<p>
Well, since you’re in heaven, you must be right cause you’re probably God.</p>
<p>Prince, RML, you’re both correct.</p>
<ul>
<li>Undergrad: Berkeley is rightly ranked about #21</li>
<li>Ph.D.: Berkeley, Harvard and Stanford are co-#1s for the past 30 years at least as Instituions across all disciplines.</li>
<li>Professional Schools: Berkeley hovers around 5-10 ranking for Law, Business and Medicine (UCSF is UC’s defacto medical research facility), ahead of most Ivies.</li>
</ul>
<p>
</p>
<p>Even disregarding HYPSM, Berkeley still cannot compare with Brown, Columbia, Duke, UPenn, Caltech, Dartmouth, UChicago, and Cornell each. Probably the only reason why one would ever chose Berkeley over these universities is simply cost.</p>
<p>The universities I mentioned are highly respected and are second to HYPSM. Their prestige, academics, and statistics are higher and better than Berkeley.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter even if the statistics you give shows that Cornell and Berkeley are similar.
The result: Cornell is ranked higher in USNWR, its more selective, and it’s of the “Ivy League.”
To get into Berkeley, all you need is to go to a subpar high school in CA and be in the top 5%-10%. That doesn’t sound prestigious to me…</p>
<p>A personal experience.
Friend A = Ranked 2 of 400 in her high school. She has stellar academics and she has great ECs involving herself with the school. However she went to a mediocre high school. Her APs are mostly 3s and she got a 1990 SAT.
Rejected from Cornell, got into Berkeley.</p>
<p>Friend B = Ranked 36 out of 300 in his high school. Has slightly above average academics. He builds Robots and writes complicated software for fun. No ECs. Got a 2260 on the SAT.
Rejected from UCBerkeley and UCLA, got into Cornell.</p>
<p>I don’t know if its me, but I keep seeing somewhat similar patterns of selection happening all the time between the Ivies and public schools (Berkeley and UCLA). To me, I see Friend B having a lot more potential and having a more interesting life than Friend A. I realize the example I gave is highly subjective. But the whole college process is mainly subjective anyway. I feel subjective experiences play a bigger role in a university’s image/prestige.</p>
<p>
lots of CA high schoolers wish that were the case. The stats you quote are about right for UCI, UCSB, and UCD, assuming an OK SAT result.</p>
<p>For Berkeley and UCLA, top 1-2% of the typical suburban public high school class is required. For UCSD, top 2-4% is required. At our local high school of 625 or so graduates each year, about 15 go to Berkeley. More than that amount, from the top 10% of the class, are rejected. Berkeley rejects 79% of applicants. The applicant pool to any of the 9 UCs is the top 12.5% of CA high school graduates.</p>
<p>Prince, I’m going to assume you were accepted into Berkeley, and also apparently MIT, and therefore have a sense of satisfaction in that accomplishment. Good for you, but no need to bash Berkeley.</p>
<p>Mr. Prince: </p>
<p>Your friend A was the Sal, not 5%, not 10%. The point is that, without a hook, only the top few from “medicocre” high schools are accepted.</p>
<p>Your friend B probably got offered boat loads of $ from 'SC.</p>
<p>But so what? The difference just show that UC values gpa more than test scores. If your frend B would have applied himself/herself better in the classroom, s/he would have been a easier admit into Cal. It;s just that after reserving slot for those from teh “mediocre” high school, Cal requires top grades and test scores from everyone else. Perhaps then Cornell is the “easier” admit for the unhooked, untipped. :D</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
To a dude going to MIT, I can see why you’d be more easily impressed with the introverted computer nerd…</p>
<p>I think what the OP is after cannot be reduced to rankings or admission stats. He seems to be looking for a brand identity, one with national name recognition and appeal, that is both exclusive and distinctly western. He’s looking for a brand comparable to “Ivy League” that would make it as meaningful to go “out west” as it is to go “back east” to college. Such a thing simply does not exist. There is no set of 2 or more western colleges that can make up a meaningful stand-alone acronym like “HYP”. What would it be? “SPB”? “CRS”? </p>
<p>In the 18th century, every colony needed ministers and legislators. Every northern colony had to have a Harvard. These were places to cultivate things of the spirit and a life of the mind. These are the origins of Ivy League mystique. By 1900 or so, every western state had to have a flagship public university. These were places to learn veterinary science or business accounting. There’s not too much mystique in any of that.</p>
<p>“Reed College was founded in 1908 with funds from another wealthy entrepreneur who wanted to bring culture to city life in the West. … Founded explicitly in reaction to the “prevailing model of East Coast, Ivy League education, …””</p>
<p>tk’s point is well taken, but one minor clarification: both of the above statements are true, but there is little connection between them. Simeon Reed died years before Reed was founded, and his will said only “… devote some portion of my estate to benevolent objects, or to the cultivation, illustration, or development of the fine arts in the city of Portland, or to some other suitable purpose, which shall be of permanent value and contribute to the beauty of the city and to the intelligence, prosperity, and happiness of the inhabitants.”
