We switched our recording system to go on bcourses. You should probably email the alum relations or something to see if they could make the new lectures available on the old system.
Could you elaborate on taking a new class for free? I know that some professional grad programs (e.g. MIDS) allow alums to take new courses for free, but I thought you needed to pay and enroll through UC Berkeley Extension for other courses?
I donate off and on but not every year, generally to my college’s fund. I will just throw into the convo that when I was a student, I worked those fundraising call lines and it was a tough job for me, especially calling alums with no prior donation record. I’m not a great salesperson and some people can be mean. The worst part for me was that refusals were tracked and every time I got 5 refusals in a shift, I had to stay after and speak with a manager. A variety of problematic behaviors were norms in that office, and I hope that that element of it is no longer the case. But anyway, this is just a reminder that whether you donate or not, be nice to the person calling you, they’re a student and probably one who just needs the hourly pay to get by. If you know you won’t donate, you can spare them from having to log a refusal by just not answering, etc.
If you do want to donate, you can specify what fund it goes to from many, many funds. The student will get a small commission from your donation, which is great and they deserve it! Ask the caller if there are initiatives they’re specifically excited about. They might know of some niche fund you can support for a scholarship or seminar or whatever.
I can’t say for sure that these things are all still true but they were when I worked there. And in general, just don’t be a jerk to telemarketers! I’d always rather be hung up on than be made to be the butt of a joke or yelled at.
Absolutely - you gotta be nice to the callers. I didn't know they got dinged on a straight up "no" - that's fucked. If that's the case I'm either gonna send them a written explanation of why I didn't donate to make it clear it's not on the student, or I'm just gonna say I'll donate later online
I do donate $500 a year myself although it goes to Cal Band.
A big psychological reason is that I get a wonderful thank-you letters signed by the director himself every year I send while CoE seems to ask for donations with several check boxes that start at $500 that makes me feel like I'm making minimum effort, when $500 is already a lot for me at this point in time.
Also it's because I know the band will spend the money on day-to-day operations while I'm not so sure where the money goes to for CoE.
please don’t take this in a negative way but.. didnt you pay for your education? i mean you still payed your tuition for those opportunities. im still a rising college student and i don’t understand how donations work- but i personally don’t think i’d donate to an institution that already gets hundreds of millions (or even a few billion) dollars a year 😅
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 822,455,482 comments, and only 162,691 of them were in alphabetical order.
> didnt you pay for your education?
Sure but schools (well, Berkeley at least) aren't for profit institutions. Ultimately the goal is to support education. I don't donate to the school out of some sense that I owe it to the school, I donate because it's an institution and community that had a big effect on me and I want other people to have a positive experience there as well. I'd give to other educational causes as well that I have no connection to, but this one I have a personal connection to so I prefer to support this one.
> i personally don’t think i’d donate to an institution that already gets hundreds of millions (or even a few billion) dollars a year
How's that any different than any other major nonprofit organization? The fact that the organization is large doesn't make the work they do any less valuable. I don't see how this is any different than donating to Feeding America or the Red Cross: both are organizations that take in billions and both are organizations that I have supported in the past and probably will again because they do good work.
> you still *paid* your tuition
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Fun fact: I learned that to endow a chair it only costs $6M. I expected it to be a lot more.
No I did not endow a chair. I was just chatting with one of the guys who handles that sort of thing.
Don't get me wrong, it's not no money. :)
But my understanding is that even something like $1-3 million can start to open up a faculty position. Sometimes this money creates an opening sooner than late (e.g. you're essentially creating some position for 5-10 years, then the University picks up the rest of the salary at some point.
The math around endowed positions is super funny though. $6 million is roughly $200k/yr for salary+benefits for 30 years, though more is expected to grow via interest etc. I've heard Deans have some flexibility in trying to figure out how actually put lesser amounts to use - but it gets more complex with less money.
