Your opinion on UC Berkeley

LogicWarrior · April 3, 2009, 4:00am

Good post.

Still, name one way besides admitted student stats that any school besides HYPSM is better than Berkeley.

IBclass06 · April 3, 2009, 10:55am

Stand by for a long incoming. Since sakky has not shown up yet (oddly enough), I’ll quote him instead.

Which leads to what I think is by far the greatest advantage of the top private schools over the top public schools, in that the former schools are safer. At a school like Brown, you’re not going to flunk out. Not only will you will graduate, but also probably with a pretty decent GPA. It’s practically impossible to actually get a truly terrible grade at those schools. Not so at many of the top public schools, in which you really do run an actual risk of flunking out. Even if you avoid that, you may nonetheless barely graduate, with a GPA that is completely trashed, hence preventing you from getting into any decent grad school or from getting many good jobs, or even generally, just enjoying the undergrad experience. I recall one guy, at a major public university, who went into his final semester with a GPA that was so uncomfortable close to a 2.00 that he didn’t even know whether he was going to make it to graduation, or whether he would simply flunk out completely. Just imagine you’re heading into your final semester of college, but with the legitimate fear that you still might flunk out.

Private schools are optimal for the risk-averse, and most people are risk averse. The guys I know who flunked out of their top public schools would have almost certainly been better off if they had gone to Brown, for, at least there, they would have graduated. Probably not with top grades, but at least they would have their degrees. As things stand now, they don’t even have degrees at all. Nor are they likely to get degrees, at least at any half-decent school, for no such school wants to admit a transfer candidate who flunked out of his previous school.
**
What I find ironic is that you say that the top public schools don’t offer, as you say, the ‘desirable’ elite academic experience in terms of small class sizes, professor hand-holding, protection from cutthroat competition, and that sort of thing. But that’s not entirely true; in fact, the top public schools offer precisely that…for graduate school. The graduate classes at places like Michigan or Berkeley tend to be much smaller than are the undergrad classes. The graduate programs offer significant “professor hand-holding” - indeed, you work very closely with professors as a PhD student at those schools (as you would at a PhD program at a private school). There is little if any truly cutthroat competition in the graduate programs; I highly doubt that very many people actually flunk out of the grad programs at Michigan. In other words, the graduate programs at the public schools are run quite similarly to the undergraduate programs at the private schools. Yet - you said it yourself - the graduate programs are the best part of those public schools.

So it begs the question of why it is so good for schools like Michigan and Berkeley to offer small class sizes and lots of hand-holding to their graduate students, but not the undergraduate students. Let’s be honest. Who needs the hand-holding more? An 18 year kid who is living on his own for the first time in his life? Or a 22 year old grad student who has been living on his own for several years now?**

Look, the truth is, all research univeristies, Harvard included, have some tenured profs who are just absolutely TERRIBLE teachers. They’re brilliant researchers, but they’re teaching skills are terrible. Either they’re completely incoherent in speaking, or they clearly hate teaching and are only doing it because they are obligated to, or they deliberately choose to spend no time in preparing lectures, etc.

Consider some of these quotes from Thomas Sowell, himself a graduate from Harvard (an extremely impressive feat as he is an African-American who got into Harvard in the days before affirmative action when the entire higher education system was still racist).

"For example, Time magazine summarized criticisms of top Harvard professors as “too engaged in their own research, too busy with outside consulting or just too lordly to bother with anything so trivial as an undergraduate.” …Much the same picture emerges repeatedly in the Confidential Guide published by Harvard students, where another professor of government was described as “completely disorganized” in his lectures and “inept at managing classroom discussions.” Words like “disorganized” and “rambling” appear again and again in descriptions of the lectures of particular Harvard professors in fields as disparate as music, anthropology, and women’s studies. In a course on genetics, both the professor and his teaching assistants are described as “often inadequately prepared” and in an introductory chemistry course, "lectures have bordered on the incomprehensible…“A research star who actually considers teaching worthwhile,” “one of the few professors who answers his own telephone,” “everything that Harvard is supposed to be, but usually isn’t.”

