This is naive. The job of admissions is to make money for the institution. Academics, being "well rounded", being a "leader" is all kayfabe.

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aabhay 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Colleges are a “marketplace” as much as any other marketplace. Just how Stanford disrupted the traditional Ivy League monopoly, other schools can disrupt the status quo by consistent churning out leaders, great thinkers, entrepreneurs, and the like.

What sells the colleges the most is the sense that successful people tend to be there. So while admissions profit can be a very short term goal, any admit counselor knows that the long term goal is to create admirable leaders and change makers.

This is not impossible for publicly funded schools. Berkeley has put out consistently top AI researchers and engineers, more so than Stanford in my opinion.

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mistrial9 2 days ago | parent [-]

Stanford builds companies; Berkeley builds entire industries

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SilverElfin 2 days ago | parent [-]

Interesting take. But Wikipedia has lists of scientific achievements and also companies associated with both. Is it really the case that each university has such a strong “personality” or is it just their reputation.

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mistrial9 2 days ago | parent [-]

years ago I had no interest in this old football rivalry stuff.. very, very smart people work&play hard individually at both places. However once things get more organized, the differences are indeed profound for example, the rise and concentration of capital on the one hand, and the Nobel prizes and social contracts on the other. Agree that both places are large enough, active enough, stable enough such that simple comparisons are certainly refutable. However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two. The inward and enduring commitment to certain (polarized) politics, in both cases, is evident to me. Both institutions can claim societal-level accomplishments in the pure sciences..

	▲	musicale a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Berkeley has more Nobel prizes (and actual elements in the periodic table); Stanford has more Turing awards (with MIT at #2 between Stanford and Berkeley). > However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two This is true. Stanford isn't too far removed from Berkeley by grad student enrollment (10K vs. 12K) but the undergraduate enrollment is tiny by comparison (7.5K vs. 33K).
	▲	SilverElfin 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Interesting. Would love to learn more. Of the things you mention the capital thing does seem real. I don’t have enough visibility into these places to know about the rest. Did you attend one of these?

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kjkjadksj 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If things were really so machiavellian they wouldn’t take broke students at all.