Are More Selective Colleges More Academically Difficult?

Parents Forum
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This salary stuff makes the comparisons extremely murky. Professors on average make less money than successful commercial real estate brokers- a career which in many places does not even require a four year college degree. So I’d be very leery of using salary as a proxy (or even a factor) in dissecting intellectual rigor. The most gifted student in my Classics program (PhD from the top program in the world by some measures) probably makes 1/4 of what I do-- which in no way diminishes her intellectual gifts compared to mine which are quite modest. But I work in corporate America and she works for a non-profit institute which protects and preserves the material artifacts which are being destroyed by terrorists in that part of the world and we can all imagine how lucrative a career THAT turned out to be.

Salaries track to career choices- some of which are voluntary (an MIT grad working for NASA vs. going to a hedge fund; a Stanford grad working at an educational reform think tank vs. Google) and some of which are not (it is hard to go from University of New Haven to an M&A job at Goldman Sachs).

And quite frankly, some salary outcomes are completely disassociated with academic rigor- the wide and well trod path from a bunch of “country club” type colleges to careers in sales for example-- or some of the preppy colleges and the path to private banking. These are kids who find a discipline where they can log respectable B’s and C’s, join the right frat, play lacrosse, and emerge with a diploma and a job in hand. Or the helmet sports crowd who major in whatever it is that their coaches tell them to major in which won’t interfere with training, practice, and travel to games.

The smartest people don’t usually end up making the most money and I think that’s good for society. Love him or hate him- Justice Scalia was not a stupid man. If he was interested in making millions he’d have died while working as a partner at a white shoe law firm, not a public servant. Take a look at the long list of Pulitzer winners, Guggenheim’s, etc. These are people with vast intellectual gifts, most of whom are working in universities and think tanks NOT startups and private equity shops.

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@blossom Very true. Actually I think there was a noticeable discrepancy between mid-career salaries at Harvard vs. Yale, and many investigated and ended up speculating that the difference in career paths could be attributed to some of the difference. With more Yale undergraduates going into fields with more of a civic orientation that may pay less.

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al2simon provided an interesting insight into Phd admissions. However, it was a little depressing. It seemed like his Phd program was judging applicants at least as much based on whether they got admitted to an elite college for undergrad than on whether the elite college offered a more rigorous curriculum at the undergrad level.

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@roethlisburger: Where did you get that idea?

It seemed to me that @al2simon’s department was looking solely at rigor (thus they were confident of the preparation of kids from some schools but had to wonder if kids from other schools could make the jump in rigor).

It’s just that in his area, the most rigorous seemed to be concentrated in the top 20-30.

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@PurpleTitan

Frome this, you certainly don’t get the impression the courses at the elite universities are necessarily more rigorous than those at your average state flagship:

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@blossom “I’d be very leery of using salary as a proxy (or even a factor) in dissecting intellectual rigor.”

Salary is certainly not a proxy for intellectual rigor. There are a lot of students who completely do not care about careers and salaries. However, I think that most students do think it is a consideration. Especially in a not-so-great economy and with sky high tuition costs. That is a huge investment for most people.

I think the majority of students and parents want an outcome-based ranking that says something about the typical student, not only the 1% of students who win some type of fancy award or go to congress, but says nothing about the other 99% of students. Without a salary outcomes, perhaps it would make sense to call it “Intellectual Rigor Outcomes for students who don’t care about money”, I think that would be accurate.

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@al2simon I’ve read that grad departments add up to 0.7 to the GPAs of applicants from Caltech. Probably if you were in an economics department, you had no experience looking at Caltech grads. But any thoughts on whether that might be somewhat accurate?

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@roethlisburger: Please reread again what I said:
“It’s just that in his area, the most rigorous seemed to be concentrated in the top 20-30.”

I am presuming that @al2simon does not consider his field an easy major, true.

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@PurpleTitan

That just begs the question of what is an easy major, at an elite university, other than the hypothetical underwater basket weaving?

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@roethlisburger: Do you really not know?

I have my opinions, if you care to PM.

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@PurpleTitan

I’ve never heard someone admit that their major was easy. Harvard and Yale don’t even offer the undergraduate business majors, which seem to come under so much criticism on this board.

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@roethlisburger : Hell, even faculty at b-schools criticize it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html

HYChicago (and more without UG b-schools) have economics programs that are known to be very rigorous overall. Schools aiming for rigorous economics majors are usually doing so by integrating more mathematical rigor especially at the time students reach intermediate courses. At even elite business schools, you of course have majors or substantive areas and some will be known to be analytically and mathematically rigorous, and some will not. In a lot of the “easier” concentrations at such schools, the pressure does not come as often in basic or more traditional courses as it would in an accounting or finance major but they may get it in more project based courses that perhaps require the students to work directly with and for a company.

