Duke vs. Berkeley?

[UCLAri]

<p>CalX,</p>

<p>Berkeley is also known more globally than Williams and Amherst. I don’t know that I’d unequivocally recommend Cal over those two.</p>

[caligali]

<p>Public v. private university raises questions beyond the academic.</p>

[kyledavid80]

<p>“Berkeley is also known more globally than Williams and Amherst. I don’t know that I’d unequivocally recommend Cal over those two.”</p>

<p>Yes, but that’s the difference between a university and a college. A public uni vs. a private uni is an easier comparison. But LACs are often a completely different type ('course, many say that of state universities).</p>

[sfgiants]

<p>

1- Berkeley used to be ranked in the top 5 in the early USNWR rankings, because those rankings, far higher than Duke (which wasn’t even in the top 19)</p>

<p>2- Since 1983, the quality of the undergraduate education and experience at Berkeley has actually risen.</p>

<p>3- Berkeley’s USNWR ranking has tanked in the past two decades, while that of private schools has risen considerably, to the point that Berkeley is behind some schools that are clearly inferior on academic grounds. The reason for this decline is the change in the metrics, with the dilution of pure academic ratings down to one quarter of the total score.</p>

<p>4-Berkeley is far better known globally than Duke. As a matter of fact, I had never even heard of Duke when I applied to college from Europe.

</p>

<ol>
<li><p>That was twenty years ago</p></li>
<li><p>Sure, but perhaps the quality at other schools went up at a faster rate. Thus, in relative terms, Duke could have gained on Berkeley significantly.</p></li>
<li><p>Berkeley benefits from a strong Halo effect stemming from its graduate programs.</p></li>
<li><p><em>shrug</em> Why does this matter to a person planning to work in the U.S?</p></li>
</ol>

<p>I agree that Cal is probably underrated by the U.S News, but it is certainly not a top 10 school either. I would place it in the mid-to-high teens.</p>

[kyledavid80]

<p>“I agree that Cal is probably underrated by the U.S News, but it is certainly not a top 10 school either. I would place it in the mid-to-high teens.”</p>

<p>I don’t think it really matters where we “place” these universities. I would argue that Cal is of the caliber of UPenn or Stanford, so I’m saying top 10. But in my way of thinking, there are 20 or so universities that can reasonably fit into the (read “my”) top 10. =)</p>

[CalX]

<p>UCLAri said:

CalX,</p>

<p>Quote:
“I think you also display the kind of ignorance about maths that many engineers or non-scientists have.”</p>

<p>This isn’t even a remotely good response to what sakky was arguing. All sakky said was that the super famous professor isn’t exactly the best person to be teaching a basic calculus course. Instead of responding to that point, you chose to launch into some silly ad hominem questioning sakky’s academic credentials.</p>

<p>Stop.

</p>

<p>My criticism at sakky’s stance is that it regards mathematics as merely a set of tools and reduces it to a generic subject. I believe this stance is typical of people who don’t really understand or value that subject. It’s unfortunately a common cultural belief in the USA, where maths is relegated to an obscure and fairly useless topic and it is a bit bastardized and distilled into a set of tools. A lot of American college students don’t even know the meaning of many basic mathematical notations that 12 year-olds in France or Russia are taught, such as the reverted capital “e” or the exclamation point. </p>

<p>Beyond basic calculus, maths is a way of thinking, a rigorous approach that can help a future scientist, an engineer or even a future manager in their perception and conceptualization of complex problems rather than just a set of tools that will allow them to calculate areas, integrals, differentials and so forth. A great math professor like Ole Hald, which I had for math 1B, showed the elegance and power behind the more abstract and rigorous approach to mathematics, an approach that really defines that discipline.</p>

<p>Berkeley being a world-class university, its faculty will tend to emphasize that approach. Note that Berkeley is #1 in maths while Duke is #28, according to a 1998 USNWR ranking:
<a href=“http://math.scu.edu/~eschaefe/grad.html[/url]”>http://math.scu.edu/~eschaefe/grad.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>

Now answer this: is the famous professor always the best teacher? Why do grad schools admit disproportionately high numbers of grads from LACs, whose faculties are usually not full of famous profs, over research university grads?

