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

eudean
Sun, 25 Jun 2006 18:11:43 +0000

I don’t think people are completely irrational. There has to be a reason for why people prefer MIT over Berkeley for undergrad. MIT must offer something to its undergrads that Berkeley does not, whether that’s better research opportunities, better prestige, a more integrated undergraduate experience, or whatever it is. If Berkeley could equal what MIT has, then Berkeley would become more preferred.



Pure speculation. What prevents me from speculating likewise that MIT is simply a smaller campus, and that it is likely that students who apply to MIT and Berkeley may simply prefer a smaller campus (or colder weather, or don’t like the Berkeley area, or anything else that has nothing to do with the quality of education there). It’s about as justified as your reasons. And that does not make MIT “better” than Berkeley as a result, necessarily (I’m not saying that it is or isn’t, but that such a factor on its own cannot determine this).

Even so, what IS the cross-admit rate of students that choose MIT? I would certainly not say it has to be 50-50 for Berkeley and MIT to be on the same level. It would have to be 50-50 for Berkeley and MIT to be equivalent, but nobody is saying that.

And BTW, sakky, you aren’t the only one in this thread. When I say “you guys”, I mean that many people are citing rankings to demonstrate one way or another that some school is definitivley better than another (or with strong implications of such as a result of citing the rankings).