<p>RML, I don’t think TheSaiyans was claiming a demand-based different but rather, a supply-based difference, and I am inclined to agree with him on that point. The percentage of students at Cal or Michigan who wish to pursue careers in Law, Investment Banking or Management Consulting is nowhere near the percentage of such students at Duke and other similarly pre-professional schools. You would have to look at Haas or Ross to see a comparable ratio of students interested in such professional pursuits at Cal and Michigan.</p>
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<p>You’re a guy with double standards. lol</p>
<p>Yesterday you just claimed that Duke places much better than Berkeley in “the street”. It’s obvious that you’re ■■■■■■■■ on this thread and you obviously don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Why won’t you just keep quite and read posts.</p>
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Fortune 50 CEOs? Is that a sizable data to be able to clearly establish that Duke places much better than Berkeley in the Street? lol</p>
<p>Alexandre, thank you for the explanation. I just find it troubling when someone says Duke places much better than Berkeley or Michigan in the banking or finance industry despite that the two latter schools are multi-disciplinary and run by departments due to their large size. Some people just couldn’t accept the fact that both Berkeley and Michigan are just as target schools by these large banks than is Duke.</p>
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Alex, are you a student at Cal, Michigan and Duke right now? I don’t know how anyone would have the authority or the expertise to make statements such as “Duke is much more pre-professional than Michigan/Cal” without being a current student/recent alumni/have lots of CURRENT contacts in all three of these institutions.</p>
<p>First off, Michigan and Cal have an UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS SCHOOL while Duke does not. There are approximately 350-400 students in Ross and about 700 in Haas each year which means that there are the same number of students enrolled just in the business programs at Cal/Mich as there are students at Duke interested in investment banking or management consulting. I would say there are no more than 500 students interesting in banking/consulting at Duke in a given class and the interest level would be at the same level at its peer private schools. I can guarantee that the VAST majority of students in Ross/Haas want banking or consulting jobs and this isn’t to say that the majority of Econ students at Mich/Cal don’t want these jobs either. Due to their large enrollment, Michigan and Cal have MORE students interested in Wall Street positions than any smaller private schools like Duke(4 times smaller) and Dartmouth(6-7 times smaller).</p>
<p>It’s not that there isn’t enough of a supply of students at Cal/Mich that are interested in finance/consulting positions, it’s that many of them SIMPLY CAN’T GET THEM. Each company has a certain quota of students it will take from each school and these quota is bigger for Dartmouth/Duke than it is for Cal/Michigan.</p>
<p>Michigan actually has pretty good Wall Street representation while Cal is virtually nonexistent on The Street so lumping them is a somewhat disingenuous move on my part although I was trying to make a separate point.</p>
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They’re simply not. I work on Wall Street and I’m telling you that there isn’t a single bank I know where Berkeley has even half the representation of Dartmouth and Duke. Michigan is very well represented at JPM, RBS and boutiques like Moelis but is almost nonexistent in places like GS, MS and Merrill.</p>
<p>" I can guarantee that the VAST majority of students in Ross/Haas want banking or consulting jobs and this isn’t to say that the majority of Econ students at Mich/Cal don’t want these jobs either. Due to their large enrollmentMichigan and Cal have MORE students interested in Wall Street positions than any smaller private schools like Duke(4 times smaller) and Dartmouth(6-7 times smaller)." </p>
<p>Hmmm…I am a little surprised to read this. How do you know this?</p>
<p>I would think most Cal students would want to end up in California.</p>
<p>P</p>
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<p>What?
My links were not intended to prove anything. Notice I never explicitly said “Duke is better than Berkeley” at all. Go back and read my posts carefully. Whatever I post is for knowledge and passing statistics.
And from the links I gave you, Duke and Dartmouth place higher than Berkeley. Look at the links again.
