s

[pplar]

By Greg Partenach (who studied at Cal)

I was in multiple courses at Berkeley with students and friends that were admitted to top 5 schools like MIT - Princeton - Harvard. Almost every course I took had several people in it that earned admission at those schools and was at Berkeley for one reason or another.

The departments at Berkeley had no real weak link when I attended. You could meet a more intelligent student in philosophy or chemistry than in EECS. Students in the humanities and social sciences were valedictorians of their class.

The professors were elite researchers, with Nobel Laureates, Turing Awards winners, Fields Medal winners, and so on. The people that graduated with impressive credentials and graduate test scores from Berkeley were admitted to any (I do mean any) graduate or professional program.

Admission to the competitive Berkeley PhD programs is probably just as hard as any other top 5 program, and sometimes harder. At a few times in the recent past, the Math and Chemistry programs were the hardest in the country to gain admission to for a PhD.

Note, I don’t talk as much about engineering, because…well, Berkeley is very highly ranked in most engineering disciplines. Post Docs and other top researchers from Berkeley go on to be professors at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc.

Elite, really, is a state of mind, partly marketing, and based on the whole “more elusive” quality of getting into MIT or CalTech or Stanford.

[noles]

Size matters. In this case, the smaller the 'better'. When you have 45k enrollment, it's hard to say all of 45k are valedictorians of their class because it's not true. UCB may have as many elite students as M,C, and S. But it also has not so good students that M, C, S don't and will not have.

If UCB reduces its enrollment to less than 10k, it'll be just as good or even better than the three. It won't happen though.