valuing a liberal education -- Part III Quality & MOOCs

The quality of the Berkeley student body is unquestioned, as is the quality of the university.  For example, a National Research Council analysis of U.S. universities concluded that UC Berkeley has the largest number of highly ranked graduate programs in the country. The analysis ranked doctoral programs, finding that 48 out of the 52 Berkeley programs evaluated were ranked within the top 10 nationally.  UC Berkeley has the second highest number of graduate programs with a ranking of #1: 16 out of 52 reached top status—Harvard, for comparison, achieved this level in 19 of its 52 ranked programs, while Stanford was #1 in 11 of its 47 tested programs.   UC Berkeley doctoral programs that received a #1 ranking include Agricultural and Resource Economics, Astrophysics, Chemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science, English, Epidemiology, German, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Genetics, Genomics and Development, Physics, Plant Biology, and Political Science.

UC Berkeley was also the #1 recipient of NSF Graduate Research Fellowships between 2001 and 2010, with 1,333 awards. The next closest schools: MIT at 1,242 and Stanford at 1,070. Berkeley faculty, alumni, and researchers have won an astonishing 71 Nobel Prizes (including 28 alumni Nobel laureates), 9 Wolf Prizes, 7 Fields Medals, 15 Turing Awards, 45 MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes. UC Berkeley researchers have discovered 16 chemical elements, 6 of them in the periodic table – more than any other university.

But having a high-quality university nearby which is unavailable to you due to size constraints, rising costs, and preferential admission criteria for others didn’t seem like a palatable situation to some in the audience.  With more students applying, with ever-higher credentials to vie for fewer total spots for ‘locals’, and no way to expand the university size – what next? 

Asked about the new MOOC (Massive Open OnLine Courses) craze, Jacobsen cited a Faculty Senate meeting (he was chair of the Academic Senate last year) where some 280 folk (of the 1,500 faculty) showed up (he mentioned that usually it is very hard to get a fifty member quorum).  The Dean of the Law School was urging adoption of the EdX program from Harvard, but the faculty group was resistant.  The linchpin comment: someone asked the Dean why he wasn’t urging the Law School to pioneer it first.  His unfortunate reply was that “less rigorous programs are the better place to start.”  The meeting apparently descended into a near riot.  Our mature group was more restrained; clearly this audience valued the on-campus experience of their education much as they savored the Lair experience in the Sierra Nevada mountains.