Forbes 2016

Parents Forum
181

@hebegebe, I’m including LACs as well. And in the Forbes ranking (that includes unis/LACs, everything) the 25th best public flagship is Iowa at #184.

As for #3 vs. #30, whether there is a meaningful difference in output depends on distribution as well as whether adcoms doing the selection do a good job. In the Forbes ranking, #3 is Princeton and #30 is Rice. And (in the 2014 Forbes subrankings that I have available) while Princeton bests Rice in American Leaders and Prestigious scholarships (only barely) as well as percentage sent to prestigious professional programs, Rice actually is better than Princeton in percentage of grads who get PhDs.

Which gets to another point: What does “accurately” mean? What I consider to be an accurate tiering/ranking seems to not be what USNews or other people consider “accurate” because we weigh different things differently. I don’t think the world is as black and white as you think.

182

In my experience, pursuing a PhD and ultimately getting a PhD is often times a personal choice. There are so many PhD programs out there, and in some areas professors "desperately“ look for “cheap research labor” of graduate students, who in turn are fully funded while they are in graduate school. Many of the “brightest” choose to stay in workforce or pursue professional degrees. Getting into a PhD program is significantly easier than getting in an MD program, for example. And it seems the majority of those admitted who are willing to stay 5-6 years doing research will eventually get their PhD. I wonder why you think the percentage of graduates getting PhDs is an important yardstick for the quality/prestige of undergraduate colleges especially among the say top 50 colleges?

183

Ok, I see where you got your 180. But you are making the mistake of believing that I think the world is black and white.

As I said, I think the methodologies are flawed in many ways, with one flaw being how it determines the quality of many state flagships. The one I attended was required to admit all high school students from our state at the time. So it was heavily penalized in terms of selectivity and entrance scores. But the school still had fairly high standards, and so many students were weeded out (including my first two roommates), which hurt its retention and its graduation rate. And so a school that might have made the top 50 on academic reputation drops to 100 when all factors are considered.

And for a highly talented student, a small LAC ranked around 100 and a public flagship ranked around 100 are not remotely the same. The public flagship, because it is larger, will have a critical mass of really strong students, often concentrated in an Honors College, enabling a far higher quality education than the ranking would suggest. But Honors Colleges and weeding out students are simply patches to fixing the problem of a weak entering class.

Its interesting that you brought up #3 Princeton and #30 Rice, because we toured both schools this year. Princeton was rejected because she considered it too rural. On the other hand, D really liked Rice, putting it ahead of Harvard on her list (I am sure that @Pizzagirl would be puzzled by this given her earlier statement), for three reasons. First is because she is doing medical research already, and right across the street from Rice is the world’s largest medical center. Second is that Rice might offer merit aid that allows her to use her college funds for medical school if she chooses. Last, and certainly not least, she thinks that Rice students are just happier about their college experience than most other college students.

If she ends up at Rice, she will have a great education. For her particular area of interest, it might be her best choice. That is different than saying that Rice is at the same level overall as Princeton.

184

So… Just to clarify, you’re saying Rice is NOT at the same overall academic level of Princeton?

I just don’t understand that conclusion.

185

nm

186

@panpacific, PhD production is a criteria. One of four (and the one I weigh the least). Sure, I’d look at med school placement as well if someone has ranked undergraduate institutions by that somewhere.
Though I believe Rice does pretty darn well in that metric as well.

187

@PurpleTitan Rice is a great college. There’s no doubt about that. I just think if you want to take postgraduate degrees into consideration, then maybe MD, top business and top law schools all should be considered. Of course, as you pointed out, there may not be that data/stats available out there. But using only what’s available could skew your results…

188

“That is different than saying that Rice is at the same level overall as Princeton.”

At any reasonable macro level, though, it’s close enough that it’s immaterial.

189

Yes, I think there is a small difference, but that was not the #3 and #30 I was thinking of. The #3 on USNWR is Yale, and #30 on USNWR is Boston College. There is a much larger difference between those two.

190

When I said l knew someone who got a great education at UCB I had Stanford in mind for comparison. That person was a top student there and noticed the unevenness of the students.

191

@hebegebe

Haha. Further evidence that Forbes makes more sense than USNews:

Forbes

3 Princeton, #30 Rice

USNews

3 Yale, #30 Boston College

192

@circuitrider while I generally agree with you on Forbes making more sense, there’s just so much I would change on that ranking as well. But then again, I’d be laughed out of the park - there’s a reason us normal citizens have no say lol

193

@hebegebe, well, USNews divides off the LACs. If you divide off almost half the top institutions, then yes, there is a bigger gap between #3 and #30.

194

most parents don’t like to (or won’t admit) that for their particular child (or all of their children as it is in some families) the difference between #3 or 30 or 100 or 120 won’t make a darn bit of difference.