</p>

<p>I do think the professors that are world-class leaders in their fields are more likely to teach their subjects better, ceteris paribus. Often, Berkeley’s faculty practically wrote the book on the subject, not just the Nobels, but a very large contingent of the faculty.</p>

<p>About the LACs: there might be a bit of a self-selection here, students who opt for LACs are more likely to want to go on to graduate school from the onset, as opposed to the average student who choses to attend a university, who might be more focused on getting a job and have more immediate career plans from the onset. I do think that LACs provide a good preparation for graduate schools, but I don’t think you can discount their demographics and the profile of students that they cater to as a strong factor in their high percentage of grad school acceptance.</p>

<p>I will address other remarks later this week, you guys are relentless! :)</p>

[UCLAri]

<p>CalX,</p>

<p>I’ve heard this argued before and am getting an odd sense of deja vu right now…</p>

<p>Anyway, you once again launched into ad hominems and avoid the question for the most part with this last post.</p>

<p>

A lot of American college students don’t even know the meaning of many basic mathematical notations that 12 year-olds in France or Russia are taught, such as the reverted capital “e” or the exclamation point.

</p>

<p>Do you have, oh I dunno, proof of this? You’re fond of generalizations, putting down Americans, and trying to demonstrate that it’s the American attitude that is flawed, yet you ignore the fact that it’s the same ignorant bunch of bumpkins that produced Cal. Odd, isn’t it?</p>

<p>

It’s unfortunately a common cultural belief in the USA, where maths is relegated to an obscure and fairly useless topic and it is a bit bastardized and distilled into a set of tools.

</p>

<p>Sorry, but for the average person, math (it’s singular, by the way) will only ever be a set of tools. The only math I’ll ever need in my career is differential calculus and some matrix algebra. I learned a lot more (from irrational numbers to imaginary numbers to integration), but I’ll never use it. And from disuse comes a loss of memory on how to use it-- kind of like how a lot of us will forget what year events happened.</p>

<p>

Berkeley being a world-class university, its faculty will tend to emphasize that approach. Note that Berkeley is #1 in maths while Duke is #28, according to a 1998 USNWR ranking:

</p>

<p>1998??? Dude, no offense, but 1998 was a long time ago. </p>

<p>Besides, you still haven’t convinced me that the math genius is the best teacher. Why is it necessarily the case? Just because they’re smart? </p>

<p>Have you ever taught, by the way? It’s not easy. It takes a different kind of approach than most academics understand. Remember: most people taking calc 1 want to understand the basics… they don’t want to know about the outer frontiers of math. For one, the latter won’t benefit them much at that point.</p>

<p>Would you start teaching English by explaining why dangling participles are a problem? No, of course not. You’d start with the basics. You also wouldn’t start teaching Japanese with a 30 page list of kanji to memorize from day one. However, a lot of brilliant mathematicians don’t know how to NOT teach from the outer reaches, and this is frustrating for a lot of students.</p>

<p>The best teacher is not necessarily the best researcher. I don’t see how you can say it’s always the case otherwise.</p>

<p>

I do think the professors that are world-class leaders in their fields are more likely to teach their subjects better, ceteris paribus. Often, Berkeley’s faculty practically wrote the book on the subject, not just the Nobels, but a very large contingent of the faculty.

</p>

<p>I’ve taken classes with professors who wrote books on subjects that were simply awful pedagogues. Just because someone can write doesn’t mean that they can teach. </p>

<p>But anyway, I disagree a great deal with you. Unless a student gets the fundamentals down, the rest of the study of mathematics is largely a moot point. Since the vast majority of college students are only taking</p>

[sakky]

<p>

My criticism at sakky’s stance is that it regards mathematics as merely a set of tools and reduces it to a generic subject. I believe this stance is typical of people who don’t really understand or value that subject. It’s unfortunately a common cultural belief in the USA, where maths is relegated to an obscure and fairly useless topic and it is a bit bastardized and distilled into a set of tools. A lot of American college students don’t even know the meaning of many basic mathematical notations that 12 year-olds in France or Russia are taught, such as the reverted capital “e” or the exclamation point.

</p>

<p>Uh, it’s not “my” stance. Like it or not, right or wrong, Americans are going to think the way they want about math. You can whine all you want about how you think Americans are wrong, but at the end of the day, it is what it is. </p>

<p>The bottom line is, at the end of the day, the vast majority of students at Berkeley taking lower-division math courses are not math majors or have a lot of interest in deep math. The number of math majors at Berkeley are far far dwarfed by the number of engineers. Berkeley confers about 60 math bachelor’s degrees a year. That’s less than the corresponding number of civil engineers, and CivE is one of the smaller engineering majors at Berkeley. The upshot is that the vast majority of students in those classes see math as little more than a tool that they have to use in later engineering courses. Nothing more, nothing less. Like it or not, it is what it is.</p>

<p><a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Math.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Math.stm&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CivilEngr.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CivilEngr.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>So what you are saying is that Berkeley is just not giving the majority of students what they want. You can talk about how the Berkeley math department teaches classes in a highly rigorous manner, but it seems to me that most students in those math classes don’t really want that. </p>

<p>

About the LACs: there might be a bit of a self-selection here, students who opt for LACs are more likely to want to go on to graduate school from the onset, as opposed to the average student who choses to attend a university, who might be more focused on getting a job and have more immediate career plans from the onset.

