Worldwide University Rankings

sakky
Thu, 23 Dec 2004 02:44:56 +0000

I don’t think it is unusual at all for me to say good things about Berkeley, so don’t treat that as such a rare event. I have always maintained that the Berkeley graduate programs, particularly the PhD programs, are top-notch. Berkeley is indeed a tremendous place to get your PhD, and I have always said as much.

The issue that I have with Berkeley is specifically with the undergraduate program, which although pretty good, is not anywhere close to being as good as its PhD programs. And that’s always led me to the same question - if Berkeley can make its PhD programs so good, why can’t it do the same for its undergraduate program?

What’s even more galling is when anybody starts complaining about the problems of the undergrad program to the administrartion, the Berkeley administration’s favorite response is to tout its grad-school rankings. Yes, we know the graduate-schools are strong. That’s not the point. The point is, why can’t they make the undergraduate program as good as the graduate-programs?

Now, to rooster08’s comments that professional schools are sexier than graduate-programs, I think it comes down to what you want. But clearly you can take this logic too far. For example, UCDavis has a law school, a business school, and a medical school. Princeton has none. So does that mean that UCDavis is a ‘sexier’ or ‘better’ school than Princeton? I think you’d find very few people, even calfornia1600 who would be willing to say that. But if you really believe that professional programs are sexier than PhD programs, then because Davis has professional programs and Princeton doesn’t, the logical conclusion is that Davis must be a sexier school, right? Similarly, MIT only has a business school, and no law school and medical school. So Davis must be sexier than MIT too, right? And clearly Davis is sexier than Caltech, which also has no professional programs. Heck, UCRiverside at least has a business school. I think you’d find very few people indeed who would seriously argue that UCRiverside is sexier than Princeton or Caltech.