I fully agree with Alexandre.</p>
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<p>Haha - the sentence could not work because one critical word was missing, namely NOT. Obviously, only 7% were accepted. A better sentence would have been:</p>
<p>Obviously, I know that 93 percent of the 30,000 applicants were REJECTED on the basis of MORE than tests scores and GPAs, including a deeper and comparative analysis of the validity of regional GPAs.</p>
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<p>Again, being an Ivy-caliber student means absolutely nothing in the context of this discussion. You could find the ONE student currently enrolled at an Ivy League school that was admitted with the lowest SAT and GPA possible and declare that anyone with similar stats is … Ivy League caliber. For all we know, such a category might comprise 500,000 students.</p>
<p>And regarding Harvard versus the entire Ivy League, I’d happy to maintain the same low three digit number for the entire Ivy League plus Stanford plus MIT. To be clear, I maintain that you would hard pressed to find more than 200 students from the latest freshman class at Michigan who turned down one of those 10 schools to travel to Ann Arbor.</p>
<p>^ Yaaaaaay, everyone’s a winner!</p>
<p>Hmmm…that’s an awful lot students interested in I-banking. Aren’t there any business students interested in actually manufacturing a product any more, or doing something that actually benefits society?</p>
<p>How do people just out of school become management consultants? I would think a cxonsultant needs some expertise. Do these folks have any particular expertise?</p>
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<p>So you really believe that the very large overlaps in test scores and GPAs/rank mean absolutely nothing? I would think they mean something. We are not talking about a few outliers here. We are talking about many hundreds of students at Michigan or Berkeley whose grades, rank and scores are virtually indistinguishable from those of typical Ivy-plus students. If that is not enough to make them “Ivy caliber” then the difference hinges on factors whose significance in many cases is subject to considerable disagreement. This is why the Ivies so often are said to be reaches for nearly anyone.</p>
<p>If you disagree then we are at an impasse that I do not think will easily be resolved by data. I don’t need to be persuaded that the Ivies (HYP especially) get an outsized share of kids whose talent can’t be fully expressed by grades or test scores. I really don’t know how many such kids wind up at Michigan or Cal. More importantly, I’m not sure how much that matters to the college learning experience of a bright, well-rounded kid who does or does not share a classroom with them.</p>
<p>Tk21769, again, you keep coming back with elements that were not part of the original discussion. Why do insist to depart from the issue that was about the commonality of students who attend Michigan despite having been accepted at Harvard, or at a few highly selective schools? </p>
<p>Is it really necessary for me to repeat --again-- what I have stated earlier, but to quote Frost, in less “good” words?</p>
<p>Because this is a discussion, not me listening to you lecture, and I do not agree with the terms in which you are trying to frame this discussion.</p>
<p>The original discussion is responding to a question. What are public Ivies? There are corollary questions. I don’t believe that the “commonality of students” can be well understood by limiting the discussion to students who choose or don’t choose Michigan in a cross-admit contest. Though I can appreciate why someone might want to frame it in just those terms. It does give the discussion a clear empirical basis. Well, o.k.</p>
<p>TK, I am not lecturing you in any way or fashion. </p>
<p>As far as I know, you can take this discussion in any direction you want. However, what can I do more than repeating the same thing I wrote before:</p>
<p>"The discussion and your agreement with Alexandre are quite different from mine --which were about the commonality of ACCEPTED students and the definition of as simple term as “many.”</p>
<p>As far as framing the discussion, I believe that I do not have to actively debate the validity of points I never made nor addressed. Please read the posts 344, 356, and 358 for the start of THIS discussion. Since both of us used quotations, it is very simple to follow the scope of what was discussed and where there was no agreement.</p>
<p>^ Well, it seems to me that you are posting with a rather smug tone that it is you who have the right and authority to frame the discussion, and that if someone disagrees with you it is because he is too dense to follow your argument. I think that I do understood your points (I read #358 the first time), and I concede the validity of them, as far as I think they go. Yes, even without the actual cross-admit numbers, one can do some simple arithmetic on the admits and the yields at the Ivies (esp. HYP), and conclude that Michigan must not be getting much of the spoils of those contests. </p>
<p>Where we seem to differ is in interpreting the meaning and significance of these numbers. If you think it is pointless to speculate about interpretations and meanings that cannot be supported by evidence, fine, that’s not an unreasonable position. We can agree to disagree. You can resume with someone else whatever you think should be the most productive focus of this discussion.</p>
<p>To sum up my position on what I think is the main issue in this whole thread … I believe the Ivies have some strengths that the public Ivies cannot 100% replicate. One area of strength is that they are more selective, so they can craft classes that have higher concentrations of unusually talented kids. In most respects, though, the public Ivies represent a tremendous value for in-state students, and the Ivy advantages are not automatically worth an extra ~$30K/year for all full-pay students fortunate to have the choice. If for example your roommate at either school is likely be a top student (high rank, high scores), I don’t think it is necessarily worth a huge price premium to get a roommate who also is a Choate graduate and national tennis champion. After all, maybe you don’t even like tennis, and maybe he’s a real d*ck. If you sum all the other exceptional people you’re likely to meet at the Ivies (not just Choate grads but also inner city hell-hole grads, not just tennis champions but also Intel prize winners, etc. etc.) then the case does become stronger, and the Ivy experience may well be worth some price premium.</p>
