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<p>Most people don’t get their college degrees from Berkeley. According to UTA’s website, there’s like 2k colleges in the U.S, of these, imo, maybe 50 are highly respectable. And this 50 includes Berkeley.</p>
<p>There are too many incompetent people here at Cal and other UCs. All the transfers to be exact.</p>
<p>^Harsh, but probably true. Berkeley will never truly be top notch until it cuts down its transfer numbers.</p>
<p>because freshman admits are full of merits</p>
<p>@iphone929, @loldanielol - That’s probably one of the most ignorant things I’ve heard on these boards. “All the transfers to be exact” - I’m a transfer student from CC who performed excellently in high school, a near perfect SAT score, but no money. Because I’ve spent two years getting a GREAT education at my current college for near zero cost, when I transfer to Berkeley, I’ll be reducing its top notch prestige? Most students who are accepted to transfer have worked their asses off for 2+ years and with the ability to get classes in CC, some are there for 3-4 or even longer. As nero said, I didn’t realize being admitted two years earlier and getting your lower division credits done at Berkeley made you a student superior to any other.</p>
<p>Any freshman admits could get a 4.0 at a local community college without trying.
I am not trying to attack on anyone. It’s a fact. Berkeley is looked down upon by many peers b/c there are so many transfers.</p>
<p>If you think that then you’re really really delusional. Just because you’ve heard an anecdote doesn’t mean it’s at all close to the truth.</p>
<p>A lot of people know substantial amount of transfers don’t deserve to be here. You know it and I know it. We just don’t mention it in public because we don’t give a crap. How’s it an anecdote? Let’s face it… It’s the truth. Besides CC grades are meaningless. Everyone does well in CC because they are so easy. Bragging that transfers work their butt off to get a 3.7 in CC is proving that they don’t deserve to be here.</p>
<p>Even employers know it. The transfer students at comparable university is far better than the ones at Berkeley or other UCs. It’s just that people don’t express in public, but it exists and people know it in their hearts. Happy? All my peers in Berkeley/LA as well as the ones in Ivys all feel the same. Yes, they are all freshman admits.</p>
<p>well the avgerage gpa of freshman admits and transfer admits is not big, if you want to take GPA as a measure</p>
<p>Goddamn, someone’s got a superiority complex. **** happens bro, and some were just in bad circumstances. Just because they are transfers doesn’t mean that they are any less qualified than freshman admits. Take JetLogic for example. I can tell from his posts that he is a very intelligent fellow and I’m sure that you can tell as well. Stop stereotyping and judging others. Grow the **** up.</p>
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<p>I agree regarding the professors and research maintaining Berkeley’s prestige …which is also precisely why I can’t feel sanguine about this particular issue. The fact is, for certain rival schools - especially a certain rival in the South Bay - it wouldn’t exactly consume a large percentage of their endowment from them to offer an absolutely irresistible killer deal to raid the best professors (read: most actively publishing in top journals) from Berkeley. </p>
<p>Think of it this way. What if I was a Berkeley professor and that certain other school in the South Bay offered me a significant salary hike, along with perhaps either zero teaching responsibilities, or responsibilities to teach only the classes that I want to teach (as opposed to, say, teaching huge undergrad survey courses that perhaps I hate), along with a brand spanking luxurious new office and lab facilities and hefty research budget, and either a generous moving allowance or perhaps a telework arrangement that requires that I don’t even have to move away from Berkeley at all, but simply have to commute down there only a few days a week (and perhaps even a free in-town apartment for me to crash during those weekdays so I don’t have to commute)? Frankly, I’d probably take it. Given the giant endowments that those other schools enjoy, it therefore wouldn’t seem to be that hard for them to be able to assemble a ‘Dream Team’ of ex-Berkeley professors.</p>
<p>Thing is, most Berkeley professors absolutely LOVE Berkeley and are proud to be teaching here. All the best professors I’ve had here have straight up said that they could be anywhere else but choose to be at Berkeley. I heard Robert Reich say this today and Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter just said this on Cal Day. They could all easily leave Berkeley for more money but won’t.</p>
<p>And it’s not like Berkeley is slashing pay for professors. They chose to raise tuition instead of giving professors incentive to leave, and I think those are good priorities.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that there are many Berkeley profs who love Berkeley. </p>
<p>But at the same time, what almost every prof surely loves more than his school is his own research - certainly any faculty member at a school such as Berkeley. Let’s face it - if you don’t love your research, you’re not going to get a tenure-track position at any top research school, let alone at a place such as Berkeley. At the same time - to be bluntly honest - many (almost certainly most) profs at top research universities dislike teaching, instead preferring to spend their time on research. </p>
