How hard is it to get into UCSF med school from Berkeley?

sakky
Tue, 13 Jun 2006 16:07:59 +0000

Drab, I never said that the administration never does anything at all.

But to me, one of the biggest symbols of the unresponsiveness of the Berkeley administration is the problem of impacted majors. I can understand that in certain years, certain majors might get impacted because of unusually high demand. But that’s when the administration is supposed to shift resources to alleviate that impaction for future classes. That has not happened - in fact, the impaction has become worse.

Let me give you an example. 10 years ago, the only L&S major that was impacted was CS. Anybody in L&S who wanted to major in econ was allowed to do so. Anybody who wanted to major in psychology was allowed to do so. Anybody who wanted to major in Mass Comm was allowed to do so.

Now, all of these majors (and others too) are impacted. If things keep going like this, in the future, we will have many more majors that are impacted.

I don’t understand why Berkeley can’t just increase the number of available spaces in those majors. Why is this such a problem? To find the resources, Berkeley can just take resources from the unpopular majors that have very low student demand. Or just shut down those majors entirely. Why not? Berkeley shut down all of the mining engineering and petroleum engineering undergraduate programs for lack of student interest, despite Berkeley’s long tradition as a prominent mining school (as demonstrated by the names of the Hearst Mining Building and Hearst Mining Circle). I think that’s perfectly fair. If more students want to study Civil Engineering and not petroleum engineering, then it is entirely fair that Berkeley shift resources from PetE to Civil Engineering. By the same token if lots of Berkeley students want to study a certain major in L&S (like econ or CS) , then Berkeley ought to shift resources to that major.

But that’s just one example. Obviously Berkeley has lots of things in its undergrad program that can and should be improved. Does the administration sometimes do helpful things? Sure. But it needs to be doing a whole lot more.

This is why I suspect that unlimitedX is largely right. I suspect that even if Berkeley were to magically get a huge pot of money, they probably wouldn’t spend much of it to improve undergraduate education, instead devoting the lion’s share to the graduate programs. The real issue to me is not the lack of money, it’s really the lack of an administrative culture that values the undergraduates.