<p>Look (I’m starting to imitate Obama’s speech patterns)</p>
<p>Berkeley is the #1 ranked Ph.D. university overall, ahead of, in order, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, etc… These ranking come from the NRC, and are a combination of program rankings across 41 disciplines.</p>
<p>That makes it the #1 university in the world. If you add in MBA, Law and Medicine (counting UCSF for Berkeley’s Medicine), Berkeley drops to #3 behind Harvard and Stanford.</p>
<p>However, your question is not about the university IN GENERAL. You are asking about an undergraduate education at Berkeley.</p>
<p>To that specific question, I answer: I wouldn’t want to go there. The relative “you’re on your own-ness” of a large, underfunded, highly competitive undergraduate institution does not appeal to me.</p>
<p>People do very much distinguish between Berkeley undergrad, and Berkeley Ph.D. or Masters. They’re so different from each other in experience and student selectivity (and ranking) that they don’t compare at all.</p>