............ wrote:
Having been at both schools, I can say the average student at Berkeley isn't as good as Stanford (because Berkeley is a big state school so it will have a larger range) but the top students at both are great.
+1.
I attended high school in Palo Alto and we would consistently send the top students to some combination of Cal and MIT. The kids who went to Stanford were generally children of tenured faculty or recruited athletes, with the occasional CS kid picking Stanford over MIT/Caltech every few years (generally for the social scene).
As part of the UC system (and a workaround against the affirmative action restrictions resulting from Bakke v. Regents) Berkeley commits to accepting the top 5 - 10% of students in California public school districts. In some areas (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Huntington Beach, etc) this top 5 - 10% consists of students who are the national academic 1%--perfect standardized test scores, winners of national awards, etc. In other areas (Tenderloin, inner-city LA, Oakland, large chunks of central California), this includes kids who are smart and studious and stand out amongst their high school peers, but come from backgrounds of a lot less privilege.
So Berkeley ends up with a very wide range of academic talent. The top kids, however, are every bit as good as the top kids at Stanford.