UC Berkeley vs Amherst

bigwords
Fri, 16 May 2014 03:33:07 +0000

Hi OP, I think I was recently in a similar situation to you a few weeks ago, so perhaps I can offer some advice. For reference, I was accepted into Berkeley, Pomona, and CMC (and Georgetown SFS and Rice). Like you, I am in-state for Cal. I am also interested in economics, political science (IR), and business, although I have no specific career goal at this point, only some ideas.

I think your decision should focus on a few things, most importantly the cost (is it a consideration in your case?) and the environment of the school.

I did not apply to Amherst because I doubted the environment would be a good fit for me (note that I have never visited). I am not a fan of cold weather, isolated environments, less than a 2000 person student body, or northeast culture. I knew I would not have picked Amherst over the Claremonts.

By my own admission, I am not exactly sure what the environment at Amherst is like, but I suggest you understand it before you commit. Is it a place where you fit in?

I considered that question for CMC and Pomona.

I did not really like Pomona. It felt very intellectually enclosed. By that I mean the people I met, both faculty and students, felt a bit out of touch with the real world. I am a person interested in practical applications. I hate math proofs.

At Pomona I had the opportunity to sit in on two classes. One was Introduction to Political Theory. The professor, whom I should note was quite engaging, had all of the prospective students introduce themselves. We were supposed to say our name, where we were from, and what other schools we were considering if we were still deciding. I think there were about 15 of us. Anyway, the professor’s reactions to the schools people were considering were interesting. If the school the person was considering was not a top 10 LAC, she would just move on, and say something like “oh well that makes your choice easy” or something like that. I get she was trying to be humorous, but her demeanor was off-putting. When I listed one of the schools I was still considering as CMC, there was audible laughter in the room. The only person she tried to convince to come was some kid who got into Williams, Amherst, and Pomona. She didn’t really have an argument for the guy, other than something about California being nice and progressive. Then she confessed that she really didn’t have anything against Amherst because she went there.

Another Amherst grad I met was actually Chair of the Politics department, and, as it so happened, did his Ph.D. at Berkeley. When I asked him about Cal, he went off and extolled the values of the liberal arts, and I cede there was merit in his argument. But when it came to his perception of the current state of undergraduate education at Cal and the postgraduate world, I think his viewpoint was ultimately flawed and a product of the insular environment I have described thus far. Without going into too much detail, he took the oft-feared impersonal nature of Berkeley and exaggerated it to the max, often times directly contradicting facts I was told by current professors and students I spoke with at Berkeley. In terms of the job market, he told me how he thought employers were looking for liberal arts grads (and by that he meant social science and humanities) because they had a unique set of critical thinking skills that made them ‘special’.

I did meet a really cool professor from their politics/economics department that had done extensive work with the World Bank and still works abroad as a consultant during the summers. I found his more practical view refreshing, but it really felt like more the exception instead of the norm.

Almost equal to my hatred of math proofs is my hatred of smugness, which, as I think I have demonstrated above, felt readily existent at Pomona. I have other examples, but I will not write them for the sake of brevity.

Without going into a lot of detail (I feel like Amherst would be more like Pomona than CMC), I liked CMC better. They also gave me a merit scholarship and some sort of preferential aid package. At this point SFS was considerably more expensive than CMC (>60k total). Although small, I felt like I would enjoy the environment at CMC.

At this point I bring up my second determining factor: cost.

To be clear, if CMC were the same price as Berkeley, I would be going to CMC. But it wasn’t. It was roughly 20k more per year.

There is no doubt in my mind that an education at CMC should cost more than one from Berkeley (the classes are smaller, and the resources are more readily available), but by how much?

Maybe Blah2009 can better address this, but my understanding is that your career outcome is not likely to be much different if you go to CMC or Haas or even Berkeley Econ. It’s really what you make of it. And in most circles, a Berkeley degree will be more recognizable, especially abroad.

What it ultimately came down to was the fact that I had no compelling desire to attend CMC over Berkeley. I was torn. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I had gotten into Harvard or Stanford, I’ll never know. But I wasn’t going to spend 80 thousand dollars just because.

So in closing, I would consider the following if I were you:


Do you fit in at Amherst/Berkeley? Is the environment right for you? Consider this carefully if you were born and raised in California.
Do you have a compelling desire to spend more money to attend Amherst? Do you want to go to Amherst?


If you do choose Cal, I know that there are students there like me: people who turned down “superior” private options. Just from my high school I know people that got into Brown (x2), Cornell (x2), Dartmouth, NYU Shanghai, Stern BPE, Bowdoin, and CMC that ultimately chose Cal (mostly) or UCLA. In fact, due to the income in my area, most will choose Berkeley/UCLA over anything that is not HYPSM.

If you have any other questions, feel free to PM me.