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Walkerita-

I'm assuming you're referring to the Students Review website. Before I started my first year at Swat (I'm now a rising junior), I looked over those reviews and developed similar concerns. I encourage you to largely ignore those reviews. As you may have learned in AP Stat, the reviews on that site hardly represent a random sample of students. In fact, my guess is it only includes reviews of those who absolutely LOVED or HATED Swarthmore. If you're a rising freshman, don't worry too much and enjoy the remaining days of your summer. Soon enough you'll see that most of those reviewers' experiences were unrepresentative of average students' experiences.

A.E.

I used to feel exactly the same way as you... back when I was 16 years old and researching colleges. Like you, I had apparently consumed some sort of LAC Kool-Aid and really thought they were superior to universities. Then, I went to Swarthmore for four years and also took classes at two different public universities. Now I'm of the opinion the quality of teaching at Swarthmore is not really all that special and the best thing you get out of going there is developing an elite circle of contacts that can benefit you well into your adulthood. This is the one area where Swarthmore decidedly crushes public universities, but it is not something special to Swarthmore over other elite academic institutions. Going someplace like Princeton would probably be even better in this regard.

In total, I took 16 undergraduate courses at two different public universities, and I had precisely zero TAs teaching my classes. They were all taught by professors. Maybe I just got impossibly lucky (assuming the theory that TAs are inferior teachers is even accurate), or maybe the whole TA thing is way overblown by the Ministries of Truth at the likes of LACs.

interesteddad

Since you are so concerned with the "Ministry of Truth", why won't you name the two public universities? You took 16 courses there, imply that you never encountered a TA in the classroom, and found the undergrad education there to be the equal of Swarthmore. People need to know the names of these wonderful institutioins. You should be trumpeting from the rooftops.

arador

I have a cousin who attended Brown—not exactly an enormous university, but certainly not a LAC. All of his first year classes had 70+ students, and he consistently described his professors as detached and distant.

I only once had that experience at Swarthmore, out of ~35 credits.

A.E.

I didn't imply that I never encountered a TA in the classroom; I said outright that all of the classes I took at these public universities were taught by professors. Most of the classes I took were either upper-level math and statistics or foreign languages, so it's possible I was in classes where a student is less likely to encounter a TA. Whatever the case, none of my classes were taught by one.

I think you're missing the overall point of my argument, though. Both of these public universities were unexceptional and not even highly rated. But, the quality of teaching I received from the professors was just as good as the quality of teaching I received from my professors at Swarthmore. They cared just as much and communicated just as effectively. If I were to rank all of the professors I had in my undergraduate classes, the best one I ever had was a foreign language professor at one of these public universities, and the second best one I ever had was a professor at Swarthmore who was actually a visiting professor from Princeton at the time. My point is that these universities don't need to be shouted from the rooftops because they're probably not exceptional and neither is Swarthmore; my point is not to brag up these other institutions because they're "as good as Swarthmore," because I don't think that means very much.

interesteddad

To be perfectly honest, I'm not really interested in your "point". I simply want to know the names of the two public universities where you found the quality of the undergrad education to be comparable to the low standards (your opinion) set by Swarthmore. That's all. I would like to be able to recommend these two, presumably high value, institutions. I suspect you are reluctant to name them because readers would conclude that you are simply blowing hot air comparing them to Swarthmore.

I understand perfectly well the semantic game you are playing about the TA's not "teaching" courses. You are also playing a semantics game about professors, too. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that there aren't excellent professors at every school in the country, including the most underfunded community college. Heck, there are even great professors at a place like Berkeley with 1000+ seat introductory classes.

johnwesley

interesteddad - i don't think any of us would mind knowing the answer so long as you will stipulate before hand that this isn't going to turn into another one of those Swarthmore's is bigger diatribe's whereby every marker is in favor of someplace with no public mission except to spend less than 5% of the yearly proceeds of its own money on as few people as possible.

A.E.

Is that because you're prejudicial when it comes to Swarthmore and are unwilling to accept information counter to your opinion?

I don't see any need to upset them like that.

What semantic game am I playing? TAs were in no way involved in any of the courses I had. Professors taught them; professors were there at every class, teaching the class, giving lectures, answering questions, heading discussions, handing out exams, and doing everything it is professors do when they teach classes. And then, after the classes, they were generally in their offices, available for students to come by and ask questions, just like the professors at Swarthmore. I don't know what it is you're getting at, but I think it's another example of your presumption making it impossible to accept the reality that someone else has actually experienced.

But, I see you're making steps here. You're willing to acknowledge that there are great professors at public universities. Are you willing to take the next step and acknowledge that I had a better teaching experience from a professor at a public university than I did from any professor at Swarthmore, and that, in my opinion, the best professor I had at Swarthmore was a visiting professor from Princeton? After that, you can maybe wrap your head around the idea that I thought just as highly of my professors at public universities as I did of my professors at Swarthmore. I realize these are the subjective judgments of my own experiences, but I'm pretty sure the College Confidential forum about Swarthmore is exactly the right place for a Swarthmore alum to be giving his opinions about his Swarthmore experiences.

interesteddad

This is a really easy question:

What are the names of the two public universities where you enjoyed an undergrad educational experience comparable to Swarthmore's.

