<p>I'm actually quite curious of this thread since I receive phone calls from NYU constantly and I had a feeling they underreport their endowment to encourage alumni to donate and as a justification to keep raising tuition. They constantly report themselves as a "tuition dependent" institution whenever fees have to be raised.</p>
<p>From the website you posted, they seem to be pretty high, making me wonder.</p>
<p>Cal's peers, I believe, are other top schools (both public and private). Schools like Northwestern would be in the group below Cal and its peers. They are about equal in undergrad, but for Grad Cal dominates NW so you can't really put them in the same group. That, and nobody knows what or where Northwesten is (Seattle? Portland?), where Berkeley is one of the most known schools in the world. Northwestern's peers would be schools like Pepperdine, BU, and maybe Tufts. All schools that people vaguely know about but really aren't that good.</p>
<p>Oh boy, why do I feel like we are going to have WWIII?! LOL Here it comes!</p>
<p>alexandre: yes, they certainly do. Places like Princeton and UofC require that professors teach undergrads, at berk there is no such requirement. Berk is populated heavily by TAs. </p>
<p>I know they are graduate schools, i live in san francisco, my mom is a Ph.D. candidate at UCSF right now. The point I was making is that Berk has all the top graduate programs.
let me explain to you what a UC education looks like. My mom just started on her Ph.D. this year. They had her T.A.ing a master's level course during her first quarter back in school in over 6 years. If this is how they treat the students working on their M.S., imagine the kind of teaching you get as an undergrad. Everyone i know who goes there talks about their 400 person classes and how they really dont spend a whole lot of time working to learn, jsut working to pass the tests and get a degree. </p>
<p>Berkeley is kind of an anomaly, its reputation for research and graduate programs is rivaled only by maybe Harvard, Possibly Oxford and Cambridge, Stanford and Yale. </p>
<p>I think this is really just an idealogical difference about what the purpose of a college education is. Berkeley undergrad supporters seem to believe that all there is to be gained from college is a diploma that associates you with an institution, hopefully one of distinction. On top of that, maybe berkeley offers you the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the top researchers.
I would instead believe that the education you receive, the contact with top professors who enjoy teaching and who's mission is not only to do research, but to teach bright undergraduate students. </p>
<p>Of course, you dont have to agree with me, but hopefully you could take a look at the UC master plan and realize that the UC regents willfully recognize that they are graduate, research institutions. It makes sense too, they get more federal money to do research, which brings money into our economy, than tehy would get as an undergraduate institution.
If the UC system was intended to be great for undergrads, why would there be a seperate CSU system.</p>
<p>as to harvard, stanford, princeton etc., these private institutions recognize undergraduate education as an integral part of their goal. part of this is just because they believe in undergraduate education, part of it is because private schools need alumni money, and colleges have found that students who went to college one place and grad school at another are more likely to give money to the college, so having strong undergrad is the best way to ensure that you'll have alumni support. </p>
<p>now, as to the person who just, for no apparent reason, clowned on NU. Im not usually much of a believer in USNWR, but it does give a pretty good overall picture, especially for refuting dumb comments like that one. Nat'l Universities -
11)Northwestern
21)Berkeley
52)Pepperdine
56)BU</p>
<p>NU's graduate school of business - #1 in the world, 3 years running, in Business Week's rankings
Law and Med schools - both top 20
Undergrad Journalism - #1 or 2 nationally
graduate journalism - one of the big 4 (berk, mizzou and Columbia are the others)
schools of communication and music are both highly regarded (dont know rankings)</p>
<p>berkeley certainly has an advantage when it comes to engineering, but NU's engineering program is still one of the best, and fastest growing. </p>
<p>for comparison, Berk has a top ten law school, top business school, and top Arts and Sciences departments, only at the graduate level. </p>
<p>you'll find that the institution of berkeley, that is, the whole thing, is unrivaled in the world. the college at berkeley is certainly the least spectacular part of the university.</p>