Important as lectures are, opportunities for interaction with professors outside the classroom-in their offices or at informal gatherings-can also be an important part of an educational experience. However, according to a distinguished accreditation panel visiting Harvard in 1987, “only the most aggressive and persistent undergraduate” is likely to have any “faculty-student interaction outside of the classroom” with senior Harvard professors. Harvard is by no means unique in this respect, nor are junior faculty members or even teaching assistants always accessible at research universities. The junior faculty and the graduate students who serve as teaching assistants at many universities have other distractions and pressures that keep them from investing great amounts of time in teaching. Their whole future and that of their families hang in the balance while they try to complete their research, so as to establish themselves in their professions. Many graduate students never get the Ph.D. degree for which they have sacrificed years of their lives. Most junior faculty members at leading research universities are let go after a few years, except for those rare individuals whose research output marks them as stars to be given tenure. In short, junior as well as senior faculty at many universities have strong incentives to give teaching a low priority. The very process by which a top university maintains its prestige and visibility in the world can undermine the education of undergraduates.

The teaching role of graduate students at universities is far larger than many people-especially parents and high school students-realize. Harvard has about 400 people teaching who are not faculty members but teaching assistants, teaching fellows, and the like-usually graduate students, understandably preoccupied with completing their own education. Even when called “teaching assistants,” they do much more than simply assist professors with grading exams or preparing science labs. Most of the classes in introductory calculus at Harvard are taught by teaching assistants. Many teaching assistants are foreign, and a recurring complaint in the Harvard students’ Confidential Guide is that their English is often hard to understand. As for the advisory role of these non-faculty teachers, according to the Harvard Salient (a student newspaper), “academic advising can be a sad joke, often consisting of nothing more than a harried tutor’s cursory glance at the study card. Many of us qualify as ‘phantom students’ who go through Harvard without ever meeting a full professor.”

Those professors who enjoy teaching more than research are likely to seek out the small liberal arts college-or have to go there after being forced out of research universities for not publishing enough. Winning the “teacher of the year” award at a research university will carry very little weight when time comes to have one’s contract renewed or to be voted on for tenure. In 1987, a Harvard professor whose credentials included such an award was notified that his contract would not be renewed. I personally know three other professors at three different institutions who were notified that their contracts would not be renewed after they had won “teacher of the year” awards. One referred to the award as “travel money.” The issue of teaching versus research has been debated innumerable times and is unlikely to be settled any time soon. What is important to someone seeking good teaching is to find out where it is most likely to be found. At a top research university, where the professor knows that “publish or perish” are his career choices, it is unrealistic to expect that most will make teaching their top priority. To some, teaching is purely incidental."

Nor is this criticism specific to Harvard. Sowell also talks about UCBerkeley:

“The great state universities have similar problems, often to an even greater extent than Harvard and other large private universities. The University of California at Berkeley is unsurpassed as a research institution, its faculty have received many Nobel Prizes, its graduate programs rank above those of Harvard in several fields, and Berkeley is often rated number one among the nation’s universities. However, none of this translates into an outstanding undergraduate education. At Berkeley, there are estimated to be more than twice as many graduate students teaching as at Harvard. In addition, Berkeley has large numbers of part-time junior faculty, who support themselves by having other jobs-and therefore other demands on their time besides teaching. Finally, the huge size of the university-more than 30,000 students-ensures that undergraduate education is impersonal, bureaucratic, and sometimes chaotic.”

[Sowell:</a> Choosing a College Chapter 2](<a href=“Sowell: Choosing a College Chapter 2”>Sowell: Choosing a College Chapter 2)

The point is that many research universities, Harvard included, have uneven teaching quality in that the profs are not particularly interested in research. That’s not to say that everything is perfect at the LAC’s. But I think in general, the profs at the LAC’s tend to care more about teaching than the profs at the research universities.

Heck I myself was just talking to Rakesh Khurana, professor at Harvard Business School, and he himself stated that doesn’t think the teaching of Harvard undergrads is very good and that the teaching is better at the LAC’s.

