Forbes college rankings: Princeton top, UChicago #4

hyeonjlee · August 2, 2012, 5:15pm

this proves my point, doesn’t it? Rankings take into the equation the whole student body, not just exceptional outlier cases. If we follow your logic, we can easily come up with a list of super successful people who did not even go to college and prove that college education does not matter.

Regarding the merit of public vs. private, everyone to his own. We live in NJ, and our in state public schools is nothing to write home about in terms of top flight academic excellence. Since out of state tuition in some top public universities was about the same as private education (perhaps a bit lower, not really meaningfully), none of my kids considered top public schools for the reasons I listed above. That was our preference. And, both kids are very happy where they are. They relay to me, with some horror, the stories of their friends who went to public schools who sit in a cavernous lecture hall holding over 500 students. Granted, maybe it’s far better by the time they are juniors and seniors, but if you can sit in a class with less than 20 and have individual attention from actual faculty members from the day1 in their first year, why not? Especially if it’s about the same price!

JHS · August 2, 2012, 7:28pm

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

hyeonjlee · August 2, 2012, 7:53pm

I respect other people’s choices. My sentiment about the merit of public schools as an OOS vs. private schools is just mine.

We are not super rich, but we made a decision to let my S1 decline a full ride from a very well regarded school and instead let him attend U Chicago as a full pay student. All of us are very happy with this decision. It’s the best money we ever spent. He is thriving at U Chicago in a way I think will be very hard to replicate in the school that offered him over $50K+/year worth of money. As for S2, we would have paid the full expense at his private school because it was a great fit for him on several important dimensions. Luckily, it worked out that he got a full ride deal.

Some people must think we are stark mad spending this kind of money when S1 could have gotten a free education from a very good school. However, I also think people who buy expensive cars costing $70K and crazy designer bags costing thousands of dollars are stark mad (money completely down the drain in a few years: it’s not like a house that keeps the investment value and even appreciates in a normal market).

As I said above, everybody to his own. We all spend the money the way it pleases us best. Of course, if we had not had the money, we would have never taken the loan of $250K for ourselves or for S1: that’s insane. The delta in educational experience at U Chicago and that at the other school would have never justified this kind of risk.

Regarding the ranking results that put public universities at a disadvantage, based on the methodology, I can see why public schools did not fare that well when the quality of education is judged on an undergraduate academic experience ON THE AVERAGE for the entire student body.

goldenboy8784 · August 3, 2012, 8:21pm

I’m curious as to how you think Michigan is better than Northwestern as I’ve never heard anyone suggest that before. Sure, Michigan has a slight edge in the reputation of its graduate programs and faculty but Northwestern edges it in nearly every other category that an undergraduate could possibly be concerned about (student body strength, classroom intimacy, financial resources, faculty pay, graduation rates, fellowship production, professional placement, etc. etc.).

Do PhD programs favor students enrolled in schools which are more renowned in the particular subject area over students enrolled in other universities that have weaker graduate offerings in that field even if the latter places have a stronger overall reputation?

For example, Harvard and Yale are unquestionably weaker schools in the field of Philosophy than Rutgers, which is one of the heavyweights in this field. If a Harvard and a Rutgers grad apply to Princeton’s doctorate program in Philosophy, would the Rutgers candidate be favored all things held equal?

I’m actually curious about your take on this since you seem well versed in admissions practices of academia.

Isn’t that how people judge objects, whether it be universities or restaurants or movies? If I meet a Michigan graduate who went to Harvard Law and clerks for a Supreme Court justice and then I meet another Michigan alum who went to Cooley Law School and is currently waiting table at a restaurant, then my logical conclusion would be that the academic aptitute of Michigan graduates span the entire spectrum of ability.

Wash U, on the other hand, has a more concentrated population of intelligent students so I’m more likely to be impressed if I meet a Wash U grad than a Michigan grad unless I have more information about their accomplishments and backgrounds.

You’re absolutely right though that the top 5% of Michigan graduates are probably every bit as good, if not better, than the top 5% of Wash U graduates.

Now if only Berkeley and Michigan could start producing more Rhodes Scholars, so we could both actually be proven to be right.;)

JHS · August 4, 2012, 9:36am

Those are good questions, goldenboy.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Sam_Lee · August 4, 2012, 10:07am

Using your goal post, Michigan may even be better than UChicago. Not saying I am using it.

PAGRok · February 15, 2013, 7:57pm

What JHS is saying is the opposite view that Forbes has taken on determining its rankings. It chose to “focus on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, high graduation rates and low-levels of debt. They do not attempt to assess a school’s reputation…”. This is clearly why the public schools, who have breadth and depth of faculty, strong graduate programs, sometimes strong reputations, are not favored. The things is is that you can view a school as what it is (such as number of faculty, well ranking fields, etc.) or by the educational opportunities and “career” services it provides (small classes, intimate student-faculty interaction, interaction with strong peers, connections at the college, etc.). For me, I believe undergraduate schools should be chosen based on the educational side, and so I am a great lover of LAC’s for this reason (other than their inherent lack of strong research, which should be a greater part of undergrad education, IMO), as well as strong private universities. They are for me what create a better academic environment where I am thriving, but that’s not to say that people can’t get equal educations from public schools, it just seems like a different beast.

Forbes college rankings: Princeton top, UChicago #4

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