Comment by mistrial9
20 hours ago
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..
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).
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?