<p>Those are good questions, goldenboy.</p>
<p>Michigan vs. Northwestern. The thing is, for me, faculty strength across many fields is about 90% of what matters, and history gets maybe another 1%. Michigan isn’t just a little bit better than Northwestern in faculty strength, it’s in a different league. (Not that everyone is better at Michigan than at Northwestern, but Michigan has a lot more breadth.) And in terms of history, Michigan has been one of the great universities of the world for 150 years, and Northwestern was basically a regional university until well into my adulthood. </p>
<p>The rest of “what matters to undergraduates” – some of that is fake. Employers and graduate programs don’t accord any weight (or hardly any weight) to where you got your degree, as long as it seems good enough. What matters is what you can do, what you can demonstrate you have done, how you present yourself. So what undergraduates should care about is where they have the best chance to learn stuff, to network, and to produce work that can impress others.</p>
<p>As for averaging, no, that’s not necessarily how people judge things. Have you heard of Keats as a great poet? His entire reputation rests on 15-20 poems; the rest of his work is mainly crap. (He died very young; “the rest of his work” is mostly juvenalia.) </p>
<p>But my main point is that Michigan is in a somewhat different business than Northwestern or WashU, and they really shouldn’t be judged on the same criteria. Michigan tries to provide opportunity and quality education to the largest number of people possible. It provides world-class scholarship to people who want and need world-class scholarship, and it provides basic professional qualification education to a large number of people who need and want that and don’t necessarily care about world-class scholarship. The fact that it’s providing a lot of the latter doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s providing a lot of the former as well.</p>
<p>Sure, if all you know about someone is that he graduated from Michigan, you maybe know a little less about him than if he graduated from WashU. But if all you know about someone is where he graduated from college, you really know practically nothing useful about him.</p>