That's all.

A.E.

Sorry, bud. I'm not going to accept presumption and constant straw man arguments from you and then answer your bolded demands. If anyone is actually interested in knowing because he is interested in matriculating to a non-prestigious public university, I will give him whatever information he wants in a private message. Your request for the names is clearly disingenuous.

As far as this argument is concerned, it may as well be just about any public university because, as I've said, they're not prestigious or even particularly big, and they are in completely different university systems in different parts of the country. There is no reason to think they are exceptional at all, or that I somehow wound up at the nation's two most anomalously good and underrated universities, but the point is that I had very good academic experiences in the courses I took there, and I would rate the quality of teaching I received as being on par with that which I received at Swarthmore. To me, this confirms the belief I have that the educational experience at Swarthmore is overhyped.

interesteddad

Just as I thought. You claim that two run-of-the-mill public universities offer an undergraduate educational program fully comparable to Swarthmore's, but then won't name them. Worth about as much as an "unnamed source" in a newspaper. I knew that you would never back it up.

Now, you want us to believe that any old public university, perhaps even just a regional campus, matches Swarthmore's undergrad academic experience. I think the readers are quite capable of judging for themselves.

Biggie_Smalls

They have grade DEFLATION at Swat? I've never heard of that before. Why?

A.E.

If I said, "University of Wisconsin at Madison" and "University of California at Riverside," for example, how would this constitute backing anything up? I'm just reporting an opinion based on experience either way. Either way, I am the source, and your insistence of ignoring everything I've said and harping on the identities of the university in question is the height of fallacious argument. Is this what they teach at Williams? Oh yeah... we've been down this road before (about 20 times). I guess it is.

Even for you, this is a ridiculous approach. If I were to do the same, I would simply ask you to tell us all of the public universities where you took undergraduate classes and how the professors in those compared to your experience as a student at Swarthmore. Oh, wait...

This is another straw man. Please quote where I said these universities match Swarthmore's undergraduate academic experience. You can't, because I didn't. All I said is that the quality of instruction I received at other institutions was just as good as that which I received at Swarthmore. My peers were not as high caliber in the public universities, though, so the total undergraduate academic experience was not as good, as a lot of learning takes place outside the classroom in discussions with peers.

As I've said before, I was underwhelmed by my professors at Swarthmore, possibly because my expectations were too high (thanks to people like you incessantly trumpeting their greatness). Taking classes at both Swarthmore and public universities was a massive reality check for me, because I came to understand that there was more variance within an institution in terms of professor quality than there was between the average level of professor quality from one institution to the next. This is a subtle point that I think a lot of high school students don't appreciate when they're preparing to go to college.

Indeed, I hope the readers are capable of judging for themselves, because the invalidity of your position in this discussion should be more than a little transparent to anyone even remotely considering Swarthmore.

A.E.

No, there is grade inflation at Swarthmore, just like there is almost everywhere. My point is that law schools in America used to make an adjustment to a Swarthmore graduate's GPA that would effectively raise it so as to compensate for the academic rigor and difficulty of Swarthmore. So, perhaps a 3.7 at Swarthmore was considered as good as a 4.0 at Purdue, or something. This practice of GPA adjustments by law school admissions personnel, however, is no longer in place. Students from many other elite schools would have their GPA adjusted upwards, and students from some notoriously non-rigorous schools would have their GPAs adjusted downwards. Obviously, this sort of practice is questionable, and that's ostensibly why it was ultimately stopped.

dchow08

I don't think that A.E. is saying that Swarthmore is worse academically than the universities where he took classes. He's just saying that there are very good professors at places where you wouldn't expect, some even better than those at Swarthmore, where you would expect.

I agree with A.E. that it is misleading to generalize by saying that at Swarthmore, all the professors care about you and have all the best teachers, whereas in the big universities, the professors care mostly about research and are mostly bad. For example, when I was taking multivariable calculus, I also watched free online lectures from MIT, and the MIT professor, supposedly not caring about students, was better than my Swarthmore professor was. The MIT professor, Denis Auroux, simply had the gift of good rhetoric, while Professor Hunter, although certainly devoted to teaching, wasn't a very good teacher.

Another example: Harvard has been denounced as a school where teaching is subordinated to research. That's what Professor Ward of the psychology department told me when I visited. He got an undergraduate degree from Harvard and said, no, Harvard isn't that great for undergrad--I know from experience. That may be true, but it hasn't stopped my friend RH -- a bright girl who wants to become a scientist, who took the most advanced maths and physics courses and took online classes at Stanford after she finished the ones at the high school, who got into Stanford and MIT and lots of other top colleges, and who expects excellence in academics -- from saying that Harvard was "everything I was looking for in a college."

My examples, like A.E.'s experiences, are not suggesting that Harvard or MIT has better academics than Swarthmore does. But I think a lot of people are told than academics sucks in the big universities.

By the way, such notions are only further aggravated when students and professors say, "Only at Swarthmore can so and so happen," or "Only at Swarthmore will you be able to have dinner with your professors." Nonsense!