<p>tk,
I like this comment,</p>
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<p>For IS students in places like California, Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, maybe even Texas and Pennsylvania, the public alternatives offer a pretty darn good value and especially for students who can find a way into the Honors programs of highly regarded state colleges in those states. </p>
<p>More broadly speaking about this thread and dozens of others like it, it seems that one’s opinion can be distilled down to whether they value many of the nuts-and-bolts elements of an undergraduate education from the student’s perspective (quality of student peers, size of classroom, quality of classroom instruction, availability of undergrad-focused services) or whether they value institutional comparisons that are driven by faculty measures which themselves are driven by research accomplishments. The publics are pretty good at the latter, but at a decided disadvantage vs top privates for the former.</p>
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<p>No, I am absolutely right - the bulk did. Again, the bulk does not mean the majority - how many times do I have to explain it? </p>
<p>Since you were unable, as I requested, to actually name a single area other than the Bay Area where you think the bulk of Berkeley ChemE’s are employed, I would ask you to please stop your nonsense. You were wrong, let’s leave it at that.</p>
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<p>Oh? Again, the bulk stayed in the Bay Area. Seems to me that another chunk went to Southern California, which ain’t exactly the cheapest place to live either. The Accenture guy almost certainly lives in a relatively high-cost city, for that is where the Accenture offices tend to be. The Boeing guy probably went to either Seattle or SoCal, both of which are not cheap. </p>
<p>I might agree with you that if Berkeley was sending giant contingents of graduates to a low-cost engineering mecca such as the Gulf Coast, then I would be wrong. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Hence, unless you have more evidence to support your stance, what you’re saying seems to be absolutely false.</p>
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<p>I seem to recall reading on another thread that Stanford wins well over half of the cross-admits from the rest of the Pac-10 combined, of which Berkeley is obviously only one member. Hence, if that is the case, then the Stanford-Berkeley cross-admit battle must be clearly slanted in one direction. </p>
<p>I would also propose the following thought experiment: how many Berkeley students would rather transfer to HYPSM vs. vice versa? Be honest. For those who would argue that the latter number is high, that begs the question of why haven’t they done so already, as it is well-established that Berkeley is relatively easy to be admitted to as a transfer (relative to freshman-admissions).</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong. I wish that Berkeley would be a fully competitive choice against HYPSM. But the fact of the matter is, whatever the reason may be, that doesn’t seem to be the case.</p>
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<p>I find it intriguing that JohnAdams12 has chosen not to comment on this post. So I’ll pose the following question to the crowd: what exactly is the benefit of earning, say, a chemical engineering degree at a top-ranked school such as, say, Princeton, if you’re going to work as an engineer but will make little more than will the average chemical engineering graduate from an average school, particularly after adjusting for cost-of-living differences? </p>
<p>Now, to be clear, I agree that there may indeed be significant benefits if you don’t want to work as an engineer, but are merely using the engineering degree as a (high-stress) pathway towards other careers such as consulting or investment banking. I agree that there may also be benefits if you intend to embark upon a career within engineering academia, from attending a school with a top ChemE department such as Princeton, Berkeley, or MIT does indeed provide research opportunities that aid you towards admission in top graduate programs. </p>
<p>But if all you want to do is work as an engineer, what exactly is the benefit of attending a top program?</p>
<p>^ You really are asking (I think) what is the cost benefit. If the cost of all top programs were exactly the same, and if the financial rewards were exactly the same, would the top program not be more desirable than a mediocre program (in ChemE or in anything else)?
The only reason it wouldn’t be is if you are not willing to put in the extra work required.</p>
<p>Many smart, competent people will prefer to go to school with other smart competent people, costs and financial benefits being equal. This is all the more true if the financial benefits of top programs are greater. It will still tend to be true even if the starting salaries aren’t demonstrably much higher, and for some people even if the costs are higher, up to a point. What is that point? Whatever is is, I doubt that most people make a fully informed, fully rational calculation of where it should be, unless it is perfectly clear that one can’t afford the higher-priced program. In many cases it is a decision based on incomplete information and unsettled personal goals. No high school student really knows for sure that he’ll become a chemical engineer. Even if he did know, no data exists to demonstrate with certainty that he’ll earn more in real dollars by graduating from Cal than from Purdue, or from MIT than from Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>However, two things are pretty clear, even in the face of uncertainty about personal goals or salary potential. First, Berkeley offers top engineering programs. Second, for a full pay California resident (one who does not qualify anywhere else for need-based aid), Berkeley will be much cheaper than virtually any private school that offers top engineering programs (with the possible exception of Cooper Union, Olin, or a school offering large merit scholarships). So if you do choose Stanford or MIT for engineering over Berkeley for engineering at double the cost, you are not doing so based on a rational, data-driven, cost benefit analysis. You’re doing it for the bragging rights (or some other reasons having nothing to do with engineering program costs and benefits.</p>