<p>One thing to bear in mind in the whole "Endowment P1ssing Contest":</p>
<p>Listing / Rankings of Largest Endowments (aggregate amounts) shows you only HALF of the picture. </p>
<p>What's really important is the ENDOWMENT PER STUDENT ratio.</p>
<p>Otherwise you might as well rank universities by the largest student body, but what would that tell you exactly?</p>
<p>"What's really important is the ENDOWMENT PER STUDENT ratio."</p>
<p>which does not always hold true because schools don't always spend the endowment per student to each of its students in real life. and the endowment is not to be spent on just undergrads... there are many other things to pay for that may indirecty affect the students or not affect the students at all.</p>
<p>TheCity is not usually not much of a believer in USNews rankings (only when it suits his school?), and I'm not a big believer in rankings either, but I have some that suit my school so I'll post them.</p>
<p>Times of London
Berkeley #2
Northwestern #30</p>
<p>Shanghai
Berkeley #4
Northwestern #73 (ouch!)</p>
<p>As you can clearly see, Northwestern has a wanton disregard for being thought of as a quality school. Very brave strategy on their part</p>
<p>
[quote]
which does not always hold true because schools don't always spend the endowment per student to each of its students in real life. and the endowment is not to be spent on just undergrads... there are many other things to pay for that may indirecty affect the students or not affect the students at all.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>i don't disagree with any of the above.</p>
<p>in fact those points above only serve to reinforce my POINT: which is that a list of the largest endowments (in and of itself) really doesn't tell you much.</p>
<p>acrually, gentleman, i was referring to teh many comments i have on other threads about the pointlessness of arguing whether one school is better than another simply because its one or two places higher in the USNWR. </p>
<p>But your citation of the Times study makes my point exactly, that Berkeley is the greatest university in the united state. the Times ranking does not purport at all to be a ranking of the quality of the undergraduate education, but rather, a ranking of a University's worldwide reputation. A university gets its reputation mostly for research productivity, and nobody doubts that berkeley dominates here. </p>
<p>I have never seen the Shanghai report, if you could provide me a link to the website, id be interested. </p>
<p>USNWR purports to be a ranking of the undergraduate education. While you may enjoy talking about how great a certain university is based on how many professors they have that you'll never meet, how much reserach theyve done that youll never do, and how well they teach the graduate students (whom we are not)... i really dont see how any of that is relevant to what we are all trying to discuss here.</p>
<p>The link to the shanghai rankings: <a href="http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).htm%5B/url%5D">http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).htm</a></p>
<p>As for the USNews undergrad rankings, when they released their UG department rankings for engineering and business Berkeley was ranked third in both. I don't know where Northwestern was ranked because they only posted the top ten. I'm not sure if USNWR did undergrad departmental ranking across the board (if they did, can someone post them?) but from what I've seen the UG ranking match up almost the same as the graduate ranking. Maybe a correlation? Maybe Cal's #1 ranked graduate program is English is also ranked #1 for undergrad. Again, I don't know, but what I have seen has shown me that UG and Grad share similar rankings, which bodes pretty well for Berkeley.</p>
<p>anybody else know anything about these shanghai rankings? i cant tell wehre they got their data, if they used data at all, and what institition/publicationd did the research... i dont know too many people who'd put UIUC above NU. </p>
<p>it would be interesting to see how berkeley's undergrad programs compare to grad programs. the only comparison ive seen is journalism.. graduate is top 3, undergraduate doesnt exist.</p>
<p>methodology: <a href="http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/Methodology.htm%5B/url%5D">http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/Methodology.htm</a></p>