<a href=“http://centennial.reed.edu/docs/jones_curricular_hist_78pg_1982_X.pdf[/url]”>http://centennial.reed.edu/docs/jones_curricular_hist_78pg_1982_X.pdf</a></p>
<p>Eliot was certainly correct! :)</p>
<p>Thanks for that link, Vossron. Very interesting to read how the founders’ vision took shape.</p>
<p>MrPrince, half the people at Berkeley have SAT scores identical to the lower-ranked Ivies. The upper quartile of Berkeley students, which count to about 6,000, have SAT scores equal to HYPSMC students. If it’s true that Berkeley rejects applicants on the basis of high SAT scores alone, why are there about 12k students at Cal with SAT scores high enough to get them into a top private school?</p>
<p>OnT: No school in the West Coast can equal Ivy League. Again, Ivy league is uniquely an EAST COAST thing. There is no substitute for it. Stanford, MIT and Caltech are probably better than most ivy schools. But the uniqueness of the league sets it apart from all the rest of the schools. It’s like Oxbridge. It’s not the ultimate best universities on earth. But they are special and anciently old with great and highly influential alumni, and that sets them apart from all the rest of the schools anywhere on earth.</p>
<p>@RML
We all know that the top national universities modeled after HYPS complement SATs and GPA with other holistic, subjective standards which Berkeley students do not particularly excel. There is a rather large surplus of students with high SAT-GPA applying to HYPS that makes admissions decisions rather unpredictable. </p>
<p>The top national universities modeled after CalTech that use almost strictly SAT-GPA admissions standards have significantly higher scores than Berkeley. (CalTech is really the only top national university that subscribes to the CalTech model, however.)</p>
<p>are there any schools on the west coast that bring to mind studying in ancient halls and secret societies and well dressed people living a sort of old world collegiate scholarly life.</p>
<p>No, not on the West coast. </p>
<p>While the architectural style of the older buildings on many Ivy League campuses might evoke such images and create a certain ambience, a visit to most of the Ivy League campuses also shows the reality that these buildings and grounds are just the backdrop for some incredibly super busy, hyper places. </p>
<p>You also should know that the Ivy League of your imagination is very much a contrived environment. Sure there are genuinely old colonial era buildings. There are also collegiate gothic buildings, but these mostly are buildings constructed in the modern era. Yale even faux-aged some of its buildings to make them look older. There are faux-heraldic arms and other symbols of a bygone old world era. The house system at Harvard and the college system at Yale only date to the 1930s. At Harvard, even the statue of John Harvard in the Yard is a lie. I very much like the ambience these surroundings create and the images they evoke, and greatly prefer them, but realize, its a stage set. </p>
<p>Though there are strong historical associations of academic endeavors with those types of settings, I dont think they are the only, or necessarily, the most appropriate examples for a university to follow. Take Berkeleys central campus. This is executed in a neoclassical Beaux-Arts style, evoking the ancient Greeks, Romans, and the Italian Renaissance. In many ways, this is very a fitting expression of the ideals that inspired the Berkeley campus design, that of a City of Learning. [John</a> Galen Howard’s ‘City of Learning’ - UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://www.berkeley.edu/news/multimedia/2003/03/jgh/index.shtml]John”>John Galen Howard's 'City of Learning' - UC Berkeley) Arguably, this style is more genuine in that it is contemporaneous with styles in vogue for public buildings at the time they were built. It also evokes old-world associations, though of a different sort than some of the Ivy League universities. I say some of the Ivy League universities because several of them certainly have buildings or sections of their campuses also built in the neo-classical mode. This is true of Columbia, the Widener Library at Harvard, etc. Outside the Ivy League, MITs main building is done in a classical style, and, of course, UVA is done in an earlier rendition of a classical style. </p>
<p>(The OP might appreciate the series of campus guidebooks put out by Princeton Architectural Press: [Princeton</a> Architectural Press * Book Search Results](<a href=“Princeton Architectural Press”>Princeton Architectural Press))</p>
<p>so, in addition to asking how the east coast sees some west coast schools and if any are even seen as close to ivies in terms of mythology (not academics, that is a different question), i guess also is there a certain way people on the east coast think of west coast university? like if we on the west coast think of the east coast as how i’ve sort of described the ivies, do people on the east coast have a view of west coast education?</p>
<p>No, I dont think people on the East coast think of any West coast universities in terms of the mythology you described. Though certainly educated people on the East coast are aware of the academic and research accomplishments of Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA, they are as provincial as people in other parts of the country, if not more so. With a few exceptions, university reputations and preferences tend to be regional. Just as the West coast man on the street is probably unaware of Dartmouth or Brown, so too, the East coast man on the street is probably unaware of Berkeley or UCLA, apart from student protests in the case of Berkeley and sports in the case of UCLA. Also, many people on the East coast would tend to write off Berkeley or UCLA because they have an almost congenital bias against public universities, based on their perception of their own public universities, which Northeastern states have treated poorly over the years and have failed to develop to the same level of quality as the great Midwest and California public universities. And some of this bias is probably just class snobbery as well.</p>