Well, there are significant downsides to being at many large research universities too. Let’s take Berkeley as an example. You say that LAC’s offer limited courses. Well, at Berkeley, many students cannot get into the courses that they want. Who cares if your school has lots of courses if you can’t actually get into the ones you want? Your school then becomes, in effect, a school of limited courses. Same is true of profs. There are profs at Berkeley who haven’t taught an undergrad course in years, sometimes decades. To give you an example, take Yuan Lee, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1986. He is emeritus now, but back when he was still a full prof, he stopped teaching undergrads basically ever since he won the Nobel. Berkeley let him get away with it. Plenty of other Berkeley profs have not taught undergrad courses in years. Nor do I mean to single Berkeley out. Many other large public universities exhibit the same problems.

Nor do I see a small peer group as necessarily being a bad thing. I think this depends on the person. Caltech, for example, has extremely small peer groups - as Caltech has fewer undergrads than even most LAC’s do. But that doesn’t seem to hurt the school spirit of Caltech. Most Caltech grads seem to appreciate the experience. The same could be said for a place like Princeton, which is also not a particularly large school in terms of the number of students. Some people strongly prefer a small environment. I think it’s for the same reasons that some people like living in small towns as opposed to big cities.

About the research thing, I wonder how much it matters. After all, plenty of students, even math/science students, have no intention of becoming researchers anyway. For example, I know people who just wanted to study math/science so that they could teach it in high school. You don’t need to do cutting edge research to be a high school teacher. Plenty of other people just want to pursue it as an intellectual interest before heading off to, say, law or medical school, or going off to investment banking or consulting jobs. If you don’t actually intend to pursue math/science as a living, then who cares how much cutting-edge research you are exposed to?

And then there is the high success rate of LAC’s in getting students into the top PhD programs of math/science, measured as a percentage of grads getting into such programs. I think that demonstrates emphatically that whatever the LAC’s may be lacking in cutting-edge research evidently doesn’t hurt the students in terms of getting into top doctoral programs. For example, Caltech publishes its PhD commencement data, showing where its new PhD students got their undergrad degrees. In many years, the combination of Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Wellesley have more alumni getting PhD’s at Caltech than UCLA has, despite the fact that UCLA clearly has many times undergrads than the combination of those 4 LAC’s, and despite the fact that UCLA is local to Caltech and thus would be expected to send plenty of their undergrads to Caltech. I am sure that there are plenty of UCLA grads who wanted to go to Caltech to get their PhD, but were not admitted because Caltech decided to admit somebody from a LAC instead.

UCBChemEGrad · April 3, 2009, 12:31pm

Which leads to what I think is by far the greatest advantage of the top private schools over the top public schools, in that the former schools are safer. At a school like Brown, you’re not going to flunk out. Not only will you will graduate, but also probably with a pretty decent GPA. It’s practically impossible to actually get a truly terrible grade at those schools. Not so at many of the top public schools, in which you really do run an actual risk of flunking out. Even if you avoid that, you may nonetheless barely graduate, with a GPA that is completely trashed, hence preventing you from getting into any decent grad school or from getting many good jobs, or even generally, just enjoying the undergrad experience. I recall one guy, at a major public university, who went into his final semester with a GPA that was so uncomfortable close to a 2.00 that he didn’t even know whether he was going to make it to graduation, or whether he would simply flunk out completely. Just imagine you’re heading into your final semester of college, but with the legitimate fear that you still might flunk out.

This is really support for this statement:
“The Ivy League is a revolving door of the privileged helping the privileged”

“The great state universities have similar problems, often to an even greater extent than Harvard and other large private universities. The University of California at Berkeley is unsurpassed as a research institution, its faculty have received many Nobel Prizes, its graduate programs rank above those of Harvard in several fields, and Berkeley is often rated number one among the nation’s universities. However, none of this translates into an outstanding undergraduate education. At Berkeley, there are estimated to be more than twice as many graduate students teaching as at Harvard. In addition, Berkeley has large numbers of part-time junior faculty, who support themselves by having other jobs-and therefore other demands on their time besides teaching. Finally, the huge size of the university-more than 30,000 students-ensures that undergraduate education is impersonal, bureaucratic, and sometimes chaotic.”

With all due respect to Mr. Sowell, there may be twice as many graduate students at Berkeley teaching, but they are teaching more undergrads. And it gives false perception that courses are taught by graduate students and “junior faculty”. All of my courses at Berkeley were taught by profs. Graduate students led discussion sections and labs. This is very common in most research universities. And the notion that an associate professor at Berkeley can be classified as “junior” is disingenuous.

