gellino

Aren't schools like Mich, Cal, UVA at least 65% in-state students?

I guess it's what your definition of better undergraduate education is. I wouldn't have wanted to be in large classes taught by TAs.

huskem55

gellino- in fall of 1999 (when i was applying to schools), conn coll was ranked 25. in 2006, the usnews ranking was 36. which is why the usnews rankings need to be taken with more than a few grains of salt- how does a school drop that much that fast!

barrons

Gellino--get educated--TA's do not teach large lecture classes at any major ranked university. They lead the small 15-20 student hour long weekly discussion sections and grade class work and tests. The only classes they will actually lead teach are small intro level math, English Comp., and foreign language classes. the class size is usually under 25 for those classes.

gellino

That's not the impression I've gotten of friends that have gone on to grad schools at big state schools.

"Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale are the only research universities in the nation that offer better undergraduate education than Cal, Michigan and UVa. Outside of a select few on this forum, most of the highly educated world agrees with that."

If this were true in the case of Michigan and people actually believed this, I would think their admit rate would be way lower than 57%.

thethoughtprocess

^Agreed

If that was true, the children of most of the highly educated world would be wanting to attend Cal, Mich, and UVA as much as they'd like to attend Penn, Columia, Duke, Brown, and Cornell.

barrons

Maybe you need to ask more detailed questions. All I ever saw TA's do in large lecture was hand out notes and assignments and take attendance.

jakem333

If you're seriously going to base your perception of schools off of admission rates, then you're just like the rest of the idiots out there who only go for schools based on name prestige.

gellino

I guess I didn't ask more questions because I wasn't interested in attending one those schools. However, I did have a couple friends in PhD programs at Big 10 schools and from their description it sure sounded like they were teaching undergrad classes.

gellino

Admission rate is certainly an important consideration. After all, similar to the stock market, the college admissions market is, at least, pretty close to efficient. People seem to follow USN&WR rankings like gospel so much that other publications haven't been able to sprout up and compete like in the MBA rankings and it uses admission rate as a main criteria; so there has to be some merit behind it. I'm not saying it should be the only or even main consideration and it should be combined with factors like location, size, environment, etc, but cannot be ignored.

barrons

Even among elite level students most will choose a college within close proximity to home. Thus the market is far from efficient and schools in large population centers will have more applicants and more selectivity.

gellino

It is true that many students will choose schools close to home, but was taking these types of factors into account when saying the market was efficient. Maybe the market is "in equilibrium" would be a better descripition of what I was trying to convey.

Still, I would think a lot higher % of students in the top 5% of their hs classes in location-neutral states like CO, MO, FL, GA would be attracted to Brown and Dartmouth before UMich and UVA. It would be interesting to compare what the acceptance rates from students from these four states to these four schools would be.

Alexandre

Gellino, TA do not usually teach at most major universities, be it Harvard or Michigan. They may teach intro to Calculus or 101 of a Foreign Language, but that's the extent of it. For the most part, TAs assist professors with leading small discussion sections and with some of the grading.

As for % accepted, it is meaningless. You will one day realize that when you are older. What matters is the quality of the student body. Like I said, people in the know will not rate a private elite over a public elite.

kinglin

Everyone has been doing the top top colleges so I figure I'll go more along the middle schools.

Underrated- U. Nebraska, U. Iowa, University of Minnesota, U. Maryland.
Overrated- Boston College, Miami (OH), Bentley College


Indiana was underrated, but class of 2010 seems to have caught on to that.

pirt8528

bentley college, miami (oh) overrated? haha who is rating these colleges highly? i surely have never heard anyone promoting bentley college.

underrated: washington and lee, davidson, tulane
overrated: georgetown, brown, JHU

gellino

If % accepted is meaningless, then why is USN&WR using it as a main component in its ranking and why are colleges sprinting to out-do each other in reporting what % of applicants were accepted literally within days of the letters initially being sent out to candidates?

I would guess that if you run a regression of acceptance rate vs. avg SAT, % in top 10% of class or any other measure of student quality you want to use that you will get a high R-squared. It would be an interesting study and probably one that has already been done somewhere.

Having attended a top 15 LAC, top 10 business school (not UMich), and having worked on Wall St. for about a decade, I feel I would be in your self-created "in the know". From what I have seen at the companies I've worked for as far as recruiting has been a clear bias towards mostly private colleges. In fact, now that I think about it, at the two hedge funds I've worked for, there were only two people from public schools (both UVA) out of the ~ 25 people I worked with. They were both great people who I enjoyed working with, I'm just saying that your statement that top public and top private schools being treated equally and "everyone in the know" thinks so, I have not seen so far in my career at all. If anything, I have come to appreciate the merits of the top private schools more after joining the working world than I did out of high school. A lot of it to me just comes down to personal preference and ambition, but certain schools will certainly make the road tougher to hoe than others.