Saturday, October 3, 2009

Misleading language, again

Bob Herbert's op-ed in today's New York Times, Cracks in the Future, is all about the damage being done to California's public universities, Berkeley in particular, by the chaotic state budgeting system. He says (emphasis mine):

More of Berkeley’s undergraduates go on to get Ph.D.’s than those at any other university in the country.

which comes straight off a UC Berkeley website, A Legacy of Excellence.
This is a great example of the sort of language I want my students to learn to look out for. Berkeley's got about 25,000 undergraduates; Harvard's has 8,000. It's not particularly impressive to point out that "more" Berkeley students get Ph.D.'s. Plenty of state schools are larger than Berkeley, but almost every major private university is much smaller.

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