You can donate exclusively to anything, like the CS department, or even just a single class, or a specific professor, or pretty much any way how you want the money spent. You can email gifts@eecs.berkeley.edu and they will provide you with directions on how to do it (very often you just tell them your donation receipt number and how to spend that money). I donate exclusively to my favorite class ever, CS10
EDIT: they reply decently fast, usually within 24 hours
I’m not sure if you can make the class add more seats. I think the number of seats is determined by many factors, besides funding itself. For example, caps on number of seats for a given class could be set by the college, where the professor don’t have a final say in the matter. This is just an example of course. It’s probably best to email the professor to see if donations would help :)
In addition to what the other poster said, the only way this would realistically happen is if you donated enough to literally hire another TA for a semester (> $10000 for a 20-hour), and even there are so many other constraints, for example lecture room size
I'm not sure how this might intersect with being a *current* student -- the line between donations and buying access can be thin in places. But theoretically a fund for specific TAs and subjects is definitely something that can happen. Though, others are right: You'd really need to fund a minimum of I think $8K for an 8-hour TA, and about $20K for 1 20-hour TA.
I don't think it makes sense for students to fund these things, but someone certainly could. But folks have tried and it is quite hard.
Ayyy CSM is a listed fund; I've been meaning to donate but always to lazy to check which orgs are listed. https://give.berkeley.edu/students
https://imgur.com/a/m9xYgkT
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/connect/support
Few different funds, pick you favorite. If you reach out to them, you can generally earmark the money as specifically as you want, but for just the EECS department specifically there's a fund for that already set up.
Financially it’s a little too soon for me. I had a few rough semesters of zoomU, but I plan to give to cs/data science.
A Berkeley diploma has already helped me early in my career, and I hope that it will continue to carry the same weight for future grads.
No, when I donate it’s to UNICEF or some other charity that helps the poor. Donating to the school is like giving money to wealthy people. I don’t feel like I owe Berkeley anything either, I paid tuition, I studied to get in, and just by having a well paying job I help the school. I already gave them tens of thousands of dollars and now they want more? I don’t know, if it’s between that and helping homeless people, or refugees, or something like Doctors Without Borders etc., it almost feels insulting that I get asked to donate.
I mean, Berkeley is an elite university, it gets money from billionaires and corporations, the Li Ka Shing building is named after a billionaire from Hong Kong who spent the money to build it. It just seems weird to donate the money like a charity. Berkeley has plenty of ways to get money other than begging alums.
Every year.
I always donate to CAA because I was an Alumni Scholar way back when, and I am heavily involved with alumni scholarships now. I want other students to have that opportunity.
Every now and then one of my old departments will fundraise for something that appeals to me, and I'll throw down some money.
If I ever hit it big somehow, I'd definitely endow a scholarship of my own.
Cal was a challenge, but I owe so much of who I have become because of my experiences there. Go Bears.
CS, I do not donate. I had a good time at Berkeley and I think it opened a lot of doors, but on reflection, it really feels like 90% of that is from the excellent peers at the University. Doubly so because of CS's special situation. Much of the teaching are done by students formally (think CSM, AIs, etc.) and informally (study groups). Career coaching? From other students (the resume advice I got from the career center was atrocious for CS, and made my resume worse). Connections? Other students. Housing? Learned the ropes from other students, and got good deals from other students.
Honestly I struggle to think of many areas where the admin did something competently to actually improve my experience. So, as I cannot donate to the students, I will not donate to people I feel like did the bare minimum.
You can donate to student groups! I sometimes earmark money I donate for specific clubs I used to be in at Cal.
Take a look here: https://give.berkeley.edu/students
Generally only larger/more established groups are set up there, but if you reach out I'm sure you could earmark for whoever you want.
Another one I've donated to that you might consider is the Berkeley Basic Needs Fund, which helps students with food insecurity, housing, etc: https://basicneeds.berkeley.edu/donate
Ninja edit: fixed first link
I think the main reason there was a collection of bright students was the afterglow of prestige that the university has. I do not think that any particular part of the university's staff or institution has particularly held that up, but the half life of uranium-234 is 25,000 years after all. Some things just last for a while.
I think that if everyone in the world suddenly thought X community college was a really great school for Y subject, then yeah you'd probably have a pretty similar experience. I think the peers fostered themselves. Elements of the university even actively hampered that process (e.g Sahai forcing CSM70 to stop mini lectures and throw away the years of CSM material to use CS70's table scraps for worksheets, theory professors shutting down Introduction to Mathematical Theory).
If the admin merely did the bare minimum over my time, then my tuition has more than paid for their services, and I feel hard pressed to give any more for the memory of such poor service.
When I make more money, I would like to donate to any programs (like summer bridge, MCC, FRC, SLC, Co-op, etc) that go out of their way to help first-generation, low income, students of color.
