<p>Alexandre: Cal is in no way at Top 10 or 15 undergrad institution. For grad school/PhD’s, easily, but for undergraduate, it’s really nowhere close.</p>
<p>Top 15: Ivies (8), Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore</p>
<p>…maybe Chicago. maybe.</p>
<p>s snack, for graduate school, Cal is #1 or #2. For undergrad, it is top 10 or top 15…among universities. LACs don’t count since they are completely different. Apples to apples please.</p>
<p>“Top 15: Ivies (8), Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore”</p>
<p>-And just what does Caltech of all places have that Berkeley doesn’t.</p>
<p>Caltech has an entering class of like 216. Cal’s is like 5,000. Class size should factor into college shouldn’t it?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/applying/profile[/url]”>http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/applying/profile</a>
(where I got caltech’s entering class size)</p>
<p>“Class size should factor into college shouldn’t it?”</p>
<p>-Indeed it should. But when you say Caltech is a better undergrad school than Berkeley… it’s a rather silly criterion if you ask me. Having fewer students doesn’t make a better undergraduate atmosphere, and surely doesn’t make students learn better or more efficiently.</p>
<p>The average student at Caltech is significantly smarter than the average student at Cal.</p>
<p>Caltech’s average SAT is in the low 1500’s.
Cal’s is in the low 1300’s.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why? 10 char</p>
<p>"The average student at Caltech is significantly smarter than the average student at Cal.</p>
<p>Caltech’s average SAT is in the low 1500’s.
Cal’s is in the low 1300’s."</p>
<p>Higher SAT scores doesn’t mean “smarter”… wow… And it doesn’t even translate into the type of education a particular student would get at a school. Caltech also only has 800 students. If you took the top-scoring 800 students at Berkeley, I wonder what its SAT average would be…</p>
<p>^Not for every individual. But a 200 point higher average means A LOT.</p>
<p>Just out of curiosity, I’d be interested to learn the methodology that others are using to arrive at their top 10 or 15. So often, people just list schools based on reputation or what they have read in the press. </p>
<p>I prefer a more quantitative approach that has some hard numbers to it and tries to separate the hype from the reality. This also has value in extracting much of the influence that graduate school reputations have in judging undergraduate excellence. </p>
<p>I believe that a great undergraduate experience is determined by four things:
<p>In the case of Dartmouth vs UC Berkeley, I believe that Dartmouth wins on the quality of the students, the size of the classroom, and the institutional resources. </p>
<p>For the quality of the teaching, UC Berkeley has a higher Peer Assessment score (4.7 to 4.4). Personally I consider the Peer Assessment scores to be very poor indicators of the quality of teaching at a school. I would strongly prefer classes taught by full-time professors and not by TAs. </p>
<p>Despite my strong belief that Dartmouth is a superior undergraduate institution to UC Berkeley, this does not automatically mean that I believe that all students should choose Dartmouth. For students with financial concerns, there is a huge cost differential for students from California in choosing UCB. In addition, if one wants to study engineering, this is clearly a more active and prominent aspect of the UC Berkeley school culture as 13% of the students follow this path vs only 5% at Dartmouth. This greater school emphasis may provide more individual opportunities for an engineering student who attends Cal.</p>
<p>“Not for every individual. But a 200 point higher average means A LOT.”</p>
<p>-Yes, it means those students scored higher on the SAT.</p>
<p>And all this nonsense about class size makes me laugh. I’ve had classes ranging from 5 to 500 people, and the smaller one are not always better. In fact, most of the best and most fulfilling classes I’ve had have had over 50 people in them.</p>
<p>kk…your lack of any sort of logic is tarnishing my opinion of Northwestern.</p>
<p>“kk…your lack of any sort of logic is tarnishing my opinion of Northwestern.”</p>
<p>-Your logic is the logic that’s flawed… higher SAT scores does not equal smarter students, and BY NO MEANS translates into a better undergraduate school. Plain and simple.</p>
<p>I believe that a great undergraduate experience is determined by four things:</p>
<p>“1. The quality of the students that you will attend with”</p>
<p>-This is not objective….</p>
<p>“2. The size and nature of the classroom in which you and your peers will learn from your professors and from one another”</p>
<p>-This is not objective</p>
<p>“3. The quality and nature of the teaching (notice I said teaching and not quality of the research effort)”</p>