<p>the ranking was conducted by the institute of higher education at shanghai jiao tong university. its criteria is much different that US news', and the ranking is not meant to measure undergrad education, so the two aren't comparable. instead, it is a ranking of research, particularly scientific research, as evidenced by its values on noble prizes, articles published in the journals science and nature, and the citation prevalence of the institution's researchers. to note, there are several grad schools up there because they fit right into the category, while many schools that focus on undergrad education are ranked poorly because their faculty lack in producing cutting-edge research.</p>
<p>The only comparison you've seen? You mean besides engineering and business, right?</p>
<p>yes, thats what i meant. </p>
<p>and thanks kfc4u for the info. So, as we can see, when trying to rank a university for its research and contributions to scientific knowledge, Berkeley is one of the top 3 in the world. In my opinion, it should be first. </p>
<p>Maybe you aren't understanding that this is completely different/unrelated to the schools excellence at teaching undergraduates and preparing them for the next steps after college. </p>
<p>You may like to assume that it should follow that if a university can excel at one thing (research) it should excel at everything it does (i.e. teach undergrads).. this is preposterous.. why wouldnt we assume that schools that excel at one thing (athletics) must excel at everything else (i.e. teaching undergraduates) and then we can all go banging on the doors of Auburn and U. of Oklahoma. </p>
<p>Berkeley certainly has great business and engineering undergrad schools. Perhaps this is because engineering research and innovation can often take place at the undergraduate level, whereas, say, important psychology research can only be well done by graduate students. I think a much lower percentage of engineering students go on to grad school, in other words.</p>
<p>And you are assuming that just because a school excels at research that it CANT excel at anything else. Which theory is more preposterous, that a department ranked #1 in the world for graduates would have a GOOD UG department, or department ranked #1 in the word for grad would have an AWFUL UG department? Doesn't Northwestern do research? Why don't their UG departments suck too? As a matter of fact, aren't Harvard, Stanfurd, Yale, and Duke ALL research universities? If your thesis is that you need to go to an LAC for quality UG education then fine, I'll respectfully disagree and wish you the best of luck at Reed, but otherwise I don't see your point.</p>
<p>i never made that point at all...</p>
<p>harvard, stanford, yale and duke have highly ranked, world-renowned undergraduate colleges...look at USNWR's rankings of colleges
i believe i explained a few posts ago why this was much more likely at private universities (has to do with how tehy get their money, publics get money from gov, which gives it for research, privates get it from alum, who give mostly to their undergraduate college)... so your point is entirely irrelevant.</p>
<p>TheCity:</p>
<p>your points are well taken, but there are numerous exceptions. One of the greatest teachers Cal ever had has his name on the Periodic Table. Obviously, with a few nobels in his pocket, he didn't HAVE to teach at all, but Glenn Seaborg regularly requested to teach Chem 1, where he wowed and charmed Frosh for years until his health started to deteriorate. Think about sitting in chem lab with a TA (the best and brightest of Chem grade students in the world), and in walks Glenn Seaborg and offers to help you solve your unknown......</p>
<p>Ok, I can see that this isn't going anywere if your trump card is "look at the USNews rankings." Isn't that what we are arguing about?</p>
<p>"Northwestern's peers would be schools like Pepperdine, BU, and maybe Tufts. All schools that people vaguely know about but really aren't that good."</p>
<p>What? Northwestern isn't even in the same universe as those you mentioned, except perhaps Tufts. The fact that nobody knows where it is doesn't relegate it to some lower perception of prestige. How many people on the street know that Harvard is in Cambride and not Boston? Perhaps its name is a misnomer but I don't see how you can connect this with any level of perceived quality.</p>
<p>As for the rest of this pointless argument, you are both (TheCity/GentlemanandScholar) right in my view. Yes, Berkeley's strengths have always been graduate programs and research and yes, it places more emphases on these than its undergraduate program and yes, its undergrad program doesn't compare to those schools with which its graduate programs compete. </p>
<p>But does Berkeley offer a poor undergraduate education? Of course not... it's a top-notch one. One, which again, just doesn't compare to say Stanford.</p>
<p>no, it wasnt what we were arguing about. </p>
<p>thanks megastud for bringing a final voice of reason and mediation to this.. amen</p>
<p>im done.</p>