<p>Fickle: hyeonjlee’s post that started this phase of the discussion had very broad claims about the poor quality of the educational experience at public universities, and asserted that for the same price any “well-regarded” private university would be better. I was disagreeing, strongly, with that. That certainly doesn’t mean I think every public is better than every private. But Forbes has 45 private universities ranked above Berkeley, and 51 ranked above Michigan, including all of the football schools I named except BYU. You say Michigan would be considered the equivalent of Northwestern or Notre Dame (I think it’s a little better than that); Forbes has it as #60, and them at ##22 and 12, respectively.</p>
<p>As for hyeonjlee’s argument, it depends what you want the rankings for. Michigan has a lot of students who might not get accepted at, say WashU. But for Michigan students who are equivalent to WashU’s students, I think Michigan offers an educational environment with a higher ceiling; it is a world-class academic center in a way WashU isn’t quite. Michigan (with it thousands of students) also probably has almost as many WashU-worthy students as WashU does, so it’s not as if good students have no one to talk to there. Michigan has some down-side, too, in the form of bureaucracy and inflexibility, but if it were I (or my children) I would take Michigan over Wash U (or any number of similar privates) straight up, same cost, any day. (Not the University of Chicago, though. We paid extra – a lot extra – for that, but it was probably one of the least rational decisions of my life.)</p>
<p>Each of my kids had a very intellectual BFF who went to a public university. One of them turned down an Ivy to save $15,000/year; the other chose hers over Barnard because her hostess hit on her when she visited there. They both had superfabulous experiences, and are now ensconced in top PhD programs in their respective fields, the first one at the same Ivy she turned down to save money. (Neither went to Michigan or Berkeley, either – they were down a prestige notch from there. Both got extensive funding as undergraduates to do research in exotic places, as well.)</p>
<p>I can also tell horror stories about public universities. That’s the point. When people assign a ranking to these universities, they are implicitly averaging out a wide spectrum of experiences. But focused, top students who go to a world-class public university and keep their eyes on the prize don’t have an average experience; they get the best the institution has to offer, and that’s meaningfully better than they would get at all but a very limited number of privates.</p>