<p>-This is not objective…</p>
<p>“4. Institutional resources and the willingness to use these to support undergraduate education”</p>
<p>“Institutional resources” could be objective, but determining how willing a school is for supporting undergraduate education seems murky to me.</p>
<p>Class size is very important in picking a college. While 5000 vs 200 students has tons of differences socially, it also affects class registration, variety and number of courses offered, availability of professors, learning environment, and other factors. Some people thrive only in small discussion based classes, others thrive in large lecture halls.</p>
<p>“Some people thrive only in small discussion based classes, others thrive in large lecture halls.”</p>
<p>-Exactly!</p>
<p>This is to the person who claims to be KK19131. Who are you and what have you done to the real KK?! LOL!</p>
<p>HA! … :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Well, I definitely like the new KK a lot better. </p>
<p>Gerhard Casper wrote a letter to the USNWR back in 1996. In it, he urged the USNWR to approach the rankings in a more rational manner rather than rely purely on statistics that seem to change violently on an annual basis. </p>
<p>“I am extremely skeptical that the quality of a university - any more than the quality of a magazine - can be measured statistically. However, even if it can, the producers of the U.S. News rankings remain far from discovering the method. Let me offer as prima facie evidence two great public universities: the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of California-Berkeley. These clearly are among the very best universities in America - one could make a strong argument for either in the top half-dozen. Yet, in the last three years, the U.S. News formula has assigned them ranks that lead many readers to infer that they are second rate: Michigan 21-24-24, and Berkeley 23-26-27.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html[/url]”>http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/961206gcfallow.html</a></p>
<p>In short, Dr. Casper believes that the quality of a university cannot be measured statistically. Most academics and corporate recruiters agree with him. Education is a highly personal venture, particularly at the university level. The quality of the student body and the size of the class room are important factors to be sure, but taken out of context and without a common frame of reference, they are hard to interpret. And even if they could be properly interpreted, those are just two of many important criteria in determining the quality of a university. Quality of faculty, strength and depth of curriculum, faculty intensity and level of expectation, cutting-edge research opportunities for undergraduates, access to latest technologies, labs and reports, quality of libraries and computer, ties to industry, size of endowment, both in absolute terms and in terms of endowment per student, alumni loyalty and influence, intellectual vibe, access to and preponderance of artistic, political, social and intellectual events on campus, political and social activism etc… Most of those cannot be measured statistically with any degree of accuracy.</p>
<p>I think those criteria are actually very good, and probably some of the best criteria for a rising high school senior to look at - unless you’d rather have high school students base their college judgements on people’s random opinions.</p>
<p>These aren’t entirely objective, but you can attempt to objectify atleast 1) and 4). </p>
<p>For 1) Quality of Students - SATs, National Merit Scholars, Other types of scholars, class rank - stronger students = smarter peers. Sorry, but I’m assuming people who perform better academically are smarter, and feel thats a somewhat decent assumption to make.</p>
<p>2) Class Size - though I don’t agree smaller is always better, still I feel like it is generally a good rule. How many seminars, how much close contact with a big shot professor. How many undergraduate research opportunities. This is all measurable.</p>
<p>3) This is totally subjective. However, assuming good teaching leads to strong students, maybe how many students end up going to top law/med/biz schools (since there is a ranking for that) or go onto win prestigious scholarships. This is a rough correlation though.</p>
<p>4) Institutional resources - somewhat measurable by these rankings, and also by figures such as endowment per capita etc. (though I believe there is an increasing returns to scale)</p>
<p><a href=“http://mup.asu.edu/research2006.pdf[/url]”>http://mup.asu.edu/research2006.pdf</a> </p>
<p><a href=“http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?primary=3&secondary=32&bycat=Go[/url]”>http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?primary=3&secondary=32&bycat=Go</a></p>