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

sakky
Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:04:14 +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.



Uh, isn’t that the very definition of not giving people what they want? If I choose Mary Ann over Ginger, isn’t that probably because Ginger isn’t who I really want?



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.



Ha! If you are going to invoke the notion of prestige as to why people choose HYPSM over Berkeley, then I would say that the same thing also happens as regards Berkeley vs. other schools, and particularly vs. the other UC’s. I know many people who chose Berkeley simply because it was the most prestigious school they got into. Basically, they applied to all of the UC’s with the intent of just going to the most prestigious one that admitted them. If they could get into Berkeley, they would go there. If not, but they got into UCLA, they would get there. Otherwise, UCSD, and so on down the line.

So if you don’t consider prestige a valid factor for why people should choose HYPSM over Berkeley, then prestige is also an invalid factor for why people should choose Berkeley over the other UC’s or a CalState or any other school.

And besides, I also dispute your contention that prestige has no correlation with the quality of the education. After all, how did HYPSM get their prestige in the first place? If the education at those schools truly sucked, then that fact would inevitably feed back into the market and these schools would lose their prestige. Hence, it can’t be that bad.

If nothing else, I think the fact that a school is prestigious means that it tends to draw a stronger body of students. A stronger body of students is correlated with the quality of education for the reasons I have cited previously. Basically, education is largely a social phenomenom. The better the students around you, the more you tend to learn. This is why public education systems institute programs like magnet schools and charter schools in order to incubate groups of motivated and gifted children.



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.



That is a nonsequitur. I have always said that the top students at Berkeley are of high quality. But that’s not the point. They have to compete for resources with all of those other Berkeley students who are not of high quality. They have to be the ones that often times have to put up with lab-partners/group-partners/dorm-mates/etc. who are not very motivated and not very talented. They have to be the ones who often times cannot find intellectual equals.

I’ll give you a sports analogy. If Michael Jordan had practiced and played only against middling-quality players, he would not be the greatest player in history. In order for him to achieve his potential, he had to practice and play against the best players in the world.

To give you a poignant example, it’s sad when a person just feels like talking about philosophy or political science or economics or mathematics or some other subject at a high level over dinner in the dining commons, and nobody around him is enough of an intellectual equal to match him. It’s far better if that person has, at the same table, somebody who can match him measure-for-measure. THAT’S when you really learn something.

Nor is this a hypothetical example. This is EXACTLY what happened to a friend of mine. He basically felt that, among the undergraduate population at Berkeley, he was, intellectually speaking, a men among boys. He ended up choosing to interact with mostly Berkeley graduate students because, quite frankly, the undergrads were not able to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. But as an undergraduate, hanging around with grad-students is rather problematic because you don’t live in the same housing, you don’t take the same classes (until perhaps the upper-division), grad-students often times like to go to the bars but if you’re only 17, you can’t go with them, etc. So what did this guy do? He transferred to MIT.



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.



Usually companies do not do two different things really well. Besides, like I said, exceptional students often times prefer to study at another school.



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.



As you may have gathered, I disagree with this, for many reasons. There are a lot of hassles that Berkeley makes its undergrads undergo that those other schools do not. To give you one example, those other schools allow you to freely choose whatever major you want, and then change at any time. Not Berkeley, with its impacted majors and college-transfer policies.



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.



And like I said, by the same notion, a lot of current Berkeley students are there just for reasons of prestige, not because of any educational merit. Prestige is therefore a double-edged sword when it comes to Berkeley. Berkeley attracts students because it has more prestige than the other US public schools do. But it also loses students because it has less prestige than the top private schools do. If it is somehow invalid for people to choose HYPSM over Berkeley just for the prestige, then it is equally invalid for people to choose Berkeley over, say, UCLA just for the prestige.