<p>So instead of (or in addition to) offering you a higher salary, how about I take whatever research budget and facilities that Berkeley is offering you, and I double it? If your current Berkeley research budget provides $x in facilities, then I’ll counter with $2x. If you can fund x number of PhD students or postdocs at Berkeley, then I’ll give you funding for 2x. If Berkeley gives you a 1-year research sabbatical, then I’ll give you a 2-year sabbatical. Or, if you obtain your funding from government research grants, then I pledge a one-to-one match (so if your lab wins a $5 million grant from the NSF, then I pledge an additional $5million for a total of $10 million). </p>
<p>In addition, like I said, you’ll only teach the courses regarding the topics that you want, when you want. If you don’t like teaching undergraduates, then you’ll never have to teach undergraduates. If you only want to teach an advanced PhD seminar revolving around your specific research domain, fine, that’s all you will ever have to teach. </p>
<p>I’ll also relieve you of all administrative duties that you dislike. If you don’t want to engage in junior faculty or PhD student mentorship, fine, you don’t have to. If you have no interest in departmental budgetary or organizational processes, I’ll relieve you of all of those duties. </p>
<p>As far as I can tell, professors are generally the most keenly motivated to go to wherever they can advance their research agenda the fastest. That darn school in the South Bay easily has enough funds to transform itself into research heaven for the Dream Team of ex-Berkeley profs.</p>
<p>This strategy would seem to be the most salient -and therefore the most deadly for Berkeley - if it targeted the assistant profs, that is, the newly minted PhD’s and postdocs who Berkeley would like to entice. Assistant professors at Berkeley, like at any school, are always anxious about tenure, which is almost entirely weighted towards research. And it’s understandable that they should as many Berkeley asst profs will indeed fail tenure review. Given that, they are understandably worried about having enough pubs on their CV to merit tenure somewhere, if not necessarily at Berkeley. </p>
<p>What if I could relieve that burden? That is, I could approach every new PhD student or postdoc who has an academic job offer from Berkeley that, instead of taking it and worrying about possibly running into research funding constraints and losing time spent teaching classes that you don’t really want to teach, what if I could give you lavish research budgets along with zero teaching responsibilities (unless you wanted to teach), so that you could spend all your time building your pub record? Heck, *what if I doubled your tenure clock<a href=“for%20example,%20a%20typical%20Berkeley%20department%20may%20give%20you%205-7%20years%20before%20your%20tenure%20review,%20whereas%20I’ll%20give%20you%2010-14%20years”>/i</a>? With that sort of time and resources at your disposal, even if you don’t merit tenure here, you should surely have built an impressive enough of a pub-list to win tenure at many other schools. </p>
<p>Given that sort of offer, frankly, it’s not clear that any new scholar would choose to come to Berkeley no matter how much he loves it. After all, if I was one of them, I would be thinking: “As much as I love Berkeley, for the sake of my own career and tenure, I have to go to the place that will help me to churn out the most pubs before my tenure review”. </p>
<p>And yet those young scholars are the future of any university. If Berkeley can’t attract top young scholars - perhaps because they’re being enticed away by a nearby research utopia - then Berkeley’s prestige is destined to decline as the current tenured faculty eventually retire. </p>
<p>Hmmm, I hope the administrators of that school in the South Bay aren’t reading this message right now. </p>
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<p>Well, I think that only proves my point that money does indeed provide incentives to leave or stay. After all, if most Berkeley profs really did love Berkeley, then it wouldn’t really matter whether their pay was slashed, as they would stay anyway for their love of the place, right? So why not slash their pay and redirect that funding to keep tuition low?</p>
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<p>While this may be somewhat true, there are certainly, if not just as many, professors who love teaching undergraduate courses yet still crank out extraordinary research. I can’t speak for other departments, but I know within the chemistry department, professors (tenured or on a tenure-track) are always happy to teach courses (and do a pretty good job while at that too.) Obviously if you’re going to be a professor (at a top-research institution or a smaller school), you’re probably going to know that you’ll teach at some point or another. </p>
<p>Anyway, that’s just my two cents.</p>
