i would just like to share with you guys that I....

[sakky]

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You know the answer to that. I’ll only tell you because you asked: because we have more faculty in some areas than others. Some fields get more money. Why does Haas get a really nice building while Cory is held together with duct tape? Haas gets extra money. You take one side of the equation without balancing the other. I mean, I could naively say that every major at Berkeley must be impacted because we have 22,000 students, while every major at MIT must not be because they have 6,000 students. What about the number of faculty and the resources of each school (or department)?

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<p>Some (like greatesteyn) would argue that money is not the problem - that the real problem is that certain departments simply don’t WANT to teach that many undergrads. They could, but they won’t. </p>

<p>But even if it really is a matter of money, then that simply begs the question of why can’t money be redirected to those departments that are bursting at the seams? If students want to major in X, they should be allowed to study major in X. </p>

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For a good student, Berkeley is a roughly equal choice. I won’t say strictly better or worse, because like I always say I don’t deal in those terms. I will say that Berkeley won’t be a significantly better or worse choice than a private school in terms of the quality of education received.</p>

<p>For a bad student, a private school may be a better choice because they cannot qualify for their desired major at Berkeley. That’s not to say they’ll get a better education necessarily (or that it will matter, because they’re not good students to begin with), but that they may prefer a private school (and again, this preference would not have a correlation to quality of eduation).

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<p>And that boils down to a problem of information - nobody really knows whether they really are going to be a “good” or “bad” student. After all, I doubt that many students come to Berkeley already knowing they are going to be “bad”. Yet, the fact of the matter is, many students come to Berkeley and do badly and may find that they can’t get the major they want (or in some cases, not even graduate at all). These students, would be better off at a top private school if they could have gotten in. Since you never know whether you will end up being one of the good or bad students at Berkeley until you get there, and by that time, it’s too late, then clearly the risk averse choice is to go to one of those private schools. If you get admitted to Berkeley and Stanford, you can’t just “try out Berkeley”, and if you do poorly, then just transfer over to Stanford. If you do poorly at Berkeley, Stanford will not admit you as a transfer. </p>

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Completely irrelevant. Why even mention this? You asked whether people seriously preferred impacted majors, and I said yes (and so did greatestyen). Your question may have been rhetorical, but its answer may still surprise you. Go ask some students. One of my roommates and his project partner (for a summer CS course) both said they preferred impacted majors when I asked them today. No coercion, just a straight “Do you prefer having impacted majors or not?”

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<p>I don’t doubt that some people who get the major they want like impacted majors. Just like some people who are rich like the fact that others are poor so that they can feel superior around them. Some people who are beautiful like the fact that other people are ugly because it makes them look even more beautiful by comparison. But that doesn’t mean that this is a good socially optimal phenomenom. </p>

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Yes, because we all know that MCB professors and Poli-Sci professors can teach EECS courses. First of all, resources ARE optimized. They’re the two largest majors on campus, therefore they need the resources. If we were to transfer those resources to EECS, that wouldn’t suddenly make Poli-Sci and MCB the not largest majors on campus. That would make them the largest majors on campus with fewer resources. Which would be bad. It would be great if we had a net increase in resources overall, but seeing as how money doesn’t grow on trees, we have a pretty good balance of resources. There isn’t a huge contingency of people that can’t get what they want. Most people are happy with things the way they are.

