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

eudean
Tue, 27 Jun 2006 02:12:01 +0000

Look, at the end of the day, college education is a consumer good, and should be treated as such. That means that colleges should give students (consumers) what they want. Your logic seems to indicate that Berkeley should deliberately NOT give consumers what they want, under the guise that they know better. That seems to run dangerously close to the attitude of many companies in history who chose not to provide what their customers wanted, and hence failed as ongoing businesses.



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.

Berkeley gives its consumers what they want. Otherwise they wouldn’t come. They don’t give every consumer what he/she wants (clearly they wouldn’t give you what you’d want, while they would give me what I wanted), but they fill a niche. Just like MIT fills a niche. If people asked whether MIT should lower its requirements, nobody would say yes, because that isn’t what MIT is. Likewise, if anyone thought MIT should halve its undergraduate class to provide an even MORE elite group of students, people would also complain that MIT was being too selective, possibly missing talent that was in the next tier of candidates that was passed by (and you have to agree that in admissions, a candidate that appears less qualified on paper may end up being as or more successful than a more qualified candidate).

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.