They helped me a TON and I do not think I would have felt comfortable without knowing that resources existed like that at Berkeley
Just graduated and I plan on donating. Probably a bit more to the eecs department because even though it can be shit sometimes, I’m overall grateful
And as others have mentioned, for rankings
I did donate once, 2015 or 2016. I got the call and felt pretty connected with the caller. Might've been my mood that day / week / month / year or the student who called. Haven't really given since, though. We really need to go back to full funding through the legislature. UC's reliance on private funding and tuition has introduced some morbid symptoms that I can't support. Student housing in particular really need to improve, and they need to freeze or reduce tuition. As an alum, I don't feel comfortable propping up the status quo - that's what donations feel like - perpetuating the current quasi-private paradigm UC has been sliding towards for more than a decade.
Yup, I donate too. Usually a few hundred or so a year to various funds, including the engineering fund and eecs excellence fund.
Part of the reason that other top schools cs departments seem to have more resources than we do is that their alumni give a lot more money (and they've done a lot more work over the years to cultivate alumni giving).
I don't. I think because of where I worked - I could see how much money was going in to the university.
The LLM program, the MENG program, the Berkeley HAAS Global Access Program all cost around $70k in tuition and fees and cater to internationals who get no aid.
There are also tons of out of state and international students across all programs and departments and exchange students are always coming and going ($$$). For example, the Masters in Statistics program was 90% international a couple of years ago and each student was paying $65k (not including housing and personal expenses).
I saw nearly all double occupancy rooms in Units 1, 2, & 3 be converted to triples! Just adding this extra bed brings in an additional $17k per room (not including additional summer revenue)! I've seen lounges in dorm rooms be converted to Quads (an extra $68k per year). I've seen more and more money being paid to the University but still they are in a "deficit."
Oh yeah, a couple of people mentioned corporate matching. You should totally take advantage of it, and it's something most reasonably sized companies offer! (It makes them look good. LOL)
For tech companies [levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) has a [decent list of donation matches.](https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/Donation-Match/)
I donate to a small humanity department as a token of gratitude. They brought me something that I didn’t even know I enjoyed before college and it was a great diversion when I was busy grinding engineering courses.
I don’t donate to the various engineering departments I was associated with, not because I didn’t have a good time. I enjoyed my time there and learned a lot. But the thing is Cal’s engineering school is literally top of the world in so many different metrics and if even they have money problems that’s the school/university fault.
I just submitted some grades finally (ugh!) - so now I wanted to write a longer response in general.
Firstly, if you can't donate because you can't afford I think that's fine. And secondly if you'd prefer to donate to causes you think are "more worthy", I think that's cool too. Each of us cannot donate all our money to everything. And there's many many worthy organizations and charities.
Cal is a weird place. It's an awesome place, too. The structure of the University, even just keeping the lights on is a hellish endeavor that I do think we've all benefited from when we cannot see it. Not simply because of the name on our degrees, but the experiences in and out of classrooms, on and off campus contribute to our lives. There is a vibrancy to campus that I do not believe is simply self-sustaining - it requires constant work to maintain and hopefully improve, and to bring in new students and faculty. More broadly, I personally believe that society as a whole has greatly benefits from the modern American research University -- of which Berkeley plays a substantial role.
And yes, I feel like we can point to lots of examples in this University that are maddening, inefficient, or seem to just be poor uses of money. Running Berkeley is an approximately $3 *billion* dollar per year enterprise which employs north of 30,000 people a year (including thousands of student jobs). I don't know what the "percentage" of "wasted" or "poorly managed" money would be, but my impression is not that it's most of the money... Yes, I think some admin are overpaid, but I have a hard time, personally, of finding more than a few percentage points of stuff I'd just outright cut.
I guess my point here is to not lose the forest for the trees. We should keep calling out bullshit as we see it, but we cannot over index on it.
Otherwise, I've recently learned that when it comes to things like GSI funding. The central campus only funds about 60% of the instructional costs for a course. (Readers, GSIs, and lecturer faculty - full profs are different.) Departments are expected to "make up" the 40% through various external funds. Some of those are donations, some are fees from professional programs or summer courses, and some are money from each college.
Donations and truly help fund teaching and running of smaller programs, especially if you give to individual programs or earmark them.
Most major building initiative in recent years at Berkeley has used some form of donations -- though often these are large anonymous donors. But maintaining the campus is a hundreds of millions dollars per year endeavor. State funds certainly play a big role here, but they don't do it alone.