Some studies that have evaluated time spent working outside of class (in hours) have always placed it on the lowest end (with I guess much more selective schools being exceptional). However, hours spent studying are self-reported so that admittedly introduces error. However, recent studies of such things were comparing new self-reported data on academic effort vs. older and even the older data had business majors reporting a lower effort than their peers.

*Also, no one at an elite would admit that unless they were pre-professional and will openly admit that choosing a major they regarded as easier was a strategic move more so than an intellectual choice.

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Looking at this article, the studies should be more precise. Like I would not ask a bunch of folks with senioritis how much they study. It should be at an all time low. It would be interesting to see freshman, sophomore, and junior year. In theory one should become more efficient over time or find a course selection/GPA management scheme that optimizes the amount of effort needed. An estimate that results in a 4 year average could be better.

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It’s also an issue as the amount of time a given student needs to study to attain certain grades/learning outcomes can vary greatly even among students within a given college in the same/related majors.

For instance, my HS class salutatorian friend by his MIT undergrad roommates’ accounts all stated he studied far less than they did, had plenty of free time for ECs/enjoy Cambridge/Boston nightlife, slept at least 8 hours, never pulled an all-nighter in his entire undergrad career, and yet, ended up graduating near the top of his MIT undergrad/Masters in EE classes in 4 years.

Only surprise from that was his managing to never pull any all-nighters at MIT as he did pull a few when we were in HS.

The undergrad classmate who graduated with high honors at 17 a few classes ahead of me was similar to my salutatorian friend. In fact, he decided to take nearly 30 credits IN ONE SEMESTER(equivalent to nearly 10 regular courses) just to see if he can pull it off. While he did admit he bit off more than he can chew at the time, still managed to finish with excellent grades.

On the other end of the spectrum, I had an older college classmate who spent nearly double the amount of study time while carrying a much lighter courseload(9-12 credits) than yours truly and yet, barely eked out barely passing/mediocre grades in the same courses we took together. And this was even after he was taking many of them for the second time.

There were days I felt like and years later, he recounted he could clearly see a bit of exasperation on my part over how little return he was getting on his study time versus mine or others in our classes.

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@roethlisburger: Of course few people will say their major was easy, which is why I don’t care to share my opinion on a public board, but that doesn’t mean all majors are equally rigorous even at an Ivy/equivalent.

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@PurpleTitan

This makes it sound as if they’re using undergrad admissions selectivity as a proxy for academic rigor. It doesn’t sound like they’re really delving down into does the University of Minnesota’s econ department have a lot of grade inflation, or require more papers, or provides a more mathematical treatment of econ or whatever your definition of rigor is in a particular major at the undergrad level.

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@bernie12

Well, I think this thread has kind of strayed from the original question. I was more or less concerned with three points.

A1) are more selective schools more difficult to get top grades at?

A2) If less selective schools are also academically easier, do graduate schools actually care? For arguments sake, let’s say not as much as you’d think.

B) Assuming A1 and A2 are both true and that I want to go to the beset graduate school I can – why not strategically select a school that is at least somewhat less selective (and per our line of thinking, less challenging)? Maybe a student could drastically increase her chance of getting a near perfect GPA by going to a somewhat less selective school than the most selective school she could attend.

I argued that the more selective/more difficult theory has some merit but that there are many factors that impact a student’s performance, and some of those factors might be even heavier for a student to bear than being in classes with so-called elite students and teachers.

One of the arguments I made was that the further you get from the very top, the more likely you are to encounter incompetent teachers. Having incompetent teachers is demoralizing and disillusioning at best. They’re everywhere, but for many reasons, teachers who wind up in less glorious positions wind up being bad teachers. There are too many reasons to go into here, but one I encountered often was that even if the teacher went to Harvard and wrote a brilliant dissertation, etc, they may come to feel disillusioned with their work and lack of prestige. Doesn’t always happen, but it’s not hard to understand. I would also say that less prestigious schools with less money more often force faculty to teach in subjects that they have no real expertise in. The elite public college I attended often had professors scattered all over a multitude of departments – you’d have a single teacher doing literature, film, gender studies, and history. That individual might be amazing at one of those (maybe…) but terrible and incompetent in the others.

When I attended an ivy league school later, not only did teachers only teach subjects that they were world-class experts in (often field-defining thinkers), but not so rarely, courses were taught by two full professors. One would teach the part of the class that he was a research expert in and the other would do the half that she was an expert in. Even the TAs in these classes were often better than the professors I had at the public college. And teachers at prestigious schools are more likely to be happy with their work, pay, and students. This all translates to a lot of coddling and a lot of inspiration for students. Some of these classes were friggin catered on a regular basis-- I kid you not… and it blew my mind. It’s a lot easier to deal with tough work in this sort of situation than easier work in a depressing place. My impression was that the ivy league schools are dead-set on making students succeed and feel special. My experience at a public school was that it was dead-set on convincing you that it was every bit as hard as Harvard.

