UC,berkeley

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by rgoodman, Jul 1, 2005.

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  1. rgoodman

    rgoodman New Member

    Every year, the US News ranking placed UC,berkeley in a rather low place(even below Emroy!!!). But UCB tops in other research rankings. I feel the US news doesn't like state colleges very much. :confused:
     
  2. scotty

    scotty New Member

    Um...I would not be surprised in the least to find that most people in the know would place Emory above Cal Berkeley. UCB is a fantastic school, but Emory is by no means a slouch and can easily compete with UCB on any criteria for judging the quality of education.
     
  3. qvatlanta

    qvatlanta New Member

    What is your reason for pooh-poohing Emory? I hope it's not because it's in Atlanta! :mad:
     
  4. Tom57

    Tom57 Member

    The US News criteria are generally not very kind to public schools. Public schools often have lower teacher/student ratios, higher drop-out rates, lower alumni giving etc. Unless they change their criteria, you'll never see a public university in the top spot, and maybe not even in the top 10. You can decide for yourself whether their criteria really make a difference in the quality of education.

    Some may see a freshman chemistry class with 500 students in an amphitheatre-type lecture hall as a take-away. These kinds of classes are not uncommon at Berkeley, at least at the freshman level. Personally I loved the relative anonymity that those classes provided. Go to lecture; take notes; sip coffee; leave.

    Upper division classes can be quite a different thing. As a junior, I had a math seminar with only 4 other students. On average, though, Berkeley has large classes. This is what US News measures without catching any of the exceptions.

    Do you care if a school has a relatively high drop out rate, which Berkeley does? Depends, I suppose. One might view it as an indicator of a relatively callous administration which doesn't go out of its way to retain students. This is true at Berkeley, though they are trying to change it. One might also view it as an indication of the rigor and competitiveness of Berkeley. This is also true. I know two students who dropped out after their first day! They could not deal with the size and the speed.

    However, if you're not one to drop out, then do you really care if others do? Maybe not. So maybe you have to take US News' rankings with a grain of salt.

    Berkeley always ranks high as a research institution. Some might argue that they are second to none - not only in this country, but worldwide. Here there is a significant gap betwen Emory and Berkeley. When it comes to ranking research, the National Resource Council report is the holy grail - not US News. This report only comes out once every 10 years, and is not crafted to be sold at newsstands. The latest report showed Berkeley at the top of the heap - with 97% of their graduate programs ranked in the top 10.

    Berkeley ranked 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in Art History, Classics, English, German, Music, Chemical Eng., Civil Eng., Industrial Eng., Mechanical Eng., Astrophysics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Geoscience, Mathematics, Physics, Statistics/Biostatistics, Anthropology, History, Political Science, and Sociology.

    Does a typical undergraduate get benefit of the power of Berkeley's research? Some do; some don't.

    http://books.nap.edu/html/researchdoc/
     
  5. rgoodman

    rgoodman New Member

    No! GaTech is also in Atlanta. But Emory is virtually unknown outside USA. There are just too many top students from the world want to break into UCB to get a PhD.
     
  6. qvatlanta

    qvatlanta New Member

    I'm not saying that Emory is better than Berkeley. Especially in many humanities graduate programs, Berkeley is close to the top or at the very top in terms of selectivity and reputation. But saying Georgia Tech is better than Emory? I certainly don't know about that. Emory has a gazillion hospitals in Atlanta that are renowned for their excellence and medical research. Georgia Tech has a fairly narrow reputation but Emory has an extremely broad one. As just one example, take its small Middle Eastern Studies department. Mahmoud Al-Batal, who wrote the Arabic textbook, has worked and taught there for many years, and certainly has an international reputation.

    http://www.adfl.org/Al-Batal.htm

    And one of the best things about Emory... they don't bother with that NCAA stuff. When I went to University of Miami those Hurricanes just drove me nuts. They parked their pimped-out cars in the best spots while we had to walk miles, and held special roped-off exclusive barbecues which other (very hungry) students could only smell.
     
  7. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    The most recent USNews rankings issue that I have is 2003. It puts UCB in #20. That still makes it the #1 public research university in the US in USNews' (rather debatable) estimation.

    The USNews rankings are for undergraduate programs. Emory might emphasize undergraduates more than Berkeley does.

    That's of more relevance to graduate students.

    USNews definitely has a vision of what they want in a school. They want small classes, low student-teacher ratio, high initial selectivity, low subsequent drop-out-rate, students graduating on time (hence no part-time students) and lots of alumni giving. And there's the reputation survey (polling presidents and admissions deans, not disciplinary scholars) that inevitably favors the usual suspects. (It's like entertainment celebrities, to some extent schools are famous simply for being famous.)

    That kind of favors an ivy-league model.

    Stanford (UCB's Bay Area rival) did better than Berkeley, tied for #4. That's because private Stanford is more ivy-ish, with an undergraduate student body a fraction the size of Berkeley's. (The two are more similar on the graduate level.)

    It's interesting that many DL programs would do very badly by these criteria. They are often rather open-admissions, admitting adult students without much interest in high-school grades and SATs (that might have been completed decades earlier). Drop-out rates are high. Few students study full-time. And the vocational image just isn't toney enough to constitute a reputation.
     
  8. little fauss

    little fauss New Member

    I've never been that impressed with UC Berkeley.

    Of course, I'm talking about their boxing team from a couple decades ago. At the University of Nevada, they'd often travel to fight us or we'd travel to fight them. I smacked UC Berkeley fighter Chris Haddaway--later an All-American--up one side and down the other in Berkeley in front of a huge crowd of about 500. :D Chris Morales of U.C. Berkeley, however, knocked the stuffing out of me and performed an unwanted left retinal rearrangement--didn't exactly tickle, if you know what I mean. Couldn't see beans in the dark out that eye for the better part of a year--what an overhand right that guy had! :eek:
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 1, 2005
  9. John Bear

    John Bear Senior Member

    And even now, Chris Haddaway, having become quite a popular singer-songwriter in Germany (http://www.haddaway.de/), is writing poems about the day she beat the stuffing out of Nevada fighter named, inexplicably, "little fauss."
     
  10. Tom57

    Tom57 Member

    Ha. I know Chris Morales - a very mild mannered guy - and also a lawyer too.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 1, 2005
  11. aldrin

    aldrin New Member

    I read a book at the Cal State Fullerton library a year ago that ranked UC Berkeley as the #1 university for graduate studies in the US. I specifically remember Berkeley being mentioned as the ONLY university which has ALL departments ranked in the top ten in their respective fields. Harvard ranked #2, which, if I remember right, was due to one department being ranked outside the top ten.
     
  12. oxpecker

    oxpecker New Member

    Berkeley is crap.
    • Oski Wow-Wow!
      Whiskey Wee-Wee!
      Olee! Muckie-eye!
      Olee! Berkeley-eye!
      California! Wow!
    Nuff said.
     
  13. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    I'd have LOVED to go to Berkeley for undergrad. (Boalt Hall was so far out of my league that I didn't even apply there.)

    But the place has a...well, a reputation for wackiness. Even by California standards, UC Berkeley is on the LEFT. Even by Bay Area standards Berkeley is on the Left. Heck, even by extreme militant New Left standards, Berkeley is only middle of the road! :D

    And, as a resident of Washington State at the time, UC wouldn't have been a very good deal financially for me.

    Soooo...I stayed in the relative comfort of the Cultural Dustbin (that was Seattle in 1975, folks!) for my B.A. and got my law degree more or less by accident here in the Land of Entrapment.

    A permanent rustic, I!
     

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