<p>I can't envisage why Berkeley adcom/admin (whoever is responsible for this) continues to accept many students when it's obvious that Cal is already overcrowded and is facing great financial challenges. </p>
<p>Should they have trimmed down the number of students admitted to Cal to save the quality and standard of the school?</p>
<p>Yep. Or if anything, accept a higher percentage of OOS or OOC students. But who knows what this crazy school wants…there’s a lot of changes that Berkeley could make. It just doesn’t want to for some reason.</p>
<p>RML, I would be careful in your reasoning that: the lower number of students correlates directly with the quality and standard of the school - that if Berkeley lowered that number, the school would stay a top-notch school. On the contrary, UC Berkeley has admitted a huge number of students every year for the past few decades, and that fact never stopped this school from churning out brilliant undergrads and graduates.</p>
<p>People at my school are saying that Cal is easier to get into than UCLA now, and that UCLA is gonna be ranked higher.
I don’t like hearing that, haha, since obviously I want Cal to be “more prestigious” than UCLA.</p>
<p>In Fall 2006 the Berkeley acceptance rate was higher than the UCLA one, then for Fall 2007 the Berkeley one was lower than the UCLA one. Now due to the economy, they are shifting the budgets; Berkeley is the only UC that they are allowing to expand I believe.</p>
<p>Also the number of undergrads admitted does not really dictate prestige. The rankings have a lot to do with professors’ publications quality and research and funding. For graduate programs and research in general, the UCOP puts most of their eggs in the Berkeley basket.</p>
<p>If Berkeley were to become a private school,
it might go up in the rankings but it would lose the Berkeley-feel, imo.</p>
<p>Hi green-aw-lives.</p>
<p>It’s true. Decreasing the size of the student body may not increase Berkeley’s position in the rankings, but that’s not the number one concern here. The number one concern here is actually to lower the ratio of faculty-to-student. In that way, Berkeley will be able to provide an a more intimate relationship between faculty (which is Berkeley’s strongest assets as of now) and undergrad students. There would be more hand-holding and each student would be more assisted in their journey at Berkeley as an undergrad. I thought this current financial crises would be the perfect time to do that since Berkeley is not really hiring faculty.</p>
<p>Is Cal having a worse financial challenge than UCLA? Which school is getting hit the hardest due to the budget cut, UCLA or Cal?</p>
<p>More people means more money! Why lose money with doubles when every room can be a triple!</p>
<p>why not just create a slum?</p>
<p>Then everyone would be bums.</p>
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<p>Sorry; is this sarcasm done on purpose? :D</p>
<p>The richest schools in the nation aren’t overcrowded like Cal is. In fact, with the exception of UMIch, all of them have undergrad population of less than 15 thousand. HYSPM, for example, each has an undergrad student body of less than 10 thousand. Harvard, the richest school in the universe, has just less than 8 thousand students. </p>
<p>On the other hand, Berkeley’s endowment is only 3billion. Yet it has about 4 times as much as Harvard does.</p>
<p>Why are you comparing Berkeley to elite private institutions such as Harvard? Berkeley’s mission isn’t to rank #1 in the nation or provide the best college experience; its purpose is to serve the educational needs of the public and that means taking in lots and lots of students.</p>
<p>If you want small class sizes, you have two choices:
<p>i think the large amount of applicants combined with low budget does bear on decisions results. I had all the stats and grades etc. but was denied while a guy that cheated off me in chemistry and doesnt have half the gpa i do and a girl who misses every other day in school, doesnt try at all (sucky GPA proves it), and misses 9/10 club meetings for the club that I am president of were admitted</p>
<p>They cut off undergraduate admissions for 6 UCs (SD, D, I, SB, SC, R) and allowed admissions increases for the other (Us, UCLA, and UCMerced) due to the budget cuts.</p>