But this whole conversation makes me feel filthy and elitist. The really smart kids often don’t even get into good schools. As a guest lecturer said at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, straight A students are usually the most inane, least interested in being challenged students in the country. They just want to get an A and they avoid taking any risks – like thinking instead of memorizing or brown-nosing – that might get in the way of that A. This statement enraged a lot of the people in the class (obviously). But it rings very true to me. I hate getting anything less than an A, but I recognize that that A is just so people hiring or admitting to graduate programs will think well of me. If you want to get a real education, you have to do it on your own time.

Also, I’d say it’s relevant here that the two worst professors I ever had had ivy league degrees. And it’s also worth saying that the public college I went to had worse professors in my field in a lot of cases than the local colleges that I would never have dreamt of applying to. I didn’t notice that until after I graduated.

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Not at all. We really spent a fair amount of time looking at each individual application in detail. Our Ph.D. admissions was very different from medical school or law school admissions, which seem to be very driven by GPA and MCAT / LSAT scores. We’d look at students’ transcripts in detail to see exactly which relevant classes they’d taken and how they did… We wouldn’t necessarily even care that much if their GPA was lower because they had a C or two in some completely unrelated classes that they’d taken for fun. But grades and scores were only a partial filter.

The goal was to admit the students from around the world who seemed to have the best potential to become serious scholars and real contributors to their fields. It wasn’t to reward students who had managed to survive some Marine Corp like obstacle course by getting top grades in the most “rigorous” program. It wasn’t to reward pedigree. It was (ideally) to find students with creativity and future potential to succeed as researchers. We’d pay lots of attention to any research they’d done, their recommendations, and their statement of purpose.

However, year and year we’d find that about half of the best domestic students came from the same list of 25 schools. And for international students the results were even more skewed - the best students seemed to generally be concentrated in the top 3 or 4 schools in their home countries. Honestly, most of the top Ph.D. programs in our field and in similar fields came to pretty similar conclusions. However, even though this seems very skewed towards the elite schools, talented students in the US come from a far larger number of schools than is the case in other countries. We tried hard to find the best students no matter what school they applied from.

There’s no doubt that Caltech has lots of great students and has very rigorous programs and tough grading standards. However, there’s no way that I’d use such a large adjustment if I were going to try to roughly compare a Caltech gpa to (for the sake of argument) a Harvard gpa. My best guess is this. If I were going to compare the “average good” Caltech undergrad STEM undergrad to a similar Harvard undergrad in the same field, I might adjust by .3 or .4. If I were going to compare a top Caltech undergrad to a top Harvard undergrad, I might adjust by .1

People who’ve worked their whole lives in a field know many of the top programs reasonably well. Some know them because they attended these programs as students or taught there as faculty. They’re not guessing. However, there’s no escaping the fact that increasing admissions selectivity is a pretty direct means to increase the number of top students.

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I think a key issue here is that “rigor” is not uniform across a university, nor even within a major at a university. In my opinion, al2simon is right in saying that one has to look at the college transcripts in detail. I wish more selectors would do that.

At my university, there are roughly 6,000 courses. Given the number of courses that students take as undergrads, there would be about 15 trillion possible course sequences. Of course, many of those would make no sense, but quite a few of them would, many would even fulfill all of the requirements for a degree, the their rigor would be all over the place.

When I read about evaluations to determine whether high-school applicants can do “the work,” I think this concern is inapplicable. There are very few universities in the country where there is anything that could really be termed “the work.” The military academies have a definite baseline of academic performance. Caltech, I think, really has “the work,” at least in terms of the number and types of courses that are required of all majors. There are probably other places that have “the work.” St. John’s, with a uniform curriculum based on great works, has something like “the work.” Hardly anywhere else, including Harvard and Stanford, has “the work.” At either place, a student could opt for a comparatively easy path or a comparatively difficult path. Easy majors exist, but challenging options exist within the easy majors, and some students take them.

Back when I applied to MIT for grad school, the application form included a list of the texts used for all of my science and math courses. Probably the first hurdle for many applicants was just knowing what texts they had used. One can’t completely tell the level of a course from the text, but it does help.

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However, outcomes have to be measured against inputs, as well as such factors as the choice of majors.

For example, there are some posters who really push Stevens Institute of Technology based on its Payscale rankings. But Stevens Institute of Technology is mostly engineering and computer science majors, so graduates’ pay levels will generally be higher than for typical colleges. Since Stevens Institute of Technology makes public its own post-graduation survey results by major, it is not difficult to find the real story, which is that its engineering and computer science graduates’ pay levels tend to be similar to those of graduates in the same majors at schools like Alabama and San Jose State.

Of course, that also means that outcomes need to take admission selectivity into context. Stanford graduates may be successful, but is it because they attended Stanford, or would they find much of their success if they attended less selective schools like Alabama or San Jose State? I.e. how much of their success is treatment effect (i.e. based on Stanford actually being better) versus selection effect (i.e. based on the graduates having been selected for success by Stanford’s highly selective admission process)?