I'm a senior resident at the UCLA-Olive View program, and while our program does have some academic heavyweights and the program has very high standards for its residents and its faculty, there are plenty of great academic attendings/faculty at all of the California programs. In fact, we often bring them in for lectures. Many of our star faculty come from other programs, too. Saying which program is "best" is probably a fool's errand. The one thing I'll say is that it's great to work with attendings who literally wrote textbooks and decision rules and are basically untouchable from a legal standpoint - makes dispoing patients a lot faster. As for the 4th year, the big difference frankly is the elective time, which does give you time to pursue research and so on. The elective time is also a great way to pet interests, and also to travel (which the program is very generous about funding). It's also a great way to drill down on areas you want to master (I spent two weeks on an ophthalmology elective with the brilliant people of the Jules Stein Eye Institute that changed my whole approach to eye problems and massively increased my confidence with eye complaints). I'm not so sure how much it matters from a financial standpoint, if you do the math and consider taxes and so on. We do a lot of moonlighting and our senior residents are usually more than doubling their salaries working a couple days a month. Oh, and regarding alpinism's comment about the R2 video, our residents usually have too many procedures by the end of R2 year and try to pass them off to someone junior (I had the intern intubate twice at Olive View yesterday).
