4 ms·

Compare say, Berkeley to Stanford, and you'll see why this could work.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Compare say, Berkeley to Stanford Berkeley is highly exclusive [1], albeit 3x less so than Stanford [2]. The class-size difference, about 12,000, is noise against the millions of degrees conferred to Americans every year. Meanwhile, Stanford produces different graduate as a result of its process. Forcing homogenisation to one model for ideological purity is misled. [1] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/berkeley/freshman-admit-data.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors... [2] https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/14/stanford-admit-rate-drops-to-record-low-3-95-for-the-class-of-2025/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/14/stanford-admit-rate-dro...
- hot_gril 4y ago
  tl;dr Berkeley is still exclusive even after you're admitted Berkeley has its own way of filtering students once they're admitted. This is most obvious with the computer science majors, of which there are two that involve almost the same coursework. EECS is super hard to get into to begin with. Whereas anyone in the school can intend L&S CS, but there's a rather high GPA cutoff (at like 30th %tile but don't quote me) for declaring, and you're effectively barred from most upper-div CS classes until you've declared, usually second year IIRC. If you miss the cutoff for L&S or one of the other exclusive majors, you end up in an alternative. CS usually becomes the other CS: cognitive science. Yes it's a real field, but at Berkeley that just means you couldn't make comp sci. Cog sci has very few classes within its own major; instead everything is cross-listed with other majors, and you have a very hard time getting a spot in the class. The other common duo is Haas vs economics. And many of the required lower divs are "weeders," huge classes with low average grades that students perceive mainly as obstacles to the upper divs. I'm not saying this is a bad strategy, though.
  - abeppu 4y ago
    I also want to highlight that this dynamic messes up those adjacent programs. I was a cognitive science student because I thought it was fascinating, and it's unfortunate that the program gets a bit diluted by being branded "the other CS" and some share of students that don't actually care about the other components.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      Yeah, it kinda stinks. I want to edit my comment saying that cog sci is just mostly the alt bucket for comp sci, but it's too late. My roommate was cog sci because he actually cared about it, then he switched majors.

> Compare say, Berkeley to Stanford Berkeley is highly exclusive [1], albeit 3x less so than Stanford [2]. The class-size difference, about 12,000, is noise against the millions of degrees conferred to Americans every year. Meanwhile, Stanford produces different graduate as a result of its process. Forcing homogenisation to one model for ideological purity is misled. [1] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/berkeley/freshman-admit-data.html https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors... [2] https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/14/stanford-admit-rate-drops-to-record-low-3-95-for-the-class-of-2025/ https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/14/stanford-admit-rate-dro...

hot_gril 4y ago
tl;dr Berkeley is still exclusive even after you're admitted Berkeley has its own way of filtering students once they're admitted. This is most obvious with the computer science majors, of which there are two that involve almost the same coursework. EECS is super hard to get into to begin with. Whereas anyone in the school can intend L&S CS, but there's a rather high GPA cutoff (at like 30th %tile but don't quote me) for declaring, and you're effectively barred from most upper-div CS classes until you've declared, usually second year IIRC. If you miss the cutoff for L&S or one of the other exclusive majors, you end up in an alternative. CS usually becomes the other CS: cognitive science. Yes it's a real field, but at Berkeley that just means you couldn't make comp sci. Cog sci has very few classes within its own major; instead everything is cross-listed with other majors, and you have a very hard time getting a spot in the class. The other common duo is Haas vs economics. And many of the required lower divs are "weeders," huge classes with low average grades that students perceive mainly as obstacles to the upper divs. I'm not saying this is a bad strategy, though.
- abeppu 4y ago
  I also want to highlight that this dynamic messes up those adjacent programs. I was a cognitive science student because I thought it was fascinating, and it's unfortunate that the program gets a bit diluted by being branded "the other CS" and some share of students that don't actually care about the other components.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    Yeah, it kinda stinks. I want to edit my comment saying that cog sci is just mostly the alt bucket for comp sci, but it's too late. My roommate was cog sci because he actually cared about it, then he switched majors.