But it doesn’t. And it won’t matter if your kid is at a college where Tony Blair is debating the Dalai Lama on the use of military force on indigenous populations on Monday, and Yo Yo Ma is giving a Master class which is open to the public on Tuesday, and on Wednesday the university museum is hosting the head of European Painting at Sotheby’s doing a panel discussion with the museum’s curators on how current collecting trends are distorting the world’s art markets, with a Q&A led by the chairman of the university’s art history department. And so on… every single day, at least twenty fabulous events, for free to any undergraduate- all day, every day.

If YOUR kid is going to college to get his/her ticket stamped, whether to get that precious 3.9 GPA for med school (even when it means repeating a class he or she took in HS and already got an A in, AND taking every gut the university offers), or because he or she is actually majoring in beer pong, not economics, or your kid spends 20 hours a week on sorority activities or whatever…

Send your kid anywhere and honestly, the rankings are irrelevant. For every kid who “needs” to be at Penn because of the fantastic research opportunities and the incredible academic offerings and the very deep bench strength of the faculty- I’ll show you 10 kids who are there for the branding that a Penn degree confers (or they think it confers).

Back in the day (boy am I old) we went to stuff at the university museum because it was free and they served wine (drinking age was 18). Back in the day we went to poetry readings and classical music concerts and lectures and what-not because the number of ways to entertain yourself were pretty limited besides the TV in the dorm lounge or a movie at the local art house (if you didn’t have a car at my college, the bus had limited service after 8 pm. So we stayed on campus). Along the way- we got educated. Lectures, symposia, performances, theatrical events- that’s what you did on the weekends, that’s how you entertained yourself when you burnt out on the library.

Now? Kids play computer games like they did when they were 13 and living at home. They watch TV on their devices and someone orders in a pizza. They work out listening to their spotify. I know college kids living in some of the most robust intellectual environments on the planet who have never entered a university museum or archive or attended a lecture which wasn’t assigned for class.

So don’t kid yourself. Not every kid “needs” to be at number 8 or 12 or 30. If all they’re going to do is hang with their high school friends in a dorm or frat house and watch episodes of Friends while high or drunk… it’s ok for them to be at college ranked number 120. Really- it’s ok. The faculty at that college will be superb- that’s how deep the bench is in academia. And the other stuff? They won’t partake, so you don’t need to worry about it.

195

…that’s an upsettingly accurate yet cynical view. Yikes.

196

The thing too is that while colleges that are ranked lower down may in general offer less per capita resources, giant flagships would offer a ton, though it’s more incumbent on the student to seek them out (and being part of a well-run honors college would help). For instance, one state flagship has an amazing array of study-abroad opportunities, many of which even cost less than OOS there.

197

Not everyone who attends Harvard is a genius. Over the years I’ve known a number of Harvard grads whom I’d classify as a bit thick, though certainly the median Harvard grad is very bright. But it’s not as if in a gathering of highly accomplished academics, the Harvard grads will stand out. They’ll just be part of the mix along with equally bright people who spent their undergraduate years at other private research universities, public flagships, leading LACs, top foreign universities, and a smattering of less prestigious institutions. On a per capita basis there may not be as many people from the less exalted institutions. But on the other hand, their less prestigious undergraduate background clearly didn’t hold them back. Cream rises. Nor does the Harvard undergraduate credential automatically elevate someone to the top ranks of an academic discipline. That’s something that must be earned on the strength of more than the nameplate on an undergraduate degree.

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I agree completely. There is far more talent outside any one highly ranked college than within it. What differs is concentration.

My point, which I am apparently failing to convey clearly, is that the level of concentration matters. A class where the class average is at the 99th percentile can be dramatically different than where the class average is at the 95th percentile. And a class where the average is at the 99.99th percentile (such as Harvard Math 55) is dramatically different once again.

199

Dramatically different? Give me a break.

200

Hebegebe- the Harvard Math 55 group is an outlier. A kid can spend 8 semesters on Harvard’s campus and never once meet, run into, or otherwise benefit from the presence of these uber math types.

So if YOUR kid is a Harvard Math 55 kid- great. Your kid can find his/her peeps at Harvard, MIT, CMU, Harvey Mudd, Cal Tech, U Chicago, UIUC, Berkeley, etc.- all of which have a high concentration of similarly wired math kids. And if your kid is NOT a Harvard Math 55 kid- don’t make the fallacious assumption that the presence of THOSE kids on a campus is going to be transformative of YOUR kids college education. If your kid gets one of them as a roommate- maybe. But your MORE typical Harvard kid- who is running from an editorial meeting at the Crimson to a club soccer match to an econ section review… the mere presence of those math kids is absolutely irrelevant.

Those highly concentrated kids can be found at a lot of colleges-- sorted of course by their interests. Don’t walk onto the campus of University of New Hampshire expecting to find a concentration of Classics geeks. But you can find them at Michigan, Berkeley, Chicago, Brown, Lawrence, and a bunch of other places you might not expect. Williams- home of the Art History mafia. A bunch of schools you wouldn’t expect with top tier musical theater training.

And of course- every college has those lovable underachievers who are bringing up the rear academically. Even Harvard.