<p>Well you know what they say about assuming…</p>
<p>Hillary I guess you are of the philosophy–“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Communism has pretty much failed.</p>
<p>Actually
is probably true in most cases. (Correcting for markets, ie rural vs urban)</p>
<p>In this country, markets (S & D) dictate prices (not always perfectly as we have recently seen). If a lawyer can charge a higher price or earn more per year, there is a reason. If a professor can earn more, there is a reason. If a college can charge more and still get more applicants, there is a reason.</p>
<p>Why, if everything is equal, are so many students trying to get in the top schools?</p>
<p>But even you admit, indirectly, that every thing is not equal. You say
</p>
<p>The problem is, the student needs to be ambitious and diligent. In other words ,the student needs to be more like the elite school students.</p>
<p>Once again, as I stated on an earlier post, a student’s ambition, personality and intelligence are the driving force. But coming from an elite school w/ positives in the above attributes definitely gives you an edge.</p>
<p>So op, think about your future.</p>
<p>Yes, of course a student has to to be different from the average student at his or her state school. They have to be more amibitous, more dedicated to their work, and probably more intelligent. The essential point is that for those types of students, they absolutely can receive the same quality educaiton at their state school than they could have received at an elite school.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is simply not universally true. In fact, it’s false in many more places than it is true and saying it over and over won’t make it true.</p>
<p>Please, cite one study or give us just one piece of factual evidence to support that this is anything but a youthful, naive theory.</p>
<p>Who said that?</p>
<p>Whoops, this is what I meant to quote:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well can you prove that it isn’t true? It’s something that I have experienced for myself on a personal level. </p>
<p>Not believing in it does not make it untrue.</p>
<p>Food for thought: Every single top law, bussiness, and medical program would agree with the statement seeing as though there is no top program where every single applicant has their BA from an elite school. According to these admissions committes, the top students at a public school CAN receive just as good an education as undergrads from the elite. Why else would they be admitted?</p>
<p>Hillary, I’ve cited research as have others, discussed the fact of representation at elite law and business schools. We have discussed the fact that several industries only recruit from elite schools. I have posted a salary survey. Someone else weighed in on PhD programs…</p>
<p>Getting into an elite grad school does not mean you got the equivalent of an elite college education nor does it mean you had the same chance you would have had from an elite school. It defies logic to believe a top student will get an equal education at any school. Schools have a wide range of resources, different access to profs, hugely different budgets for all sorts of extracurricular and curricular things to name just a few issues.</p>
<p>Please tell us, what is your personal experience?</p>
<p>Well you seem to be a stickler for facts, so I’ll just introduce this:</p>
<p>The point has been risen several times that the superior quality of the faculty is an integral part of recieving a superior education. And, it has been suggested that the superior faculty can be found mostly at the elite schools.</p>
<p>If we look at graduate school rankings, we find immediatley that this is not true. I know that the focus here is on undergraduate education, but the graduate department rankings are very useful because a good department is built beginning with good faculty. Thus, we can assume that a good department in a certain school is partly good because of its good faculty (and we can assume that future superior professors will be attracted to these schools).</p>
<p>That being said, let’s take a look at some graduate rankings in three ares in the social sciences and humanities. </p>
<p>HISTORY:</p>
<p>Rutgers ranks over UVA
Indiana, Ohio State, Minnesota over Vanderbilt
CUNY over Emory and MIT
UC Davis over WashU and Rice
Maryland and UC San Diego over Georgtown, Notre Dame, and William and Mary
Coloroda, UGA, Kansas, Florida, and Michigan State over Tufts</p>
<p>ENGLISH:</p>
<p>Rutgers over NYU, Northwestern
CUNY, Indiana, UC Irvine over Emory
Ohio State, Penn State, UC Santa Barbara over Vanderbilt, WashU
Pittsburgh, Maryland over Rice
UMass-Amherst, Color, UIC-Chicago, UC Riverside over Notre Dame and Tufts</p>
<p>PSYCHOLOGY:</p>
<p>Illinois over Princeton
Minnesota over MIT and Penn
Ohio State and UC San Diego over Duke
Indiana over Johns Hopkins
UC Davis over Chicago, UVA, Brown, and NYU</p>
<p>Uncle…</p>
<p>Hillary, your arguments are not logical and you keep citing personal experience you seem unwilling to elaborate on. This discussion is over for me.</p>
<p>Interesting…once the facts emerge the leading lady leaves…</p>
<p>Facts???@@@!!!</p>
<p>Fact: A truth; a statement that is able to be proved.</p>
<p>In referring to rankings, it’s a good idea to cite the source and to show a full 1-N display rather than cherry pick here and there to back up a debating point.</p>
<p>Here are the NRC-95 rankings for 41 departments, based on peer assessments:
[NRC</a> Rankings in Each of 41 Areas](<a href=“http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc41indiv.html]NRC”>NRC Rankings in Each of 41 Areas)
Here are the FSP Index rankings, based largely on publication volume and citation densities:
[FSP</a> Index Top Performing Individual Programs](<a href=“http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopPrograms.aspx]FSP”>http://www.academicanalytics.com/TopSchools/TopPrograms.aspx)</p>
<p>The NRC-95 is old, but across the aggregate of 41 departments, I doubt the picture has changed all that much since 1995. These rankings show, I think, fairly overwhelming dominance by elite private universities, with pockets of excellence among flagship state universities. The arithmetic mean of all 41 department rankings would show one elite flagship public university in the top 10 (Berkeley at #3 by my reckoning). The rest are the usual elite private suspects. Schools like UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin and Texas (selective flagship publics) do start showing up in the next 10.</p>
<p>The FSP Index is more recent. In many liberal arts fields (not all), the #1 performer is an elite private university. The Ivies, Chicago, Hopkins, etc., are disproportionately represented across the liberal arts. Many flagship public universities also are interspersed in the ranks. Do all these schools do an equally good job matching research productivity to high quality undergraduate instruction? Here, I would think, the smaller class sizes at elite schools give them a distinct advantage.</p>