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<p>Spontaneity, it’s rather interesting that you chose to talk about the department of chemistry, for that department for years actually had the most notorious example of what I am talking about. Yuan Lee is surely Berkeley’s greatest chemistry professor today, being the school’s lone remaining Nobel laureate in Chemistry. While he’s retired (emeritus) now, while he was an active faculty member, he wouldn’t teach any chemistry courses at all for years at a time. In fact, I’m not sure that, except perhaps for specialized PhD seminars, whether he even taught any chemistry courses ever since he won the Nobel in 1986. Seems to me that he’s living proof that certain top Berkeley researchers, if given the opportunity, would simply dispense with teaching responsibilities altogether. </p>
<p>But, again, this discussion doesn’t necessarily revolve around superstars such as Yuan Lee. Obviously once you have a Nobel Prize, you have the leverage to move to any university you want. The real issue regards those professors who want to win the Nobel (or a similar top research prize in those fields that lack Nobels), or, more mundanely, to those junior faculty who are simply trying to attain tenure. To do that, you need time and you need resources, and you’re therefore preferentially drawn to a university that can offer both. </p>
<p>Regarding untenured faculty, the problem stretches far beyond Berkeley, but rather is a system-wide bias towards research. If you’re a new assistant professor of chemistry at Berkeley, you know fully well that there’s a serious danger that you will be denied tenure and will therefore have to be hired by another university. That other university, if research-oriented, will care little for your Chem1A teaching evals. What they want to see is a CV full of pubs. If you don’t have that, then they’re simply not going to hire you. Hence, the dominant risk-averse career strategy for you to follow is to spend maximal time on your research, even at the expense of teaching.</p>
<p>Sakky you obviously don’t understand how the science works. You just called a bias towards research a problem. And “a CV full of pubs” is what anyone going into science wants to have and knows they need to have to be successful. </p>
<p>I know some people think professors teaching ability is much more important than their research, but they don’t know what research means. Almost every Berkeley student in the sciences ends up actually participating in research, most working full-time summers in labs. How many graduating science students do you think are there that actually wish Berkeley professors didn’t do research and just focused on teaching?</p>
<p>I’m actually one of these students and I know a lot of others (like spontaneity). We’ve had fantastic teaching professors at Berkeley and have gotten to actually do research with some incredible people at the top of the field. Sure, we may have had a few bad teachers over the past years, but what school out there doesn’t have any of those? And you end up learning the material mostly by self studying either way.</p>
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<p>Flutterfly_28, you obviously don’t understand how academia works.</p>
<p>The bias towards research certainly is a problem for the undergraduate students. Obviously it is not at all a problem for those professors and PhD students who actually enjoy research, which comprises the vast majority of profs and PhD students at Berkeley. But most students at Berkeley are undergrads, and the overwhelming majority of them will never become researchers. See below. </p>
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<p>Are you sure you still want to stand by your statement that “almost every student in the Berkeley sciences ends up actually participating in research”? Really? Put another way, about 500 students graduate from MCB alone, not even counting the other various flavors of biology majors that Berkeley offers. Are you truly asserting that almost 500 of those graduating seniors have participated in research (and that’s not even counting all of the non-seniors in the program)? I doubt that the department even has the capacity to offer that many research openings even if the students wanted them. Last time I checked, most of those MCB students were premeds, or at least wanted to be. Most premeds tend to care little for research, as their energies are directed towards grades, high MCAT scores, and clinical experience (e.g. volunteering at one of the hospitals in Oakland or SF). </p>
<p>But far more importantly, when did I ever say that this discussion was restricted solely to the sciences? The vast majority of Berkeley students are not science students. The pressures to prioritize research over teaching are universal across all of Berkeley’s departments. The undergraduates of those departments are not well served by those pressures.</p>
<p>Such tensions are palpable even in engineering/CS, the close cousins of the sciences. More Berkeley students graduate from EECS every year than from all of the non-biology sciences combined, without even counting the L&S CS students. And let’s be honest, only the top performing engineering students care about research because, frankly, they’re the only ones that have a serious shot at an engineering PhD and a future research career. Let’s face it - if you have a GPA in the low 3’s or less, you’re not going to get a PhD in engineering. Heck, even many of the top performing engineering students don’t really care about research. Most engineering students care just about getting a job, or perhaps launching the next Facebook or GroupOn. Most engineering jobs and even many entrepreneurial opportunities have little to do with research, which is why even college dropouts can launch legendary firms such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, & Dell; or by college graduates who majors weren’t even in engineering/CS: Groupon’s Andrew Mason majored in music and YouTube’s Chad Hurley majored in fine arts, of all things. </p>
