nothing like saying that as the same faculty teaches all levels excluding law and med schools."</p>
<p>barrons, I know you know that that statement isn't exactly correct. You know as well as I do that while yes, there are faculty who teach both grad and undergraduate, just as there are faculty who keep to the grad school, and just as there are faculty who teach primarily undergrads.</p>
<p>Also, I'm sure you're familiar with the usual high profile professor who will have lots of graduate classes, and who will teach a huge intro course for undergrads that a non award winning professor could have taught just as well, if not better. This isn't the case just at berkeley, but its the case at almost every research university.</p>
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berkeley and uva are regional schools - on the east coast 99% of people will think uva is more prestigious, and im assuming the opposite would be true on the west coast.
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<p>Having lived on both coasts, I can say with absolutely certainty this is true. On the west coast, my Virginia sweatshirt gets no recognition. My peers have no idea about UVa. When I told one girl I was going to the University of Virginia, she said, "Oh, I've never heard of it...but I guess there is one." Another girl replied with, "Which one?" (To be fair, though, laymen on the west coast don't even know how great Berkeley is.) </p>
<p>On the east coast, my Virginia sweater is met with catcalls of "Wa hoo wah!" and comments on my intelligence by strangers in the airport/sandwich shop/gas station/etc. My father, who is a CEO of a fairly major company, often mentions in business meetings that his daughter goes to UVa. He comes home and tells me how impressed these executives are that I'm going to such a great school. One particular busisness man who was over at our house [in Boston, MA] stopped me and told me that a degree from UVa was huge and that I could do whatever I wanted after graduation. I swear to God this is a true story. Now, I may have been stopped by a business and told the same thing had I gone to Berkeley, but all I can say is that these were very powerful words and made me even prouder to be a Wahoo.</p>
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First of all, 10% of Berkeley's undergraduate population is Out-Of-State.</p>
<p><a href="http://cds.berkeley.edu/pdfs/PDF%20w...KS%2005-06.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://cds.berkeley.edu/pdfs/PDF%20w...KS%2005-06.pdf</a> (page 14)</p>
<p>This doesn't include internationals, who compose about 3% of the undergraduate population if memory serves me right. That means only 87% of the undergraduate population is in-state.</p>
<p>In contrast, 28% of UVa's undergraduate population is from out-of-state. That means roughly 70% of UVa's undergraduate population is from in-state. Not that much better than Berkeley, in my opinion.
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<p>Your statistics are outdated. 33% of UVa's undergrads are out of state, and that doesn't include 5% international. That means only 62% are in-state. </p>
<p>According to collegeboard.com, which I assume is where you got your outdated info about UVA, Berkeley is 7% out of state. Also according to collegeboard.com, Berkeley is 47% Asian, so I only rounded 3 percentage points. Just to state my sources.</p>
<p>Also, I shared anecdotal evidence to back up my claims about Berkeley's class sizes. Obviously I'm not a Berkeley undergrad so I can't say for sure, but my friend is feeling doubtful about her decision to attend based on the fact that she couldn't get into a single class she wanted.</p>
<p>collegeboard just take into account incoming first years most of the time. There may have been less Asians in past years so it averages out to 45 or whatever it was.</p>
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Your statistics are outdated. 33% of UVa's undergrads are out of state, and that doesn't include 5% international. That means only 62% are in-state. </p>
<p>According to collegeboard.com, which I assume is where you got your outdated info about UVA, Berkeley is 7% out of state. Also according to collegeboard.com, Berkeley is 47% Asian, so I only rounded 3 percentage points. Just to state my sources.
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<p>My statistics are outdated? I got my statistics from UVa's most recent common data set, which is published by the University itself. It's Collegeboard that I don't trust. I admit Collegeboard is easier to get quick data on colleges, but I think the data is outdated. For example, looking at Berkeley, collegeboard says that its acceptance rate is 26%, when in fact for the class of 2010 it is 23.6%. Another look at a well-known school: Yale. This year Yale's acceptance rate hit an all-time low of 8.6%, yet Collegeboard says that Yale's acceptance rate is 10%. Because of these incongruities, I tend to trust a school's CDS, which the school itself publishes, more than Collegeboard's date, which I believe to be outdated. Here's a good thread on CC with links to most popular school's CDS:</p>
<p>Calm down, "vicissitudes", and please check your record again.
"Semiserious" is right.
UVa has 33% of the students coming from OOS, and 67% from in-state.
That is the rule set by state that they have to live by at least for now.</p>
<p>Like I said earlier, both are excellent schools in different ways.
UCB is better known as a research institution than UVa.
However, UVa is a school that is very special and unique in the sense that it was founded by TJ, attended by many historical figures, caring, family-like, and unusually loved by both its students and alumni who forever cherish its association with the school.
Let me just tell you this: UVa is a One Special Place with so much magic in the air on the Ground. People there or who have been there know what I am talking about.</p>
<p>Its amazing how people on this board will make judgments without ever having gone to an institution. Almost everybody on this board is blowing smoke or parroting statistics that are available to everybody with a computer and an internet connection. I don't know much about UVA, having never attended there. But I did get an undergraduate degree from Berkeley and a graduate degree from Stanford. I think either of those schools provide a superior education to anyone willing to work hard. If you want "prestige", either Berkeley or Stanford provide you with that, especially if you are going for the sciences, or even in the humanities. I just don't think that UVA has the "prestige" that Berkeley has internationally, however, especially in the sciences. UVA truly is a regional university, while Berkeley has a well-deserved reputation internationally as a major research university.</p>
<p>venado, it depends on your definition of a regional university is.</p>
<p>Pick UVA!!!...lol</p>
<p>LOL!!! UVa is the only American university to be part of an international coalition of research universities known as Universitas21. The member institutions hail from Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Mexico, Sweden, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Canada. These institutions collaborate in research and academic pursuits, and there is a plethora of undergraduate exchange programs between all member schools.</p>
<p>Hahaha...UVa doesn't look too regional to me.</p>
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However, UVa is a school that is very special and unique in the sense that it was founded by TJ, attended by many historical figures, caring, family-like, and unusually loved by both its students and alumni who forever cherish its association with the school. Let me just tell you this: UVa is a One Special Place with so much magic in the air on the Grounds. People there or who have been there know what I am talking about.
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<p>Well said!</p>
<p>Berkeley's a good school, but I'm going to go with UVa on this one. I would rather die than choose Berkeley, and I'M INSTATE in CA.</p>
<p>Tony Blair said it well when describing the quality of a country. He said someting to the effect that the more people that want in a country, the better the country. The more people that want out, the worse.</p>
<p>Cal is the #2 most applied to university in this country. Cal is larger and accepts a much lower percentage of students than UVa. Sometimes statistics speak much more truth than the opinions of a select few (in their own forum). </p>
<p>Oh yeah -- Go Bears!</p>
<p>Go bears!!!!!!!</p>
<p>California is one of the most (if not the most) populous states in the country, so of course more kids apply to UC Berkeley - especially instate kids.</p>
<p>By the way, the majority of kids who get into UVa choose to go there. The majority of who get into Berkeley choose NOT to go there.</p>
<p>oops.</p>
<p>Though I would think it would be common sense to correlate applications to population. For being in a state that's 4-5 times the size of Virginia, UCB obviously can't expand to a 60K Person school so they reject numerous people in their populous state. Sometimes you need to think about what's behind the statistics before you report them.</p>