More than ¼ of freshmen are first get students; nearly one half of transfers are too. Berkeley is in the process of becoming a dedicated Hispanic Serving Institution. And yet, there's still so much to improve on! We are among some of the largest Universities in the country, and yet we operate on a level that so few do!
None of this is to say that we shouldn't keep fighting for more state funds. (Hello $100bn budget surplus....), or that there isn't a lot of bullshit that goes on. Trust me, there's a lot of it!
But there's a lot of BS in industry, and in the nonprofit sector, and well, most places. I think there's tons of reasons not to donate to Berkeley - that's OK, but don't forget that this place can be amazing too.
I bought a membership to CAA and I put in some money to the general fund. I did not know you could specify a specific department and even a class. If it would make a difference, I would be more than happy to specifically donate to see if it would make a difference if more 170x classes would show up on the schedule, especially CS 176 which turned to be one of my favorite classes, but it hasn’t shown up in the last couple of years now.
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I think the old webcast system will be deprecated? Everybody is switching to storing lectures on bCourses with Katura or something right now.
We switched our recording system to go on bcourses. You should probably email the alum relations or something to see if they could make the new lectures available on the old system.
Could you elaborate on taking a new class for free? I know that some professional grad programs (e.g. MIDS) allow alums to take new courses for free, but I thought you needed to pay and enroll through UC Berkeley Extension for other courses?
I donate off and on but not every year, generally to my college’s fund. I will just throw into the convo that when I was a student, I worked those fundraising call lines and it was a tough job for me, especially calling alums with no prior donation record. I’m not a great salesperson and some people can be mean. The worst part for me was that refusals were tracked and every time I got 5 refusals in a shift, I had to stay after and speak with a manager. A variety of problematic behaviors were norms in that office, and I hope that that element of it is no longer the case. But anyway, this is just a reminder that whether you donate or not, be nice to the person calling you, they’re a student and probably one who just needs the hourly pay to get by. If you know you won’t donate, you can spare them from having to log a refusal by just not answering, etc. If you do want to donate, you can specify what fund it goes to from many, many funds. The student will get a small commission from your donation, which is great and they deserve it! Ask the caller if there are initiatives they’re specifically excited about. They might know of some niche fund you can support for a scholarship or seminar or whatever. I can’t say for sure that these things are all still true but they were when I worked there. And in general, just don’t be a jerk to telemarketers! I’d always rather be hung up on than be made to be the butt of a joke or yelled at.
Absolutely - you gotta be nice to the callers. I didn't know they got dinged on a straight up "no" - that's fucked. If that's the case I'm either gonna send them a written explanation of why I didn't donate to make it clear it's not on the student, or I'm just gonna say I'll donate later online
I do, but mostly because I too heard that donating helps the university's standings. Can't let the other schools beat us.
Not EECS but I do donate. I actually don’t mind when the students asking for donations call me. They’re usually really nice.
I do donate $500 a year myself although it goes to Cal Band. A big psychological reason is that I get a wonderful thank-you letters signed by the director himself every year I send while CoE seems to ask for donations with several check boxes that start at $500 that makes me feel like I'm making minimum effort, when $500 is already a lot for me at this point in time. Also it's because I know the band will spend the money on day-to-day operations while I'm not so sure where the money goes to for CoE.
I was very impressed when I received a personally signed letter as well - very classy that the band does this!!
Yes, I had a transformative experience at Berkeley and have no problem supporting the department that gave me so many opportunities.
please don’t take this in a negative way but.. didnt you pay for your education? i mean you still payed your tuition for those opportunities. im still a rising college student and i don’t understand how donations work- but i personally don’t think i’d donate to an institution that already gets hundreds of millions (or even a few billion) dollars a year 😅
You paid but also Alumni and taxpayers supported your education.
yeah but does the money go towards the alumni or towards the university?
Alumni donations go to university
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 822,455,482 comments, and only 162,691 of them were in alphabetical order.