<p>the other kind of mythology i guess the west coast has is all of the tech schools and research schools like caltech berkeley etc. and i guess to an extent the rest of it just gets wrapped up in the mythology of the west coast (mostly california?). which i guess is the same as the ivies. so i guess thats kind of the west coast mythology.</p>
<p>I think there is a certain mythology to California that carries over to its universities, though it is different than the East coast mythology and it is becoming tarnished with the recent economic and political troubles in that state. In part, it is defined in contrast to the East coast and its universities, where family, class, religion, gender, etc. limited ones horizons and opportunities. In part, the mix of cultures, the openness to Asia and the Pacific Rim, etc. and certainly, the high tech and entrepreneurial mystique of Silicon Valley defines it. Like all mythologies, it contains a mix of truth and untruth. </p>
<p>In the 18th century, every colony needed ministers and legislators. Every northern colony had to have a Harvard. These were places to cultivate things of the spirit and a life of the mind. These are the origins of Ivy League mystique. By 1900 or so, every western state had to have a flagship public university. These were places to learn veterinary science or business accounting. There’s not too much mystique in any of that.</p>
<p>Certainly, I think the life of the mind is a big part of the Ivy League mystique—Boston as Athens of America and all that, but I would argue that the connection with social elites and the political-economic influence of certain Ivys is just as big a part of it. The symbolic function of certain architectural styles and associated trappings only reinforce these associations.</p>
<p>Of course, many Western state public universities are primarily places to learn vocational skills. If were referring to Berkeley, however, it really sets up a false dichotomy to imply that colonial colleges were places associated with a life of the mind while a place like Berkeley is not. Fairly early in its history, Berkeley set out to become a university as good as the great universities back East and it largely succeeded. It is worth keeping in mind that Harvard was not very much of a university for much of its long history compared to many European universities. After it finally did develop into a modern university, as we understand that concept today, the length of time it had been a modern university was not all that much longer than Berkeley. By 1900, Berkeley and several other public and private universities were starting to develop into graduate research universities. Some of these founded explicitly on the model of the German research university were ahead of Harvard and other Ivy League universities; others, including Berkeley, did not lag too far behind.</p>
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</p>
<p>Yes. Reed, Chicago, and a few other schools tried to emulate the former and reject the negative aspects of the latter. But this never really coalesced into a deliberate, distinctly western pattern. </p>
<p>
Many Western universities imitated the same architectural forms. Stanford is an exception but as far as I know few others adopted a style meant to express values associated with the American west (freedom, individualism, social equality, risk-taking).</p>
<p>“Yes. Reed, Chicago, and a few other schools tried to emulate the former and reject the negative aspects of the latter. But this never really coalesced into a deliberate, distinctly western pattern.”</p>
<p>However, the public universities did foster the notion that higher education is a public good that should be available to the common man, and not just reserved for a social elite. Though this notion perhaps originated with the land grant movement, California’s higher ed system is a leading example of showing the way to public higher education on a mass scale. Among private universities, Chicago had a long history of not setting barriers to a college education for many a bright Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish kids from the neighborhoods of Chicago. This is definitely a strand in American higher education that stands in stark contrast to the exclusionary policies of some of the Ivys. Though I would agree for the most part with the quoted comment about rejecting the negative aspects of social elitism, the less exclusionary policies of many Midwestern and Western universities were a distinct pattern in that sense.</p>
<p>“Many Western universities imitated the same architectural forms. Stanford is an exception but as far as I know few others adopted a style meant to express values associated with the American west (freedom, individualism, social equality, risk-taking).”</p>