</p>

<p>Aha! So you just conceded my point, which is that students at Berkeley are career-oriented and therefore are probably not that interested in learning rigorous math for its own sake. Hence, when you say that the Berkeley math department emphasizes in your words, an abstract and rigorous approach, I think you have to agree that means that the math department is providing Berkeley students as a whole something they don’t really want. </p>

<p>

I do think the professors that are world-class leaders in their fields are more likely to teach their subjects better, ceteris paribus. Often, Berkeley’s faculty practically wrote the book on the subject, not just the Nobels, but a very large contingent of the faculty.

</p>

<p>See, there it is again. Why does writing a book necessarily make you a good teacher? Some of the best teachers I have had in my life have been my K-12 teachers, and NONE of them have ever written any books. </p>

<p>Besides, let’s look specifically at lower-division math courses, which is where I entered the fray of this thread. Lower division math courses are basic calculus and linear algebra. These are subjects that have been known for a very long time. Frankly, there isn’t a whole lot of ‘research’ to be done here. It’s not like people are discovering new basic integrals or basic derivatives. The techniques of these classes have been well known for decades, and in many cases, centuries. All you really need is for somebody to explain these concepts clearly to you. You don’t need an active researcher to teach you these subjects. It’s not like a prolific active researcher is going to teach you “secret” derivatives in Math 1A that he just discovered. </p>

<p>In fact, this is why Math 1AB can actually taught and ‘passed’ in high school by taking the requisite AP course and exams. In other words, high school math teachers (that are AP-certified) can and do successfully teach the content of Math 1AB, and in many cases, do so very well (at least, well enough for Berkeley to take the credits and waive people out of Math 1AB).</p>

[sakky]

<p>

Do you have, oh I dunno, proof of this? You’re fond of generalizations, putting down Americans, and trying to demonstrate that it’s the American attitude that is flawed, yet you ignore the fact that it’s the same ignorant bunch of bumpkins that produced Cal. Odd, isn’t it?

</p>

<p>I too find this highly ironic. On the one hand, CalX insults American students, and on the other hand, he chose to go to an American school that was (obviously) full of American students. If American college students are so bad, then why would you want to be their classmate? Why not just go to college in France? </p>

<p>And besides, there are PLENTY of current Berkeley students who don’t know what the upside-down capital E means. After all, the majority of Berkeley students major in subjects in which you just don’t need to know that stuff. They don’t know what the upside-down capital E means, and more importantly, they don’t want to know what it means. Let’s face it. Does a guy at Cal majoring in poli-sci really care about that? Or sociology? Or bus-ad at Haas? Or MCB? Yet these are some of the largest majors on campus. I am quite certain that if you asked those students, the vast majority of them would not know what that mathematical symbol meant, and they probably don’t want to know either.</p>

<p><a href=“http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2005Majors.stm[/url]”>http://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2005Majors.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Hence, from what I can tell, intentionally or not, CalX is criticizing most current and former Berkeley undergrads.</p>

[Sam_Lee]

<p>For those who keep being in denial and equating profs’ awards with undergrad education:</p>

<p>Below is what Peter Voorhees, director of the graduate program in materials science at Northwestern, said upon being asked about the graduate ranking that ranked his department 2nd in the nation.</p>

<p>

“This is just one measure of success,” he said. “It doesn’t address what we do with our undergraduate program and where our undergraduates go, which I think is just as important as production of our scholarly works.”

</p>

[chaoses]

<p>berkeley is more of a natural science school (math, physics, chem, engineering …)</p>

<p>duke is more of a law, social sciences school.</p>

<p>where does biology stand?</p>

[UCLAri]

<p>chaoses,</p>

<p>That doesn’t really make sense, tough. Cal’s social science and humanities programs are almost all top 10.</p>

[darkhope]

<p>posted this already on other thread but this can help a bit in college selection:</p>

<h2>Just a tip…do not just look at brand name or ranking but I think the most important thing to look at for school selection is the amnt of students attending grad school immediately after graduation or within 1 year of graduation. And look for the percentage of that student body attending grad school which are going to fields in which you are interested like: law, med, mba, grad sci/arts, eng, etc. Comment: suprisingly this most important piece of data for hs students planning to continue to grad ed can be found on us news…</h2>

<p>in other words it really depends which field one is interested in</p>

[vangie]

<p>

That doesn’t really make sense, tough. Cal’s social science and humanities programs are almost all top 10.

