<p>That’s stupid. Really. I thought your posts were better than that. Your ideas were better than that.</p>
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<p>Because I think Michigan is Cal’s only serious contender for the time being for the title of the best public school in the nation. </p>
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<p>As I said before, schools such as the Ivies, MIT, and Chicago don’t offer athletic scholarships. Yet nobody disputes their academic prowess.</p>
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<p>Silly me. All this time I assumed the thread title was: “What is UC Berkeley like? - Please answer(:”</p>
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<p>Actually, I think I can forget about UTAustin, at least at the present time. UT’s endowment is only slightly larger than Michigan’s, yet Michigan has significantly fewer students. More importantly, UT would need years if not decades to upgrade its PhD programs to the level of Berkeley’s even if Berkeley’s were to decline. And - you said it yourself - UT’s 10% rule is its greatest handicap, for while the California high school system may be mediocre, Texas’s is, frankly, worse, with average SAT scores ranking below 45 out of 50 states. </p>
<p>[Texas</a> Where We Stand: Education](<a href=“http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/wwstand/wws0512ed/]Texas”>http://www.window.state.tx.us/comptrol/wwstand/wws0512ed/)</p>
<p>Now, that’s not to say that UT couldn’t challenge for the crown in the future, for they certainly could. I agree that UT is flush with cash, and Austin is a fun city. But I don’t take that as a serious challenge that needs to be met anytime soon.</p>
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<p>Uh, I think that question has been satisfactorily answered by myself and (especially) by others in this thread. If you want those answers, feel free to read the backposts. </p>
<p>However, the topic of this thread has clearly shifted, and I am now talking about the new topic. If you don’t want to participate in that, fine, nobody is forcing you.</p>
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<p>That seems to be a pure marketing strategy. Yet the truth is, most undergrads don’t care. Let’s be honest - most incoming undergrads don’t even know what they’re going to major in. Even if they did, most undergrads know that they probably won’t be pursuing their major professionally and/or pursuing grad school in that specific field. {Again, as a case in point, relatively few poli-sci majors - which is one of the largest majors on campus- actually become professional political scientists. One poli-sci graduate became a Southwest Airlines flight attendant. Another became a manager at Round Table Pizza. Another became a sales associate at Macy’s. Exactly what those jobs have to do with political science is rather unclear.} </p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/PolSci.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/PolSci.stm</a></p>
<p>Personally, I suspect the departmental strength is a way for undergrads to justify their choice of school to others, or perhaps even to themselves. Yet the fact is, it hardly matters for most practical purposes. What does it matter how strong the political science department may be if you’re not going to pursue poli-sci as a profession anyway?</p>
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<p>Michigan doesn’t “prioritize sports over academics.” Its athletic programs are fully self-supporting; not one dime of tuition, state legislative appropriations, or other general fund money goes into the athletic programs. The bulk of the athletic budget comes from football ticket sales, television rights, parking, concessions, etc., which together with smaller surpluses generated by men’s basketball and men’s hockey provides ample revenue to cover all the costs for those three sports and something on the order of 20 other men’s and women’s varsity sports. That’s not true at many schools. At the Ivies, for example, athletic program budgets come out of the same pot as academic programs. It’s at those schools that athletics are a drain on academic budgets—not at Michigan.</p>
<p>As for admissions, did it ever occur to you that Michigan enrolls a whopping average of 21 scholarship football players and 3 basketball players per entering class? There are also scholarship athletes in other sports, but most of them have stats pretty much in line with the rest of the student body. That’s out of an entering class of something like 6,300. Pretty trivial. Not much dilution of academic standards there, at least none that would have a perceptible impact on the average student at Michigan. Oh, and a survey done by the Atlanta Journal Constitution in late 2008 based on public records disclosures found that Michigan football players had the second-highest SAT/ACT scores among 54 Division IA public universities—higher than any others in the Big Ten, higher than any in the PAC 10, higher than any in the SEC, Big East, or Big Twelve, trailing only the ACC’s Georgia Tech by a few points. In overall athlete SAT/ACT scores (all varsity sports), Michigan came out #1 among these leading public universities. In fact, the average ATHLETE at Michigan has an SAT score that’s about 30 points HIGHER than the average STUDENT at cross-state rival Michigan State and at least half the other schools in the AJC survey. That’s hardly an “embarrassment.”</p>
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<p>Sakky, majors at Berkeley matter to students because Berkeley, unlike those small schools, are highly departmental in nature. </p>
<p>whilst it is true that there are plenty of “A” type of students who choose schools first before picking up on major, there are also plenty of the same caliber of students who choose the latter before the school. </p>
<p>For example, if I want to major in computer science, i’d be thinking of Stanford, Berkeley, MIT and CMU. But if I’m not yet decided what on which program to major in, it’s wise to pick a highly reputable school first before picking up a major. </p>
<p>In short, there are students who care about majors and there those who don’t. Those who don’t would be better of going to small private schools. But for those who do, they often choose department strength and overall all prestige of the school. Berkeley’s programs are strong and Berkeley, as an academic institution, is prestigious.</p>