<p>That’s true that they usually imitated traditional architectural styles and didn’t adopt styles expressive of the values associated with the American West. The point I tried to make with respect to Berkeley was that the old-world styles that it adopted also served to generate a quite suitable academic ambience with its own “mystique”, even though it differed from the colonial era and collegiate gothic styles prevalent at some Ivys----the Greek/Roman/Renaissance humanist vs. the cloistered monk or Oxbridge don, I suppose. None, however, adopted a style that imitated Heidelberg or Prague, even though the German university was grafted onto the English college to create the modern American university. In any case, tradition or the appearance of tradition is marketable, and I think it would be difficult for a university to rise in the ranks today if it didn’t at least have a core of old buildings that look like a college is supposed to look.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The vocabulary of available forms was richer than Collegiate Gothic. For example, at a few small colleges (like Haverford) you see Tudor Revival buildings. This is a style associated with the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts movement in England. I wonder why it did not catch on in a bigger way in college architecture, because it seems very expressive of a democratic, informal, intimate ethos that Americans would find appealing. It may have to do with who had enough money to endow a college around the turn of the 20th century. The Leland Stanfords, the John D. Rockefellors, happened to be big industrial tycoons.</p>
<p>Ezra Cornell founded Western Union, but was also another birthright Quaker with a very democratic outlook. His vision for Cornell University was consistent with the emerging model for public land grant universities. But again, that model never really developed its own mystique. When you shine the light of equality and inclusiveness on a college, the mystique disappears along with the secret societies. The Deep Springs cowboy-philosopher figure has never acquired the status of the Harvard Man.</p>
<p>
No one here compares Berkeley to HYPSMC. We all know that for undergrad level, Berkeley cannot compete with those schools, in general. But even the lower-ranked Ivies can’t compete with HYPSMC. HYPSMC compete mostly against themselves. So, let’s stop comparing Berkeley with HYPSMC.</p>
<p>
You have t understand that i was only trying to respond to MrPrince’s comment about Berkeley disregarding applicants with very high SAT scores. If it was true that Berkeley discriminates students with extremely high SAT scores, why then that half of Berkeley students, which count to about 12 thousand, have SAT scores and GPA as high as, if not slightly higher than, those students at the Ivies?</p>
<p>None even get close to the prestige of the Ivies.
But I would argue that most people couldn’t name all 8 ivies. </p>
<p>Harvard, Princeton, Yale are the holy trinity and the only true Ivies. </p>
<p>I mean Brown University? Do you really think your every day person in California, or Arizona even knows what that is?</p>
<p>Stanford and Pepperdine are your best bet on the west coast.</p>
<p>Re # 17:
“Berkeley students compare quite well with Cornell’s students. Let’s take a look at the student data of both schools.”</p>
<p>How about looking at the CORRECT, and MOST RECENT student data?? And maybe even compare COMPARABLE schools. Cornell’s 7 undergraduate colleges have separate admissions by college, you have to apply to a specific college there, and admissions odds and profiles at each college are not all identical. I assume the same is true at Berkeley. </p>
<p>Even looking at aggregates, however misleading, the acceptance rate for Cornell as an aggregate last year was 18.4%, and the SAT midrange for all its colleges as if they were aggregated together was 1330-1480. 89% of such aggregated group were in the top tenth of their high school class. This is all readily-available data reported by the university.</p>
<p>These are NOT the numbers you posted in #17. Your numbers are either WRONG or OLD.</p>
<p>Again, keep in mind nobody applies to an aggregate, so these stats do not most appropriately frame the odds for anyone applying there, who must apply to a particular college there and not an aggregate. </p>
<p>Admissions rates to Cornell’s colleges last year were as follows:
Agriculture 21.2%; Human Ecology 31.3%; Industrial & Labor Relations 20.1%; Architecture 14.6%; Arts & Sciences 15.7%;Engineering 21.7%; Hotel Administration 26.0%; Aggregate 18.4%.</p>
<p>The SAT ranges by college have not yet been published, they are available for the prior year for those interested. There are variations in these ranges, by college.</p>
<p>Does Berkeley even have colleges other than Arts & Sciences and Engineering?</p>
<p>Suggest if you are applying to Berkeley Arts & Sciences and Cornell Arts & Sciences, use numbers for those two particular colleges there to assess your odds, not some university aggregate, lest you be misled about your odds and your true cohort there. Ditto if you are applying to Berkeley Arts & Sciences and Cornell Human Ecology, or Berkeley engineering and Cornell engineering, etc. Your odds will be most accurately described by the data by college, not some aggregate.</p>
<p>Whether Berkeley Arts & Sciences is actually more selective than Cornell Arts & Sciences I really don’t know (for certain), but if you’re comparing use the right, current numbers, for the right colleges- the ones you are actually comparing, and considering applying to. You can’t apply to an aggregate.</p>
<p>Thanks for your post, monydad. Please understand that I wasn’t at all saying Cornell is such a bad school. I seriously think that it is a great school, and if I have to rank the Ivies based on academic strength, it would surely not fall in the bottom of the Ivies, contrary to what most people here on CC believe. Having said that, I think that, as good as Cornell is, it has a counterpart in the West coast, in terms of academic prestige.</p>
<p>
College of Letters & Science
College of Chemistry
College of Engineering
College of Environmental Design
College of Natural Resources
Haas School of Business
School of Social Welfare</p>
<p>Then the grad-only schools:
Graduate School of Education
Graduate School of Journalism
School of Optometry
Boalt Hall School of Law
School of Public Health
Goldman School of Public Policy
School of Information</p>