The "I-can-easily-get-into-Berkeley-but-not-Stanford" feeling?

firehose
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:44:42 +0000

“I think the reason behind Berkeley’s greater number of Nobel Laureates and what not is based more so on the size. With 25,000 undergrads rather than 4,000, you’d undoubtedly have more ‘successes.’”

Xombie is on the right track. Size alone does not explain Nobel Laureates, however, it is something that needs to be accounted for. If you really want to see which university is better at producing Nobel Laureates you need to calculate the probability that a person is a Nobel Laureate given that they went to Stanford and compare that to the probability that a person is a Nobel Laureate given that they went to Cal. I haven’t done the calculation so I don’t know which is better at it.

Here is why you need to control for size. Imagine that Ohio State offers an equivalent education to Harvard and no longer gives preference to in state. High school students also recognize that it is equal to Harvard. The cross admit yield rate is 50/50. Obviously the average Harvard student will still be better than the average Ohio student since Harvard will only accept people from the top of the pool while Ohio will need to go further down fill its class, but lets just incorrectly assume that the student bodies are equal too since I can still make my point without accounting for this.

If this were the case it would be expected that Ohio has more Nobel Laureates by several orders of magnitude than Harvard, but this does not prove Harvard’s dominance over Ohio, it is just a function of the size difference.

“Ohio State has 60,000+ undergrads and only 2 Nobel Laureates. Population is clearly not everything.”

All this post proved was how much Ohio sucks.

Yes, I know that hell would freeze over before Ohio is considered equal to Harvard, but I am sure you can see my point.