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The answer, I think, is money. First, it is ~50% more expensive for Berkeley to pay the tuition of an international student. US students, regardless of state, cost the same. International PhD candidates are rare in UC schools - the ones that are in a UC PhD program tend to be very good
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<p>I'm afraid I can't agree. International PhD candidates are rare in UC schools? Really. To be fair, I don't know about the lower UC's, so maybe it is true that UCRiverside doesn't have a lot of international PhD's. </p>
<p>But Berkeley and UCLA? Seriously, come on. The PhD programs are absolutely swarming with international students. According to Berkeley's own data, 2785international students were enrolled at Berkeley, 1308 - or nearly half - of them being doctoral students. The figures are even more striking when you compare the total undergrads to international undergrads and compare total grad students to international grad students. Berkeley has about 25k total undergrads vs. 10k total grad students (master's and PhD), whereas 32% of the 2708 international students are undergrads (hence about 867), and 68% are grad students (hence about 1840). That implies that 867/25k, or less than 3.5% of the undergrads are international students, whereas 18.4% of the grad students are international students. *That's a ratio of more than 5:1. * </p>
<p>I don't have the number of total PhD students (as opposed to just total grad students) at Berkeley, but one might guess that within the 10k total grad student population, there are perhaps 1200 total MBA students (both full-time and night/weekend program), about 850 law students, maybe 450 M.Ed students, and maybe 2000 or so other assorted master's degree students, and that equals 4500, which means that you have a remaining 5500 total students in the PhD programs. Since there are 1308 international PhD students, that's a whopping 24% of all of Berkeley's PhD students who are internationals - nearly a full order of magnitude larger than the percentage in the undergrad program. And of course in certain programs, the percentage is even higher. For example, many of the technical PhD programs, such as engineering or physics, would probably be cut in half were it not for the internationals. </p>
<p>I don't have the figures for UCLA on hand, but I'm quite confident that if you check the UCLA forum, they will confirm that the percentage of international grad students vastly exceeds the percentage of international undergrads. </p>
<p>The upshot is that international PhD students, at least at Berkeley and UCLA, are by no means rare. If anything it is the international undergrads who are rare. </p>
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Graduate school is about probing what is not known, which can only be done expensively (unless you are a philosopher/etc).
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<p>Exactly. You should disabuse yourself of the notion that all research is done through expensive labs, yet that comprises only a minor subset - notably research in engineering and the natural sciences. Even some of that can be completed with relatively low expenditures. Theoretical physics, for example, is basically just math, and with the possible exception of heavy computational work, can be done with very little equipment. Much computer science is not only cheap to do but gets cheaper every day, as the price of computing hardware power drops precipitously every year and tremendously powerful software tools are available as open-source freeware such as Linux, MySql, and the R Project. A good computer science researcher can even build his own software tools in his own time. </p>
<p>But that means that you have the humanities and social sciences that, frankly, take hardly any research funding at all. How much of a research budget do you really need to complete a PhD in English? At the worst case, you might need some fieldwork travel to examine original documents. But how expensive is that, really? And how many students actually need to examine originals? Similarly, getting a PhD in economics usually involves developing analytical models - which is just math - and then running statistical/econometric regressions. None of that is particularly costly. Like I said, many statistical packages like the R Package are available for free. Sociology? Again, maybe you'll have to run a field study, but that's usually not very expensive. Psychology? You'll need some lab facilities and some way to entice volunteers. But that's relatively cheap. Pay people $10 for an hour of their time, and for just $1000, you can get 100 volunteers, and that's good for one complete experiment. </p>
<p>The point is, many (probably most) PhD students don't really need a lot of funding to complete their degree. Granted, it's more than the typical undergrad needs. But not THAT much more. I know plenty of people with PhD's who never had to ask for a single dime of research budget while in grad school. They had access to the university library and to other libraries through inter-library loan services, they had access to the journals through the university subscription service, they used existing university software resources and supplemented them with Internet freeware, and that's all they really needed. </p>
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However, your example isn't applicable to education. Cameras cost hundreds-thousands of dollars and they don't need to take up a lot of your time. For cheaper cameras, it's definitely not worth most people's time doing the necessary research. That's why I buy Colgate toothpaste instead of some toothpaste made in Bangladesh.</p>
<p>We're talking about education here, which is on the order of a hundred thousand dollar investment + 4+ years of your life. These things don't scale linearly; most things don't in life or in nature. It would be a terrible thing if you don't do a lot of research into a school because you are going to commit a lot of resources (time being the most important). Losing a couple hundred bucks for a bad camera is nothing compared to losing 4+ years + $100k+ for an education. I think it's a sad thing for branding an undergraduate education because it can be dangerous. Like you said, many kids fail because they didn't understand how hard it is and they overestimated their abilities.
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<p>I would actually argue the opposite - that branding is even more applicable to education than it is to cameras. </p>
<p>First off, there are about 2700 4-year colleges in the United States, and that's not even counting the thousands more that are available overseas. Nobody can possibly thoroughly research even a small subset of them. In contrast, there are clearly nowhere near 2700 different brands of cameras. Hence, the search space in education is far larger than it is for cameras, which makes branding as a means to reduce search costs more economically valuable. </p>
<p>But secondly - and far more importantly - education is a 'networked' good, whereas a camera is not. You want to take a picture of a girl; she doesn't care what camera make you used. All she cares about - and all you care about - is that the picture looks good, and whether you used a top-end Nikon or a crappy no-name camera, as long as the picture looks good, that's all that matters. On the other hand, let's face it - most students go to college because they want to get a decent job - and employers do care about brand. The best branded universities attract the best employers, which then attract the best students, which then attract even more of the best employers, all in a two-sided networked relationship. The best students can therefore rely on a brand name because they know that it draws the best employers, and vice versa for those employers. To be sure, it doesn't always work - which is why some Berkeley students end up at Starbucks - but from a probabalistic standpoint, there are clearly more top employers recruiting at Berkeley than at, say, San Francisco State. </p>
<p>Now, I agree with you that some students may be drawn to the Berkeley brand who will do poorly and should have gone elsewhere. But that's not really a problem with the branding per se as it is with the admissions. Keep in mind that all that the branding can do is draw more applicants. It is still the job of Berkeley to decide who to admit. As I've always said, Berkeley needs to stop admitting people who they can reasonably predict aren't going to do well. If Berkeley continues to do that, the brand is not to blame.</p>