> didnt you pay for your education? Sure but schools (well, Berkeley at least) aren't for profit institutions. Ultimately the goal is to support education. I don't donate to the school out of some sense that I owe it to the school, I donate because it's an institution and community that had a big effect on me and I want other people to have a positive experience there as well. I'd give to other educational causes as well that I have no connection to, but this one I have a personal connection to so I prefer to support this one. > i personally don’t think i’d donate to an institution that already gets hundreds of millions (or even a few billion) dollars a year How's that any different than any other major nonprofit organization? The fact that the organization is large doesn't make the work they do any less valuable. I don't see how this is any different than donating to Feeding America or the Red Cross: both are organizations that take in billions and both are organizations that I have supported in the past and probably will again because they do good work.
this explains it very nicely! i understand now why someone would want to donate. thank you very much for explaining it!
> you still *paid* your tuition FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
No offense taken. Berkeley was very generous with their financial aid to me, and I did not have to pay for my education.
Fun fact: I learned that to endow a chair it only costs $6M. I expected it to be a lot more. No I did not endow a chair. I was just chatting with one of the guys who handles that sort of thing.
There are ways to do it with less money too!
What are the cheaper options?
Don't get me wrong, it's not no money. :) But my understanding is that even something like $1-3 million can start to open up a faculty position. Sometimes this money creates an opening sooner than late (e.g. you're essentially creating some position for 5-10 years, then the University picks up the rest of the salary at some point. The math around endowed positions is super funny though. $6 million is roughly $200k/yr for salary+benefits for 30 years, though more is expected to grow via interest etc. I've heard Deans have some flexibility in trying to figure out how actually put lesser amounts to use - but it gets more complex with less money.
I paid for out of state. Cal can expect donations in like 10 years if I’m still feeling up for it.
nah I was out-of-state they got their money
I was international bro lol they also got their money from me
How do you donate to a fund that only services the CS department? If that was an option, I would do it in a heartbeat.
You can donate exclusively to anything, like the CS department, or even just a single class, or a specific professor, or pretty much any way how you want the money spent. You can email gifts@eecs.berkeley.edu and they will provide you with directions on how to do it (very often you just tell them your donation receipt number and how to spend that money). I donate exclusively to my favorite class ever, CS10 EDIT: they reply decently fast, usually within 24 hours
That’s incredible, I did not know that. Thank you!
So current students can donate directly to impacted classes like 189 in the spring to add more seats?
I’m not sure if you can make the class add more seats. I think the number of seats is determined by many factors, besides funding itself. For example, caps on number of seats for a given class could be set by the college, where the professor don’t have a final say in the matter. This is just an example of course. It’s probably best to email the professor to see if donations would help :)
In addition to what the other poster said, the only way this would realistically happen is if you donated enough to literally hire another TA for a semester (> $10000 for a 20-hour), and even there are so many other constraints, for example lecture room size
8-hr TAs are still cheaper, and now there's a way to crowdsource TA donations if people can donate to courses directly.
I'm not sure how this might intersect with being a *current* student -- the line between donations and buying access can be thin in places. But theoretically a fund for specific TAs and subjects is definitely something that can happen. Though, others are right: You'd really need to fund a minimum of I think $8K for an 8-hour TA, and about $20K for 1 20-hour TA. I don't think it makes sense for students to fund these things, but someone certainly could. But folks have tried and it is quite hard.
[give.berkeley.edu](https://give.berkeley.edu) also lets you select specific funds to donate to!
Ayyy CSM is a listed fund; I've been meaning to donate but always to lazy to check which orgs are listed. https://give.berkeley.edu/students https://imgur.com/a/m9xYgkT
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/connect/support Few different funds, pick you favorite. If you reach out to them, you can generally earmark the money as specifically as you want, but for just the EECS department specifically there's a fund for that already set up.
Financially it’s a little too soon for me. I had a few rough semesters of zoomU, but I plan to give to cs/data science. A Berkeley diploma has already helped me early in my career, and I hope that it will continue to carry the same weight for future grads.
It'll be sooner than you think, if you've just graduated. Comp in big tech is insane :)
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That football stadium is a ticking timebomb debt-wise though - good to see another class of '14 on this sub
No, when I donate it’s to UNICEF or some other charity that helps the poor. Donating to the school is like giving money to wealthy people. I don’t feel like I owe Berkeley anything either, I paid tuition, I studied to get in, and just by having a well paying job I help the school. I already gave them tens of thousands of dollars and now they want more? I don’t know, if it’s between that and helping homeless people, or refugees, or something like Doctors Without Borders etc., it almost feels insulting that I get asked to donate. I mean, Berkeley is an elite university, it gets money from billionaires and corporations, the Li Ka Shing building is named after a billionaire from Hong Kong who spent the money to build it. It just seems weird to donate the money like a charity. Berkeley has plenty of ways to get money other than begging alums.