</p>

<p>And where did you get that from? Do you know of a ugrad ranking that we don’t know? Please provide us the link. </p>

<p>To all those anti-public schools in here:
**
When you rank schools, you assess the school, first and foremost, NOT the students of that school. **</p>

[UCLAri]

<p>

And where did you get that from? Do you know of a ugrad ranking that we don’t know? Please provide us the link.

</p>

<p>It’s well known in academia that all of Cal’s social science and humanities departments are pretty much top 10. </p>

<p>Look, I hate to break it to you, but the best ranking of departments is still its PhD programs. At least, it’s the most meaningful expression of that department’s quality as an academic entity.</p>

<p>vangie, are you an undergrad or grad student yourself?</p>

<p>

When you rank schools, you assess the school, first and foremost, NOT the students of that school.

</p>

<p>Maybe. The student body needs to be considered, however. The quality of your classmates does have an effect on your experience.</p>

[vangie]

<p>

It’s well known in academia that all of Cal’s social science and humanities departments are pretty much top 10.

</p>

<p>Ha Ha Ha… </p>

<p>this is what the problem here. The problem here is that you think you’re all knowing. When you think Berkeley is top 10 based on what you know (even if it’s wrong or not) – you insist on it. </p>

<p>The thing here is, you just heard it. There’s no data have really said that it is. What’s the danger about your thinking – or the kind of attitude of have – is when some people think Berkeley is top 5, you don’t agree, even when you don’t have the data to refute it as well.</p>

[vangie]

<p>

Look, I hate to break it to you, but the best ranking of departments is still its PhD programs. At least, it’s the most meaningful expression of that department’s quality as an academic entity.

</p>

<p>Says who? YOU sakky and the_prestige? that’s not knew. LoL… </p>

<p>What if I’ll tell you it’s meaningful for me and to my friends? So you won’t agree because you said it so? Duh!</p>

[vangie]

<p>

Maybe. The student body needs to be considered, however. The quality of your classmates does have an effect on your experience.

</p>

<p>CORRECT! But what about the effect of a good faculty, excellent facility, etc, ect…??? You see my point now! Rating schools should NOT be based on the students alone.</p>

[warblersrule]

<p>

You see my point now! Rating schools should NOT be based on the students alone.

I agree with that. Size, location, on-campus housing, study abroad options- a lot of stuff one can’t quantify, eh? Good fit > ranking</p>

[UCLAri]

<p>

Ha Ha Ha…</p>

<p>this is what the problem here. The problem here is that you think you’re all knowing. When you think Berkeley is top 10 based on what you know (even if it’s wrong or not) – you insist on it.

</p>

<p>Vangie, I’m a bit tired of your attitude.</p>

<p>For one, I suspect I have a lot more experience with these issues than you do. I also suspect that professors at UCLA and UCSD will have a good idea of where Cal sits in the academic world.</p>

<p>Similarly, I’ve seen plenty of rankings of various departments at Cal to know where most of them lie. Poli sci is top 5 in most areas, history is top 5-10, English is top 5, and econ is top 5-10.</p>

<p>If you don’t believe me, feel free to ask others. I’m pretty confident that I’m right on most of those rough rankings. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be saying it.</p>

<p>

Says who? YOU sakky and the_prestige? that’s not knew. LoL…</p>

<p>What if I’ll tell you it’s meaningful for me and to my friends? So you won’t agree because you said it so? Duh!

</p>

<p>You’re ignoring the fact that sakky has a lot of experience with Cal. More than both of us. And that he’s a grad student as well.</p>

<p>Claims to authority are fallacious to an extent, but sakky is a pretty good authority on all things Berkeley. You damn us for our knowledge of these fields, yet you don’t admit that maybe we actually know what we’re talking about, having gone through this process.</p>

<p>

CORRECT! But what about the effect of a good faculty, excellent facility, etc, ect…??? You see my point now! Rating schools should NOT be based on the students alone.

</p>

<p>Yes, but what if you get a schools that have all of the above?</p>