For being a professional gigging bass player I don't think you really need to go to Berkley. If you were playing in a classical setting and you wanted to join a Symphony then you might want the "Berkley" name attached to your resume to get your foot in the adution door.
But for pro bass players your gigs are going to come down to two things:
1) How well can you play?
2) How well can you network?
These have very little to do with which school you go to. Especially when you weigh how much debt you might go into trying to pay for Berkley. Gigging musicians don't make a ton of money and having to pay $500+ a month for the next 30 years in student loans will kill you.
If you are interested in going to Los Angeles for school there are tons of good State Schools (like CSUN, CSULB, etc...) that have great programs- and these will cost you less then $3,000 a semester to attend. There is also
LAMA which is a pretty amazing school (especially if you are a drummer).
You'd have to asses what your current music ability right now is. While a few posters mentioned "You come there to learn" inferring that you don't need to have a bunch of acquired knowledge they do so incorrectly. Most excellent music programs have a major audition process- and most of the students already have a pretty solid understanding of music theory, performance, sight reading, and singing. Now you don't NEED to have all those things but it is going to let you hit the ground running and let you concentrate on the really fun stuff (performance and the private lessons).