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<p>Once again, with the straw man? Come on Eudean, you know what I’m talking about, you just don’t WANT to see it. You know full well that some majors can be optimized.</p>

<p>I’ll throw one out right now. I don’t think I am the first person to observe that the Math department has an unusually large number of profs, relative to the number of students they have. Physics too. And the truth is, a lot of math and Physics profs could be teaching related subjects. For example, a lot of the math profs could be teaching CS, because CS and math share many similarities. A lot of physics profs could be teaching EE or ME classes. Obviously they aren’t going to be teaching advanced grad-level courses. But that’s not what I’m asking for. I’m merely saying that undergrad CS, and undergrad EE/ME really aren’t that complicated and specialized. Why is CS impacted when the math department seems to be chock full of unused resources? </p>

<p>The same could be said for Econ. The fact is, a lot of Poli-Sci profs could be teaching certain Econ classes, as Econ and Poli-Sci have many ties. In fact, many of the top Economists in the world are in certain ways actually political scientists. Nobel Prize winner George Stigler, for example, was basically a political scientist, because his work had to do with the economics of government regulation A lot of math and statistics profs could be teaching econ, especially the quantitative econometrics classes. In fact, last years co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Aumann, is not even an economist by training. He’s a mathematician, and he won the Econ Nobel for his work on game theory, which is a deeply mathematical subject. John Nash, of Beautiful Mind fame, also was a mathematician, not an economist. </p>

<p>The point is, there does indeed seem to be quite a bit of slack capacity at Berkeley. I would like to redirect that capacity. That’s what operations management and operations research is all about. Heck, CalX was a former IEOR grad, so he should know exactly what I’m talking about. Why shouldn’t Cal use some of the principles that it is teaching students? Are you saying that it’s OK to teach students optimization techniques, but not to use them yourself? </p>

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You’ve answered your own question. Which would be a smarter solution: overestimate the resources needed for MCB, so 580 students could get what they need in that major? Or underestimate those needs and shift them over to Mass Comm, where 140 people could make use of them? Yes, we theoretically could strike the ideal balance, but being realistic, I’d much rather the budget people overestimate resources for MCB, which more people want to major in, than overestimate for Mass Comm, which they aren’t expecting many to major in in the first place. It’s the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective.

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<p>Obviously you budget capacity high and low according to anticipated demand. But then, optimization techniques would then have you fine-tune your capacity to match ACTUAL demand. Operations managers have been doing this for decades. Berkeley can’t? </p>

<p>For example, in year 1, you probably budget capacity for 600 students in MCB and 100 for Mass Comm. But then when you consistently get 550 students in MCB and 150 for Mass Comm, then optimization would dictate that you shift capacity around so that you can give all 700 the major that they want. </p>

<p>Look at the history. Demand doesn’t fluctuate THAT much. MCB numbers are fairly consistent. It’s not like you get 100 MCB students one year, and a thousand the next year. The numbers are consistent. Hence, you have a good idea of what it is going to be in the following year. When you see the sun come up every day, you can probably bet that it will come up tomorrow. Hence, when you have a history of past demand, you can then make predictions of what future demand will be, and then adjust your capacities accordingly. If I am selling bananas in the farmer’s market, and I am consistently getting sold out by noon every day for a whole month, then the smart thing for me to do is to bring more bananas next time. I have to be willfully blind not to see that I am not meeting my demand and I should adjust my capacity. </p>

<p>But that is, of course, presuming that you WANT to adjust your capacities to meet demand. Which doesn’t seem to be the case. </p>

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Furthermore, you imply that it is somehow easy to hire quality professors. While I can’t speak on the quality of professors in MCB and/or Mass Comm, I presume Cal follows standard practices of getting high quality professors. It’s not exactly an easy thing to say, fire two MCB professors and hire two Mass Comm ones to fix a disparity. That’s just now how the system works (otherwise no one would become a professor, since there would be no job security).

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<p>Why do you necessarily need profs? You can hire and fire untenured lecturers. All schools do this, including Berkeley. The MCB department right now is using untenured lecturers. So is the EECS department. So is the ChemE department. So are most departments. For example, most departments at Cal have post-doctoral fellows who would probably jump at the chance to become a lecturer. In fact, many post-doctoral fellows at Cal are, right now, serving as lecturers. So why can’t you use more of them?</p>

<p>Is there something bad about using untenured lecturers? Some of the best classes I ever had were taught by untenured lecturers, and some of the worst classes I ever had were taught by full profs.</p>