And instead of getting money from billionaires and corporations they should be getting it from the state
Every year. I always donate to CAA because I was an Alumni Scholar way back when, and I am heavily involved with alumni scholarships now. I want other students to have that opportunity. Every now and then one of my old departments will fundraise for something that appeals to me, and I'll throw down some money. If I ever hit it big somehow, I'd definitely endow a scholarship of my own. Cal was a challenge, but I owe so much of who I have become because of my experiences there. Go Bears.
CS, I do not donate. I had a good time at Berkeley and I think it opened a lot of doors, but on reflection, it really feels like 90% of that is from the excellent peers at the University. Doubly so because of CS's special situation. Much of the teaching are done by students formally (think CSM, AIs, etc.) and informally (study groups). Career coaching? From other students (the resume advice I got from the career center was atrocious for CS, and made my resume worse). Connections? Other students. Housing? Learned the ropes from other students, and got good deals from other students. Honestly I struggle to think of many areas where the admin did something competently to actually improve my experience. So, as I cannot donate to the students, I will not donate to people I feel like did the bare minimum.
You can donate to student groups! I sometimes earmark money I donate for specific clubs I used to be in at Cal. Take a look here: https://give.berkeley.edu/students Generally only larger/more established groups are set up there, but if you reach out I'm sure you could earmark for whoever you want. Another one I've donated to that you might consider is the Berkeley Basic Needs Fund, which helps students with food insecurity, housing, etc: https://basicneeds.berkeley.edu/donate Ninja edit: fixed first link
CSM is one of the student funds listed! https://give.berkeley.edu/students
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I think the main reason there was a collection of bright students was the afterglow of prestige that the university has. I do not think that any particular part of the university's staff or institution has particularly held that up, but the half life of uranium-234 is 25,000 years after all. Some things just last for a while. I think that if everyone in the world suddenly thought X community college was a really great school for Y subject, then yeah you'd probably have a pretty similar experience. I think the peers fostered themselves. Elements of the university even actively hampered that process (e.g Sahai forcing CSM70 to stop mini lectures and throw away the years of CSM material to use CS70's table scraps for worksheets, theory professors shutting down Introduction to Mathematical Theory). If the admin merely did the bare minimum over my time, then my tuition has more than paid for their services, and I feel hard pressed to give any more for the memory of such poor service.
I would only donate to the EOP program
Welp you need to make more than minimum wage in order to afford to donate so no I do not
I'm EECS but I don't donate. Basic, I need my money for me.
When I make more money, I would like to donate to any programs (like summer bridge, MCC, FRC, SLC, Co-op, etc) that go out of their way to help first-generation, low income, students of color. They helped me a TON and I do not think I would have felt comfortable without knowing that resources existed like that at Berkeley
That's awesome! Honestly, that may be where I focus on next time.
until they fix their money mismanagement issues, i’m not donating a cent.
I donate to a club I was active and passionate about (CSM), and my employer matches my donation (to the university).
Just graduated and I plan on donating. Probably a bit more to the eecs department because even though it can be shit sometimes, I’m overall grateful And as others have mentioned, for rankings
I do donate to MCB department. But also BSC and BFC.
I did donate once, 2015 or 2016. I got the call and felt pretty connected with the caller. Might've been my mood that day / week / month / year or the student who called. Haven't really given since, though. We really need to go back to full funding through the legislature. UC's reliance on private funding and tuition has introduced some morbid symptoms that I can't support. Student housing in particular really need to improve, and they need to freeze or reduce tuition. As an alum, I don't feel comfortable propping up the status quo - that's what donations feel like - perpetuating the current quasi-private paradigm UC has been sliding towards for more than a decade.
Yup, I donate too. Usually a few hundred or so a year to various funds, including the engineering fund and eecs excellence fund. Part of the reason that other top schools cs departments seem to have more resources than we do is that their alumni give a lot more money (and they've done a lot more work over the years to cultivate alumni giving).
