Help me Pleasseee!!!! Emory vs Pitzer college!!!!!!!!!

bernie12
Tue, 20 May 2014 00:51:41 +0000

Yes, but by that logic, again, Vanderbilt and Washington University should be equivalent to Yale, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, and Chicago. They aren’t. I am just worried about what we are defining as high achieving here. The SAT scores don’t mean but so much. Take a look at this: Oil Change | Emory University | Atlanta GA;

This makes me proud of Emory (along with the more recent: girl who invented the differently packaged box, and one of the co-founders of fiscal note, and CMF founders), but also makes me wonder if we had bigger thinkers back in the day when the SAT scores were actually lower (by a bit probably) and the quality and rigor of courses offered was higher (I’m sure Emory was pre-professional back then, but it certainly seems as if it was more hardcore back then. You don’t hear of a genetics project lab course and all of the amazing honors courses are gone. Interestingly enough, students don’t dare demand these courses. Obviously something has changed all the while we started looking better on paper. I don’t think Emory is the only one…). Also, I have kind of been finding that beyond a certain threshold, the quality of the student body has hardly no bearing on the level of rigor or the sort of academic culture at an institution. It appears that even as student body quality increases, the administration, faculty, and even students have to drive forward additional changes to make the academic caliber increase (as the very top schools do). I feel Emory is at least trying to do this. Some schools seem to mainly be resting on their “hotness” or popularity with no change in sight at the academic level. At least Emory recognizes that it can do better by its students and should do better if it wants to get back in the competition of attracting “better” students (not in the SAT sense, but in the big thinker, go getter sense). The entrepreneur movement is finally getting us somewhere it seems. However, it would be interesting to see if we can get our sciences back to the level that inspired 1 of those 2 guys described in the article. Currently we aren’t there anymore. We’ve more or less settled for a bit less on the idea that our current crowd doesn’t demand that level of science education or inspiration.

I don’t know, I just try to look beyond the superficial. What Yale has is real and goes far beyond incoming SAT’s and GPA’s. Like HPSMetc, they can easily attract winners of international competitions and olympiads for a reason (many schools outside of this range with similar scoring student bodies can barely get their hands on these types of students. They can get the ones that score similarly on the SAT/ACT and maybe have other great EC’s, but just not at that level and not as focused). It isn’t just because they are HPSMetc and are full of awesome students, it’s because they have the academic rigor and caliber to further develop and mentor already amazing students (seriously, the most serious top schools offer courses for first years and entry level students in a discipline that rival or are significantly higher than graduate division at other top schools. The fact that they offer such options to freshman shows just how serious they are about testing and developing high talent levels). Many of the top 20 schools don’t have that downpacked all of the way yet. As I always say, many of us seem to have been getting away with harboring talent, but not necessarily going out of the way to develop it, so I am just very cynical when it comes to stuff like this (these sorts of comparisons). Like for example, I know for a fact that places like Berkeley and UCLA are raising the bar higher given the student bodies they have than some top 20 privates are for student bodies that are actually better than the ones at UCLA and Berkeley. You should not only be surrounded by amazing peers doing amazing things, but you should leave the place better than you were before, and I don’t just mean in terms of post-grad. offers and how easy those come. You should have much more talent (or it should have been refined).