<p>But by far the clearest example of all would be the humanities/arts/social-sciences (HASS) that constitute the clear majority of the undergrads at Berkeley. Let’s be frank: most of them are not going to pursue their major in their professional career. Most poli-sci majors will not become political scientists, most history majors will not become historians, most psych majors will not become psychologists, most sociology majors will not become sociologists, most humanities/arts students will not become professional humanities/arts scholars. Graduate school for them often times means law school. </p>
<p>As a case in point, take poli-sci, the most popular HASS major at Berkeley. Of the Class of 2011 graduates that reported, not a single one is clearly pursuing poli-sci research careers. On the other hand, I do see some of them taking jobs as salesmen and administrative assistants (translation: secretaries). Heck, the ones that did report pursuing graduate school are not pursuing PhD grad school but rather law school. </p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/PolSci.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/PolSci.stm</a></p>
<p>{Now, granted, perhaps some students who are pursuing poli-sci research careers simply didn’t report to the survey. Nevertheless, the reported data does seem to be a reasonably representative sample of the outcomes that poli-sci students can expect. I highly doubt that there are hordes of poli-sci graduates being admitted to poli-sci phD programs who simply don’t report their outcomes.}</p>
<p>For those who still don’t believe me, here’s an easy task for you to complete. If you’re a poli-sci undergrad, then name 3 of the top peer-reviewed poli-sci academic journals, without looking them up. If you’re not a poli-sci student, then find your friends who are and ask them. I suspect that the vast majority of them won’t even be able to name one. And why would they want to know that? Like I said, they’re not interested in pursuing poli-sci research anyway. The same could be said for the other HASS majors. </p>
<p>Why that’s relevant is that the research pressures upon the faculty of those departments is the same. A newly hired Berkeley poli-sci assistant professor has to publish or perish, just like any asst prof in any Berkeley department. He has to publish despite the fact that the vast majority of the Berkeley poli-sci undergraduate students don’t really care about poli-sci research. Those students just want a positive teaching experience before they graduate and embark upon their real careers. </p>
<p>I therefore return to my prior proposal. What if I, as an administrator from that school in the South Bay, approached every single newly hired Berkeley assistant professor, including not only the sciences but also engineering and HASS, and offer to double their research funding with no teaching or administrative obligations (where teaching and admin work would be their option)? Most revolutionary of all, what if I doubled their Berkeley tenure clock from ~6 years to 12? </p>
<p>Like I said, I suspect that most of them would take it. I would. Like I said, my overriding concern as a junior prof is building a CV of pubs. I therefore want to have the most research resources at most disposal. I want to only teach classes that are convenient and relevant for me, and not waste time teaching classes that I don’t care about. I also don’t want to be burdened with administrative tasks that I don’t care about. {For example, if I don’t really care about the undergraduate curricular then don’t force me to serve on the curricular committee.} </p>
<p>The way that academia is structured, such an opportunity would give me the best chance at developing the deepest list of pubs possible with which I could leverage to jump to other research universities…perhaps even back to Berkeley if I so wished. Other research universities won’t really care about my teaching evals in Poli Sci 1. But they will care that I have a slew of pubs in American Political Science Review. </p>
<p>Like I said, I hope that no administrator from that South Bay school is reading this.</p>
<p>I’m a graduating MCB major and I do not know any other graduating MCB majors who have not participated in research. Every premed student I know has also had a research position. They are not hard to get and everybody knows their value.</p>
<p>Maybe you should apply for an administrator job at that South Bay school. You’ll fit in wonderfully. Do you have a job? How old are you?</p>
<p>Sakky</p>
<p>You propose that Stanford could promise both senior faculty and its assistant professors that if they come to Stanford they can spend all of their time doing research and have no teaching responsibilites. Last time I checked Stanford had thousands of students and like it or not someone has to teach the courses they are required to take to graduate. You can not have a University where none of the faculty are required to teach any couses.</p>