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

sakky
Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:08:29 +0000

Undergrads today actually have it better than 20 years ago. Back then, you weren’t even guaranteed dorm housing your freshman year. Clark Kerr was a high school for the blind and deaf, Foothill, Wada and many other dorms didn’t exist. Graduation rates were quite a bit lower, the grading was significantly tougher and the administration less service-oriented. Yet Berkeley UG was ranked top 5. It seems that class sizes have gone down a bit as well, somehow. Berkeley UG would still be ranked in the top 5 if we went with Gourman Reports and other pure academic ratings instead of the metrics introduced by USNWR.



Yeah, well, the fact is, higher education in general has gotten better in the last 20 years. Graduation rates in general have risen, grade inflation has taken ahold at most schools.

However, I don’t recall ever seeing Berkeley in the top 5, even 20 years ago, simply because, honestly, that would mean replacing one of HYPSM. It’s hard to fathom that Berkeley undergrad was good enough to surpass any of HYPSM even 20 years ago, and I am quite sure that the cross-admit data would show that HYPSM was beating Berkeley even in those days.

I believe the highest I ever saw Berkeley was maybe #8 or so.



Berkeley UG has poor PR. They need to do what Haas has done, use practical measure that can improve many of their USNWR metrics, but they don’t. Some of the problem is arrogance, the admin looks down on that kind of marketing and feels it shouldn’t do anything because “it is Berkeley”. Schools with smaller names try harder in terms of selling/packaging themselves to HS students (see USC).



Ok, have it your way. Even if you are right and it’s all a matter of bad PR, that just demonstrates a certain lack of responsiveness of the administration, in that the administration is simply not interested in helping the undergrad program. And that gets back to something I’ve said in other posts - that the Berkeley administration just doesn’t really care very much about the undergrads, preferring to lavish its attention upon the graduate students. But that means that Berkeley is a very good place to go for graduate school, but less so for undergrad. It’s still pretty good, but certainly not as good as it could be.