<p>Large public universities do tend to compete well for federal grant money. They are big, so they can admit larger numbers of graduate students to do the yeoman’s work of research and journal publication. This presumably drives up the FSP numbers.Yet still, the private elite schools seem to do disproportionately well there. That’s not even factoring in the impact of scholarly luminaries like Noam Chomsky in Linguistics (MIT), John King Fairbank in Asian Studies (Harvard), Milton Friedman in Economics (Chicago), Murray Gell-Mann in Physics (CalTech),Linus Pauling in Chemistry (CalTech, Stanford), Donald Knuth in Computer Science (Stanford), Richard Lattimore in Classics (Bryn Mawr College), Henry Steele Commager in History (Amherst College), etc. etc. Or the impact of numerous discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, engineering, the arts, or educational practice associated with a small number of elite schools.</p>
<p>People are not massively duped by reputations that have no objective basis in reality. For many families, especially those in an upper middle income bracket (too rich for aid, not rich enough to avoid big loans), a good public flagship university does represent a better value. For some kids, a less selective LAC is a more comfortable fit even if they could get into the Ivy. That does not mean there are not distinct advantages to the so-called elite schools, which should be weighed and considered in the decision.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Perhaps I am misinterpreting your point, but the reasoning here seems a bit backwards. Graduate departments in research intensive fields are not awarded outside grants and the consequent ability to admit/support graduate students because they are big. Faculty members are awarded grants because they have proven themselves to be worthy researchers; with money in hand, departments are able to take on graduate students and post-docs in excess of what is needed to perform teaching assistant duties, thereby becoming large, active research centers. Large public universities have to maintain sizable faculties in fields such as chemistry because they have to move a lot of students through required courses. If those faculty members are not reputable researchers, the departments will not be pulling in external research funds no matter how “large” they are.</p>
<p>That said, I think there are limits to the importance of big, active research programs for typical undergraduates. The availability of research opportunities is quite valuable, but at many large schools undergraduates are handed off to underlings who may not wish to spend much time and effort helping them optimize their research experiences. At the same time, faculty involved in actual research bring something extra to the classroom, in my opinion. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree. But, I think it is important to realize that students will maximize that value if they come to university prepared to make contacts with faculty members, aggressively seek out opportunities, pay close attention to course and graduation requirements on their own, etc. Hand-holding is not a strength of flagship publics. My youngest will likely attend one because her interests happen to fall in majors that are handled well in Colleges of Agriculture (dad and I are city kids, so don’t ask me…) We have no qualms about sending her to Big Public U because we are very well versed in the ins and outs of such institutions. Unfortunately, many students become lost souls as soon as they get to campus because they are too immature, naive or shy to handle the challenges of a big, sometimes impersonal, institution.</p>
<p>tk,</p>
<p>Those were not “cherry-picked.” I used one source, which was the 2009 edition of the U.S. New and World Report Graduate School Rankings. </p>
<p>A department’s ranking indicates the quality of its faculty, the quality of its students, and the quality of the academic resources available to both its students and its professors. Moreover, an undergraduate would have access to these very same professors, more qualified graduates would be attracted to the programs (and these grads interact with undergrads via TAships), and undergrads would also have access to the academic resources.</p>
<p>Thus, we can see that undergrads have an advantage of better faculty not only in the elite schools, but just as equally in the non-elite schools.</p>
<p>
That’s not what I’m suggesting.</p>
<p>In rankings driven by holistic peer assessments, I would think that some comparative advantage goes to departments that employ famous, seminal thinkers like a Noam Chomsky. If nothing else, there’s a halo effect (though I do think reputations rest on much more than that).</p>
<p>In newer rankings, which seem to be shifting toward citation-counting approaches, I would think the comparative advantage starts to shift toward departments that can crank out more and more journal articles per faculty member. Large public research universities may have better economies of scale to excel under the latter model. And newer, citation-driven rankings do seem to favor large public universities relatively more than the older p.a.-based rankings like NRC-95. </p>
<p>Does this mean that large public universities, ones that are highly regarded for their research output, are equally effective in teaching undergraduates? Does it even mean that their graduate schools are doing the most important, seminal research?</p>
<p>Maybe the little list of “luminaries” contained in my previous post has a few too many dead white guys on it. Most of those people were in their heyday just before I started college. So, perhaps the landscape has shifted. Maybe today’s scholarly luminaries are at Kent State or the University of South Florida? If so, somebody please show me the evidence. I see recent Nobels in Economics, for example, still coming out of Princeton or Chicago. Am I missing something?</p>
<p>
Just because you used one source does not mean the examples are not cherry-picked.
You chose 3 departments. You cited schools selectively. </p>
<p>When we speak of so called “elite” national universities, we are talking about maybe 15 schools out of >3000 institutions of higher learning. Each of the 50 states has several large public universities. If the publics and the elite private schools were all performing about equally well, and we are down to very fine distinctions, then I’d expect public universities to completely dominate in these rankings. They don’t. The ~15 “elites” show up over and over near the top, despite a variety of criteria and methods. So I’m inclined to believe their reputations are justified.</p>
<p>I chose three areas of study that are popular majors among undergraduate students across the nation.</p>
<p>And if you read the data I provided, you can see that non-elite schools often trump the “15 schools” of the elite that you mention</p>