<p>Berkeley’s 20 Nobels put the number of most other universities to shame (if indeed this is about shaming) – only not Stanford’s. </p>
<p>To even the account a bit, though, in the Nobel “Big Game” remember that Berkeley does not have a medical school. UCSF, based across the bay in San Francisco is the closest to being called that but it’s really separate (though as a med school consistently outranks Stanford’s med school, by the way).</p>
<p>Nor does it have the Hoover Institution which “bought” several of Stanford’s Nobel Laureates after they had essentially retired from academia (Bauer, Friedman from University of Chicago, etc). </p>
<p>After accounting for these facts, the Big Game Score is a lot closer, even if you discount Steven Chu who left Stanford for Berkeley after getting his Nobel prize. But then, he was returning to the place where he did his PhD - i.e. Berkeley.</p>
<p>The fact is the Bay Area in a much faster time than the Boston area has become an academic powerhouse rivaling the best in the world. And quality researchers go back in forth amongst all the powerhouses. That’s why you have Berkeley grads getting Nobels at Stanford or NASA (as with Mather this year), Stanford grads getting Nobels elsewhere, and Harvard and MIT in the mix too. </p>
<p>The same goes for a lot of other academic prizes: MacArthur Genius Awards, for instance. Berkeley has tons, Stanford does too, and in many cases they earned PhDs at the other (e.g., Dan Jurafsky, BA/PhD Berkeley, distinguished professor at Stanford), National Academy of Sciences placements similarly.</p>
<p>One private, one public: they serve very different missions in a way, but they reinforce one another in a way and they are both far younger than some of their main “competitors” in the Nobel arena . Move out of the way, world.</p>
<p>(By the way, I have kids who have gone to both.)</p>