Fiyero · April 3, 2009, 12:43pm

To the OP

When I hear someone mention UC-Berkeley, I’m very impressed. It is an extremely competitive school with highly ranked departments in every major they offer. It does have a reputation for students being very competitive with each other and the grade deflation is well known. If someone can survive there and come out graduating with honors, I’m more impressed with that than someone graduating with honors from an ivy school.

DunninLA · April 3, 2009, 1:47pm

Look (I’m starting to imitate Obama’s speech patterns)

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.

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.

However, your question is not about the university IN GENERAL. You are asking about an undergraduate education at Berkeley.

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.

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.

RML · April 3, 2009, 1:47pm

IBclass06, the issue about Berkeley’s undergrad not being as strong as it’s postgrad is redundant to the point that it’s predictable and boring… It’s been said over and over again in several threads probably since the birth of this message board. In other words, that’s not a hidden secret at Berkeley but despite that, top students go there because it’s a very prestigious school.

UCBChemEGrad · April 3, 2009, 1:54pm

Yet, despite all the lack of undergraduate attention, Berkeley’s undergrad departments are still top-notch. USNWR rankings for undergrad engineering and business is #2 and #3, respectively. If it was such a bad ****in’ place for undergrads, you think it would be ranked a lot lower in these undergrad rankings…that’s not the case though.

IBclass06 · April 3, 2009, 1:58pm

Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I was just playing devil’s advocate. You’d see in my other posts that I’m a big supporter of public universities.

If you want to get technical about it, Berkeley does not actually come out #1 in the NRC rankings. MIT is #1 in terms of non-zero ranked fields, and Stanford is #1 in terms of all 41 ranked fields (Berkeley is #2 in both categories). It’s splitting hairs, but since posters want to get so nitpicky about everything…

Of course, we’ll see how this changes when/if the updated rankings come out.

RML · April 3, 2009, 2:01pm

Well, that’s because schools must approach undergrad and grad differently.

Research is the main thrust of postgrad education, thus you would need a close supervision from your mentor. postgrad population is also quite small in number usually less than 50 per year per program. Learning the basic skills of your major and developing discipline to accomplish your goals are what accounts as more important at undergrad education, on the other hand. you really wouldn’t need someone following you wherever you’ll go or dictating you whatever you’ll do to thrive in college.

UCBChemEGrad · April 3, 2009, 2:05pm

^ Yes, Berkeley’s intro science, math and econ lectures are very large. But, you don’t need a lot of small class discussion for these subjects…facts are facts. Humanities and social sciences were much smaller…my English lit class was 20 students, my Demography class (graduate students enrolled) was 15 students.

Economies of scale, biotches!

kb10 · April 3, 2009, 2:11pm

I think only in the USA, do people have the time and energy to dissect the differences between undergrad and grad school strength of each University. For most of the world, when you say you went to Berkeley for undergrad or PhD, you went to Berkeley.

UCBChemEGrad · April 3, 2009, 2:16pm

^ Exactly! People ask where I went to school. I say, “Berkeley”. They say, “Oh, wow. What did you study?” I respond, “Chemical engineering.” They say, “Oh, WOW!”

They don’t ask, “Oh, PhD or undergrad?” Me:“Undergrad”…Them: scoff “Oh, that’s not that good.”

IBclass06 · April 3, 2009, 2:38pm

Only in the US do we have so many colleges that we can afford to evaluate the quality of undergraduate education.

(UCB, loved your last two posts.)

kb10 · April 3, 2009, 2:44pm

And maybe the only country where people are willing to pay $500 dollars for a pair jeans, marketed as having “better quality”.

GoWorld · April 3, 2009, 2:51pm

Of course they compare, especially when those Ph.D. students are GSIs for undergraduate courses.

modestmelody · April 3, 2009, 3:01pm

Yet nowhere have you ever conceded any of the very real disadvantages that Berkeley has. You’re very good at being “even” about other places, but really don’t turn that critical eye to the problems that exist at your beloved Cal.

