<p>In case you'd say UCSF is its medical school, it really is not.</p>
<p>Of course it’s not, but UCSF is just across the Bay. What would be the point of two state-funded medical schools within 10 miles of each other?</p>
<p>UCSF is the UC System’s designated primary biomedical research center. A UCB medical school would be needlessly duplicative and essentially always in the shadow of UCSF.</p>
<p>History. UCSF started out as Berkeley’s medical campus and Davis started out as Berkeley’s agricultural campus. Davis has expanded to a full-fledged university. UCSF remains a specialized graduate medical school with several joint degrees offered between Berkeley and UCSF. Quite a few faculty members have joint appointments.</p>
<p>I have suggested to UC during these difficult budget times that Berkeley should offer more joint biomedical engineering and perhaps pre-med/med school, like Brown’s PLME program, with the UCSF campus. These programs could quickly become tops in the nation and Berkeley could charge a tuition premium.</p>
<p>^ When I toured UCB i was told UCLA was the southern campus, as well as Davis being agricultural and UCSF being the medical. It all comes from UCB, originally.</p>
<p>^ That’s correct. However, Davis and LA developed into full universities with graduate and undergrad…UCSF is still just a medical school.</p>
<p>Yes, Berkeley doesn’t have a medical school—the University of California has a medical school(s). It just so happens that when the University established the first of its medical schools, it didn’t place it on the first of its campuses. There probably are a couple of reasons for this: 1. An already existing medical school became the basis for UCSF; 2. It made more sense to establish a medical school in a city with a larger population than Berkeley, as this would provide greater accessibility to specialized clinical faculty and facilities and it would provide the more varied and difficult patient population necessary for medical education. There are a number of other universities that also didn’t put their medical schools on their main campuses, but instead established them in larger population centers: Cornell, Northwestern, Indiana, Illinois, Oklahoma, et al.</p>
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<p>I have to say, it is quite interesting how UCLA is almost nothing at all like Berkeley other than the fact that the students that go there have similar academic stats.</p>
<p>For example, UC Berkeley’s economics department tends to be filled with Keynesians (Olney, DeLong, Akerlof & Shiller; they’re pro government interventionists) while UCLA’s economics department has been recently considered to be another Chicago School (pure laissez faire) with a professor in its staff who dealt with the restructuring of the economy of Latin American and other professors having their PhDs in Economics from Chicago.</p>
<p>If you think UCLA is a liberal campus then UC Berkeley is ultra-liberal. UCLA is in a city that is considered conservative by Bay Area standards. It is almost completely egalitarian here at UC Berkeley while people in UCLA (and Los Angeles) tend to be pretty race conscious.</p>
<p>UCLA tends to have more of a materialistic scene with Ackerman Union (the building that houses the student store and food court) being filled with all these big corp fast food chains and some decently upscale computer room and arcade while UC Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Student Union historically consisting of almost nothing but local restaurants and being a dwarf in size by comparison.</p>