I admit it’s been 3-4 years since I’ve visited and the campus was great - the neighborhood around the campus less so, not exactly bad but with enough unpleasant pockets I didn’t like it as much as I thought I should. Homewood/Charles Village is nice. Lots of townhouses, pleasant streets; shops. It’s not Baltimore as one often thinks about it.
UCB is a great opportunity for California kids - a world class university that sees its mission as part of the common good. They’ve done an amazing job in preserving academics and academic quality at all levels AND access. It’d the #1 public university in the country for a reason. But there have been budget cuts. Tuition hikes haven’t compensated and if you look at the per student expenditure in 2007 and today, or the student faculty ratio today, in 2007, and 1997, you’ll see that the university suffered - it has done a great job reorganizing and raising funds, considering the cuts but we’re comparing with a private university that had no cuts. So, yes the staff are more willing to help, but there just aren’t enough.Freshmen don’t have a personal adviser. Many classes have several hundreds students, up to 700-1,000 in popular majors*. At Jhu, the cds indicates 74% classes have fewer than 20 students and only 4% classes have 100+, v. 10% at UCB- the first class in Global Studies has 165 students (and a 55 student waiting list).