BU vs NorthEastern vs Babson vs Bentley

Lergnom
Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:54:47 +0000

Yes, one of my children is graduating from BU summa cum laude in about 3 weeks. She loves it and we both think BU is very under-rated. The education is top notch.

In my day, double majoring was common. All you had to do was take enough courses - and some overlap or you could claim they overlapped - and then write a paper, which didn’t even have to be particularly long (or good). There were no minors but I suppose you could say I majored in history and minored in English except I completed the requirements for both. The diploma doesn’t say - and is in Latin anyway so no one understands it. A major was just a graduation requirement not a big deal with a special notice or something. There were ways to get a BS versus a BA (really an AB there because they insist on the Latin wording) but a Yale degree is a Yale degree and no one reading it would know if you majored in drinking or in old Icelandic poetry*.

We barely had any requirements, only 1 class in each of 4 areas (same generally as today) - and for part of the time we didn’t even have F’s on the transcript and could drop a class until the reading period before exams without it showing. (Can you imagine that today?) And yet we felt oppressed because we had to take 36 classes to graduate while others had to take 32 - and Brown was then at 30, which was to us like not going to school at all! We also had no plus or minus grades, but that was before grade inflation and the then magna cum laude was lower than the current average gpa there. Now that’s weird.

One point I’ve tried to make is that BU has an educational philosophy. In the simplest form, that means every student has to take writing because writing is the essence of communicating what you know. Pedagogy at BU developed under President Silber and you can see it in many forms - I recommend looking at BU’s strategic plan, which is on the website. I keep making this point because better schools care more about the philosophy of how they educate.

BU is a major research facility and the others schools are not. BU took in $336M in external grants last year and Northeastern took in, according to their website, $40M - Wikipedia says $70M. BC took in $44M according to their own report.

I’ve noticed that traditional business programs tend to gather rankings. I’m not sure why except it’s a big world and for many people the main point of going to a business program is, it seems, to get a job. Northeastern and a number of other programs benefit from co-op, because that helps you get a job. Clearly if you go to BU SMG, you get a job but the program is aimed at something higher. Look at the philosophy and the curriculum.

Again, I don’t know anything about Bentley but they’re clearly reaching for a point-of-view, a philosophy. It sounds more like marketing than reality the more I look at their site. I’ve known a bunch of kids from Babson. It’s a solid business education - but lacks the rest of a university (or even college) educational experience. If a person wants that, fine but it’s the exact opposite philosophy - and it’s not one I like.

*The drinking age was then 18 and the school actually ran happy hours. I even bartended at some and kids got hammered. Huge drinking parties, including the legendary Calhoun Happy Hour on Thursday (!) night. Before football games on Saturdays, the dining halls served Bloody Marys and Screwdrivers in pitchers. No one got hurt. No one fell off the roof. No one was attacked. And I think we had fewer serious alcohol incidents than schools may today because it was legal. In New Haven, you could then bring alcohol into a restaurant that had no license. It was a different world. And our class poem was in old Icelandic; the tradition is a poem each year is presented in a dead language.