| I'm a foreign graduate student, at the end of my fourth semester, and I have to agree it's highly overrated.
Academics are OK, but not as good as everyone seems to think. I took some 400 level cross-registered classes in my first year, and the standard of final-year undergrad work was a joke compared to my undergrad.
The fact is - UNC is a good, solid, local university. That's why so many of its graduates go on to positions of power in North Carolina. But to claim it's even close to UC Berkeley is absolutely ridiculous: UCB is a global university, one of the very best, known the world over.
When I told people in my home country that I was going to grad school in North Carolina, they might ask "Oh at Duke University?", but I don't think a single one had heard of UNC. And these are not uneducated people (they had heard of Duke, after all, which is itself not exactly global), these are phd students at one of the best universities in the world (far, far better than UNC).
UNC-- you're good, but get over yourselves. |