It’s not a matter of being redundant-- it’s not acknowledged or mentioned by your team of supporters and it really should be, alongside your redundant message that no one gives a crap because you still have a strong research faculty.

I’d also like to point out that it’s ironic in the quote posted by IBClass that Brown is for the “risk-averse”. I think that a university which is structured so that all of its students are always acting as risk-takers is better than a university structured in a way that risks seems daunting to most of the student body. The fact that Brown students are taking courses in 15 or 16 different departments over 32 courses is better than having a few students who take a few exceptional risks and most students never leaving their comfort zone. Everything around the Open Curriculum is designed so that your comfort zone can be expanded. It’s designed so that you find the engineers and physical sciences taking high level course work on ethnographic research (insert some other area they wouldn’t normally explore).

I think it’s crazy to suggest that creating a safe space for intellectual exploration is a bad thing for every person. There are two ways to approach this kind of education-- some people want an environment which encourages exploration and supplies students with support in all of their endeavors and that kind of exploration is what motivates them, and other people need an environment based on pitting them against their classmates and seeing how they do in a more cutthroat environment where you’re on your own.

Two professors of mine, Dean Katherine Bergeron and former Provost William Simmons both taught at Berkeley, and both of them have talked about how their classes have to be run completely different at Brown and even their perception of what grades are and how they’re used and the way to evaluate students has changed. It’s a really dumb oversimplification to say that one system is easier than the other and that one system is better than the other-- they have different goals and different designs. FWIW, neither of those professors would say that their courses are less challenging or anything remotely like that. In fact, without getting into too much detail, one of them claimed to be able to probe far deeper in their Brown classes because of the differences in student motivations for taking their class and the different way they’re able to approach their assignments and because of the vastly differing backgrounds each student brings into the classroom all being far more apparent here.

Basically, anybody making a judgment that comes down that one is better or worse is wrong. Anyone not realizing there are some very fundamentally different ways that large, public, research universities approach undergraduates versus other schools is a moron. There are pros and cons of both models and students who thrive at one may not thrive at the other. Luckily there are enough top schools that have very different models that students in the US can choose between them and be equally prepared for success post-graduation.

modestmelody · April 3, 2009, 3:03pm

I don’t think the proper number scheme and data exists to make a meaningful distinction. There is far too much data lost underneath numbers like SAT ranges. This kind of summative data is not revealing enough to depend on, so I’m depending on the experiences of those who have lived and worked and studied in both environments and talk about how students actually put things into practice within the model I personally live in. That’s more helpful that a series of numbers which even with all the proper information and all of the data disaggregated still are somewhat unrevealing.

UCBChemEGrad · April 3, 2009, 3:07pm

I’d also like to point out that it’s ironic in the quote posted by IBClass that Brown is for the “risk-averse”. I think that a university which is structured so that all of its students are always acting as risk-takers is better than a university structured in a way that risks seems daunting to most of the student body. The fact that Brown students are taking courses in 15 or 16 different departments over 32 courses is better than having a few students who take a few exceptional risks and most students never leaving their comfort zone. Everything around the Open Curriculum is designed so that your comfort zone can be expanded. It’s designed so that you find the engineers and physical sciences taking high level course work on ethnographic research (insert some other area they wouldn’t normally explore).

You must have missed my post, modest.

I said my English Lit class had 20 students and my Demography class (which included several grad students) was 15 students. You don’t need a small LAC environment to get the small liberal arts classes. Berkeley offers both.

UCBChemEGrad · April 3, 2009, 3:32pm

Several years ago, Berkeley had a cute ad with the words of alumni/author Joan Didion…I think she says it exactly right:

"I arrived at Berkeley at 18 with two new suitcases…, a yearning to be someone better and not the slightest business being there.

Yet, I loved it right away. What Berkeley offered me was infinite.

Without Berkeley, the world I know would have been…more ordered, less risky, but not the world I wanted. Not free. Not Berkeley. Not me."

[YouTube</a> - [UC Berkeley] The Promise of Berkeley](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rubcoXR3bGU&feature=related]YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rubcoXR3bGU&feature=related)
If this link gets deleted, search “The Promise of Berkeley” on Youtube.

/thread

Endicott · April 3, 2009, 3:47pm

It’s got a pretty good rep for a state school.

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