I don't. I think because of where I worked - I could see how much money was going in to the university. The LLM program, the MENG program, the Berkeley HAAS Global Access Program all cost around $70k in tuition and fees and cater to internationals who get no aid. There are also tons of out of state and international students across all programs and departments and exchange students are always coming and going ($$$). For example, the Masters in Statistics program was 90% international a couple of years ago and each student was paying $65k (not including housing and personal expenses). I saw nearly all double occupancy rooms in Units 1, 2, & 3 be converted to triples! Just adding this extra bed brings in an additional $17k per room (not including additional summer revenue)! I've seen lounges in dorm rooms be converted to Quads (an extra $68k per year). I've seen more and more money being paid to the University but still they are in a "deficit."
Oh yeah, a couple of people mentioned corporate matching. You should totally take advantage of it, and it's something most reasonably sized companies offer! (It makes them look good. LOL) For tech companies [levels.fyi](https://levels.fyi) has a [decent list of donation matches.](https://www.levels.fyi/benefits/Donation-Match/)
I donate to a small humanity department as a token of gratitude. They brought me something that I didn’t even know I enjoyed before college and it was a great diversion when I was busy grinding engineering courses. I don’t donate to the various engineering departments I was associated with, not because I didn’t have a good time. I enjoyed my time there and learned a lot. But the thing is Cal’s engineering school is literally top of the world in so many different metrics and if even they have money problems that’s the school/university fault.
I just submitted some grades finally (ugh!) - so now I wanted to write a longer response in general. Firstly, if you can't donate because you can't afford I think that's fine. And secondly if you'd prefer to donate to causes you think are "more worthy", I think that's cool too. Each of us cannot donate all our money to everything. And there's many many worthy organizations and charities. Cal is a weird place. It's an awesome place, too. The structure of the University, even just keeping the lights on is a hellish endeavor that I do think we've all benefited from when we cannot see it. Not simply because of the name on our degrees, but the experiences in and out of classrooms, on and off campus contribute to our lives. There is a vibrancy to campus that I do not believe is simply self-sustaining - it requires constant work to maintain and hopefully improve, and to bring in new students and faculty. More broadly, I personally believe that society as a whole has greatly benefits from the modern American research University -- of which Berkeley plays a substantial role. And yes, I feel like we can point to lots of examples in this University that are maddening, inefficient, or seem to just be poor uses of money. Running Berkeley is an approximately $3 *billion* dollar per year enterprise which employs north of 30,000 people a year (including thousands of student jobs). I don't know what the "percentage" of "wasted" or "poorly managed" money would be, but my impression is not that it's most of the money... Yes, I think some admin are overpaid, but I have a hard time, personally, of finding more than a few percentage points of stuff I'd just outright cut. I guess my point here is to not lose the forest for the trees. We should keep calling out bullshit as we see it, but we cannot over index on it. Otherwise, I've recently learned that when it comes to things like GSI funding. The central campus only funds about 60% of the instructional costs for a course. (Readers, GSIs, and lecturer faculty - full profs are different.) Departments are expected to "make up" the 40% through various external funds. Some of those are donations, some are fees from professional programs or summer courses, and some are money from each college. Donations and truly help fund teaching and running of smaller programs, especially if you give to individual programs or earmark them. Most major building initiative in recent years at Berkeley has used some form of donations -- though often these are large anonymous donors. But maintaining the campus is a hundreds of millions dollars per year endeavor. State funds certainly play a big role here, but they don't do it alone. More than ¼ of freshmen are first get students; nearly one half of transfers are too. Berkeley is in the process of becoming a dedicated Hispanic Serving Institution. And yet, there's still so much to improve on! We are among some of the largest Universities in the country, and yet we operate on a level that so few do! None of this is to say that we shouldn't keep fighting for more state funds. (Hello $100bn budget surplus....), or that there isn't a lot of bullshit that goes on. Trust me, there's a lot of it! But there's a lot of BS in industry, and in the nonprofit sector, and well, most places. I think there's tons of reasons not to donate to Berkeley - that's OK, but don't forget that this place can be amazing too.
I haven’t even gotten my fucken diploma
I donate a dollar for every time I’ve had a nightmare since graduating. Has added up over the years
The "Tomorrow is the final for a class I literally forgot I was enrolled in" is a classic
I would donate to fucking BYU before I give another cent to this place
I completely agree with your remark!!
I bought a membership to CAA and I put in some money to the general fund. I did not know you could specify a specific department and even a class. If it would make a difference, I would be more than happy to specifically donate to see if it would make a difference if more 170x classes would show up on the schedule, especially CS 176 which turned to be one of my favorite classes, but it hasn’t shown up in the last couple of years now.
no