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

sakky
Sun, 04 Jun 2006 01:36:35 +0000

Actually, the fact that the majority of Berkeley’s Nobels were Berkeley graduate students doesn’t really take anything away from it, because those Nobels are still teaching Berkeley undergraduates. Clearly, the main appeal of having Nobels on your faculty is not about the ability of students to earn Nobel prizes themselves, but about being taught by the best in the world. In that sense, whether Berkeley’s Nobels were undergrads or grads as Berkeley students is totally irrelevant, if not a red herring.



Actually, I would say that it is entirely relevant, because it demonstrates the gulf between the indisputably excellent Berkeley graduate students, and the Berkeley undergrads, who are still good, but clearly not as good as the grad students. By Berkeley making statements to the effect of “Lots of our alumni go on to receive Nobel Prizes”, without stating that most of the Nobel alumni were graduate students, and despite the fact that there are far more undergrads than grad students at Berkeley, I think is a prime example of PR and marketing. You’re making the undergrad program seem to be better than it actually is.

Now, let’s be clear. I am not saying that there is anything necessarily wrong with that. In fact, I think that’s how good hard-nosed marketing is supposed to work. In marketing, you’re supposed to accentuate your positives while hiding your negatives. So in that sense, Berkeley has been marketing its undergrad program extremely well by attempting to tie it to the graduate program. If I were head of the Berkeley marketing department, I would do exactly the same thing.

But the point is, you have to admit that Berkeley is engaging in shrewd marketing.



that is because the graduate rankings of USNWR are more like those of the Gourman Report and other classic rankings which place a central importance on pure academic strength, unlike the broad undergraduate ranking by USNWR which dilutes that aspect with things like alumni donor rate and class size (with arbitrary settings like a barrier set at 20 sudents per class.) So the grad depts don’t dismiss those rankings, they trumpet them.



I don’t know about that. Take the grad engineering ranking. The Berkeley grad engineering department constantly touts its strong showing in the USNews grad engineering ranking, even though that ranking contains a number of categories that I don’t think are particularly relevant. For example, it’s not clear to me that quant GRE scores really have a lot to do with engineering rankings, because the fact is, the quant GRE is really only a minor consideration in grad engineering admissions. Far more important in terms of admission are things like research ability, GPA, statement of purpose, recs’, and things like that. Yet Berkeley does very well when it comes to GRE, so Berkeley gets boosted by this category. The same thing can be said of admissions percentage when it comes to grad engineering programs, because it neglects the strong self-selection bias. Lots of people won’t even bother to apply to a school like MIT or Stanford because they don’t think they’ll get in. But Berkeley has a relatively low grad engineering admit rate, and that helps them in the USNews grad ranking. I suspect that’s a big reason why Berkeley grad engineering actually has a LOWER admit percentage than do Stanford or MIT.

The same can be said for the MBA rankings. I think you already discussed them previously, but it bears not that the Haas School does extremely well in the USNews ranking.

But the point is simple. Berkeley uses plenty of skillful marketing and PR for many of its programs. I certainly think that Berkeley does not suffer from a lack of PR skills. If the Berkeley undergrad program has a relatively low ranking (relative to the top private schools), I don’t think it’s really due to a lack of PR or marketing ability as it is due to the fact that there are issues with the program that ought to be resolved.