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<p>I believe the issue is that while there may be only a handful of scholarship football and men’s basketball players admitted every year, they are arguably the most visible of any of Michigan’s (or Cal’s) students. Let’s face it. No other student appears on TV every autumn Saturday as the football players do. No other student has a chance, if they’re stars, to be offered contracts worth 7 figures from just the signing bonus alone without even having to graduate at all. Even a guy who earned a 4.0 in EECS from Berkeley would not be paid even a miniscule fraction of what Marshawn Lynch earned in his first year in the ‘workforce’ without having even bothered to finish his degree. </p>
<p>The point is, whether we like it or not, the athletes are high profile representatives of the school. Schools should therefore rightfully cognizant of what sort of image it wants to present. Does it want to be known as a school of serious scholarship, or would it rather be known as a party & sports school…such as Florida or Texas, both having been named top 10 party schools according to both Playboy and the Princeton Review.</p>
<p>sakky, whilst we’re at it, i’d like to ask you which elite PRIVATE schools do you personally think are Berkeley’s peers.</p>
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<p>I’m not necessarily talking about only small schools. Virginia is not a small school, and doesn’t have exceptionally highly ranked programs, yet the Virginia undergrad program may arguably be better than Berkeley’s. {I’ve often wondered why Berkeley couldn’t combine its superior brand name with an undergraduate experience akin to Virginia’s.} </p>
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<p>And the simple problem with that logic is: what happens if you find out later that you no longer want to major in what you thought? What if you find yourself performing poorly in your chosen major. Since you brought up the computer science major, trust me, there are plenty of Berkeley students who come in intending to major in CS, and then perform extremely poorly, to the point that some find themselves on academic probation or worse. The CS weeders are excruciatingly brutal.</p>
<p>And again, I would point out that most Berkeley students do not actually end up pursuing their major as a professional career. This is especially prevalent in the liberal arts where only a small fraction of students will actually pursue their major further. Who cares how strong the poli-sci program is if you’re not actually going to become a political scientist? I doubt that the poli-sci graduate who ended up working at Macy’s really cared.</p>
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<p>At the PhD level, Berkeley can match up to anyone and everyone. I have no problem matching Berkeley to Harvard, Stanford, and MIT at that degree level. </p>
<p>At the undergrad level? Most direct comparison is probably Cornell.</p>
<p>My school sends 15% of the class to Berkeley, maybe 20% get admitted. The private colleges that students have chosen over Berkeley are Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, MIT, Caltech, and Northwestern. So perhaps the private peers are the rest of the Ivies and colleges like Chicago and Rice.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what exactly a “peer” means for undergrad. A college students would choose over Berkeley is not a peer. They’re not going to choose the other colleges over Berkeley, so they’re not peers, at least not for in-state students. Seems like a meaningless concept to me when you compare public vs private! </p>
<p>But I can tell you in publics UCLA is a peer. For OOS students I’d say UMich is the closest peer.</p>
<p>Blaw, do any students choose Berkeley over the private schools you mentioned?</p>
<p>They find a way to Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton. The others depend on the financial aid package … lot of rich parents don’t want to pay the higher costs and few students qualify for need based aid. So the answer is students do choose Berkeley over MIT, Caltech, UPenn etc. in some cases.</p>
<p>Thanks…</p>
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<p>Sakky, you better pray that hawkette won’t be able to read this post otherwise she will smash you with all sorts of statistics to disprove that claim of yours. lol</p>
<p>And, yeah, I agree with you that Cornell is a peer school of Berkeley, for the most part, except for engineering (and perhaps business too) where Berkeley is considered a notch higher.</p>
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<p>Sakky,</p>
<p>Of course UVA isn’t superior to Berkeley. It’s probably as good in some parts, but overall, it’s not as good as Berkeley. </p>
<p>When I say it’s not as good, I mean it’s not as prestigious, and the chain effect of that is long and deep. For example, UVA grads don’t compare well in the payscale.com’s survey. It wasn’t even close. Cal has also a significant lead over UVA in most surveys. Cal grads score better, on average, on the GRE exams. Cal grads are more represented at HBS, Harvard Law, Harvard Med, Yale Law, JHU Med and so on. In short, Cal is more respected than UVA and respect is usually gained through having strong academic programs.</p>
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<p>That’s beside the point, sakky. whether the students would perform better or not once enrolled in Berkeley is another story. My point is that there are many “A” students who choose schools based on the strength of the program. For example, econ students at Chicago chose it because they knew all along that Chicago is strong for econ. Whether those people would do good or not is another story. It’s the same reason why people aim for Wharton, MIT Eng’g, Duke BME or JHU premed because students knew all along that those schools are strong on those programs.</p>
<p>The student emphasis on specific departmental gems with the context of an overall school is disappearing however as more and more people are realizing that although Chicago’s economics program is taught by star faculty, their students are not recruited as heavily by the top investment banks/consulting firms as Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, Dartmouth, Duke and Columbia.</p>
<p>Sakky is spot on with his analysis. 99% of students at the top private schools really care how “star-studded” the faculty in their major or university overall is. These kids just want to get top grades so they can use their distinguished diploma to garner a six-figure salary. In fact, many students would prefer EASIER AND LESS QUALIFIED professors who grade easier and don’t impose harsh curves.</p>
<p>Undergraduate reputation is driven more by the selectivity of the institution and the strength of the student body, which is reflected in the hiring practices of most top American companies. This is why UCB and UMich will always be a notch below the Ivy League, Chicago, Duke and Stanford.</p>