I turned down Harvard, Princeton and Stanford for Berkeley's Physics programme

sakky
Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:29:39 +0000

No, you’re saying that you believe Berkeley should give the best students at Berkeley what they want. I’d bet if you held a survey of all Berkeley students even to eliminate the bottom 10% of students, you wouldn’t get a majority. Certainly those 10% of students would NOT vote in favor of any such initiative. And where do you cut the bottom, anyway? What if we reduced it to have a class size like MIT’s? 4,136 of our best students (stats used from Wikipedia) out of 22,144 would be kept, the rest dropped. Guess what? Those 18,008 students probably don’t want to be looking for another college to attend, and it’s likely not all of the 4,136 students would be in favor of such action, meaning a huge majority would probably oppose such action.

Further, go ahead and ask high school students whether they think Berkeley should admit only enough students to have an undergraduate enrollment of 4,136 students. I’m betting they’d say that’d suck as well. They want their shot. Of course, if you asked them if Berkeley should take everybody, they’d obviously say that was stupid and impractical. Most likely they’d say Berkeley should take as many people as possible, not limited to 4,000, but not exceedingly large where it becomes unmanagable. That’s generally what Berkeley does. That’s what students want.



I think you just admitted the weakness of your argument. If it was put up to a vote to all of the high school seniors in California, then I suspect that they would vote to have Berkeley be open enrollment. After all, everybody wants to get admitted to Berkeley. Even if they choose to go elsewhere, they still want the option of going to Berkeley. Who wouldn’t want that? In particular, if we asked the 75% of Berkeley applicants who didn’t get admitted, I think they would all say that they wanted to be admitted. After all, why did you even apply if you don’t want to be admitted?



Berkeley gives its consumers what they want.



How’s that? Berkeley’s undergrad yield rate is 40%. That means that the majority of people admitted to the Berkeley undergrad program choose to go somewhere else. That means that Berkeley is clearly not providing the majority of its consumers (its applicants) what they want.



There is room for more than one kind of college in this world. It doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, filled with HYPSM clones. Just like the car market has room for more than exotics and luxury sedans. Now, we don’t want to be Ford or GM, getting beat left and right by Japanese and German manufacturers. But we can cater to people looking for a daily driver as well as a weekend getaway car without making crappy high-end vehicles. We provide the consumers the goods they want by catering to more than one market.



Allright, now we are having an honest discussion. I agree with you that Berkeley fulfills its niche. I never said that Berkeley absolutely * HAS * to become more selective. I said that if Berkeley wants to compete with HYPSM, then Berkeley should become more selective. But if Berkeley does not want to compete with those schools, then that’s fine too. Then Berkeley should just say that they’re not trying to compete with those schools.

You used the car analogy, so I will extend it. 40 years ago, Japanese cars were crap. Toyota and Honda were widely derided as low-end manufacturers. They could have continued to stay in the low-end. They could have said that they had no aspirations to compete against the Americans or Europeans. And if they did that, then to this day, they would still be considered the low-end choice, for the consumers who don’t have a lot of money. Instead, they decided that they did indeed want to compete and beat the Americans and Europeans, so they started designing better cars. Now, it’s the Japanese who (along with the Germans) are considered the high-end, with the American manufacturer now catering to the low-end customer who doesn’t have a lot of money.

The point is, the Japanese decided they wanted to make a change to compete in a different market segment, and they did it. If Berkeley decides it wants to compete in a different segment, they can do it too. Now, obviously Berkeley can decide not to compete in that segment. If that’s the decision that Berkeley makes, then fair enough.

My point is, if Berkeley really wants to compete at the undergrad level with HYPSM, then Berkeley needs to make some changes. But if Berkeley is not interested in competing with HYPSM undergrad, then that’s fine too. But then you shouldn’t be surprised when people prefer HYPSM to Berkeley.