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

eudean
Sat, 01 Jul 2006 17:05:48 +0000

Berkeley’s undergrad yield statistic only shows that many people choose schools other than Berkeley. It does not show they felt that Berkeley didn’t give them what they wanted. If an actual survey were done, it could be just the prestige of HYPSM that drew students away, not anything else. I don’t consider prestige a valid factor showing that Berkeley is inferior to any other school. While it could be that the students can somehow determine, without having attended either school, which provides a better experience in education, then you’d be right. But that statistic can’t establish anything close to that.

And again, I feel the argument that Berkeley students cannot compete with HYPSM students is poorly supported. MIT has 4,136 students. Grab our top 4,136 students (approximately 20%) and you’d find that they were comparable to MIT’s undergraduate class (or Harvard’s, or wherever’s). If you were right, then our top 4,136 would be definitively sub-par compared to MIT’s undergraduate class.

The point of my car analogy was not that the Japanese went from making crap cars to making extremeley high-end cars. The point is that car manufacturers offer a spectrum of choices. They can provide cheap cars that just get you from point A to point B, but also luxury cars that get you from point A to point B in 10 seconds with a bunch of nice accessories. A company can do both well, just as Berkeley can offer mediocre students a solid education while providing exceptional students a solid education as well.

I think the point may be best stated as follows: if you have the ability to succeed at HYPSM, going to Berkeley doesn’t make you any less likely to succeed. I’m frankly not surprised that people prefer HYPSM to Berkeley. Heck, if I had been accepted to MIT and I didn’t get a scholarship from Berkeley, I probably would’ve gone there. Not because I believe necessarily the education is better, but because I’ve been indoctrinated with a belief that MIT is superior for no really valid reason except people saying it’s a good school. It would’ve been prestige that led me there, not educational merit.