What are your perceptions of Stanford University? How do we compare with peer institutions? Where can we improve? Does financial aid matter? This is an open ended question so feel free to share anything you’d like!
I am biased because I actually went to Stanford. When people ask me for my honest experience at Stanford, I tell them the following:
Stanford is a playground for the rich. People love to talk about their travel, their summer math camps, their internships in DC, and their newest tech gadgets. There’s very little understanding of what life looks like for the “average” person and low-income students often end up marginalized. For social reasons, students from less privileged backgrounds often end up forming their own circles, so they don’t even benefit from the presence of their privileged peers.
Academics are ‘meh’. Sure, the faculty are all at the top of their field, but few care about their teaching. I found it a lot easier to learn at a small liberal arts college, where most of my classes had fewer than 10 students and all of my professors knew me by name, than in my 200-student lectures at Stanford where I had to compete with 50 other students for 2 minutes of attention from the graduate student teaching assistant.
That being said, the campus is really pretty and the university does offer a lot of resources that the motivated student can utilize. Students from “privileged” backgrounds are likely to make valuable connections to peers who are well-connected and/or likely to succeed in their chosen profession. It’s easy to obtain good grades (the average GPA is around a 3.7) and graduate schools as well as employers are likely to look positively upon an applicant from Stanford. Academically speaking, Stanford is good place to be for students who are more inclined to learn from their peers than from their professors.
My 2 cents.
Wow I am really surprised to hear that professors dont care much about teaching.
Not saying Ualabama is better, but my school student body is MUCH bigger than Stanford yet many professirs are willing to take their times for students…
As a Cal Berkeley grad, I thoroughly appreciated your post, barium. (Not that some of the same can’t be said about Cal. But it’s certainly not a playground for the rich.) Go Bears.
@b@r!um Maybe you could describe your Stanford experience in a bit more detail. You rarely see such a mischaracterization of reality except when someone has serious issues or a bone to pick.
You are going to find professors anywhere who aren’t that interested in teaching undergraduates, but it’s not a significant issue at Stanford.
And the notion that the academics are “meh”…LOL
Where do you feel that I mischaracterized reality? When I said that Stanford is a playground for the rich? When I said that students who did not grow up in “privileged” backgrounds are often socially marginalized? When I said that students are more likely to learn from their peers than their professors? When I said that the campus is pretty?
It’s not that professors aren’t interested in teaching per se. It’s that the teaching model practiced by Stanford (at least in the tech disciplines) severely limits interactions between students and teaching staff. Lectures with 200 students are the norm, with 50 students crowding around the TA during office hours hoping to get their individual questions answered. It can be a struggle to get 1 minute of personal attention. That’s not excellence in teaching.
A few professors go out of their way to make themselves accessible, but in my experience, that was more the exception than the rule. Teaching is just not the priority of most faculty.
80% of Stanford undergrads get financial assistance. 50% get need-based assistance from Stanford. Nearly a fifth get Pell Grants. It’s hard to see how that makes it a “playground for the rich” as you characterized it.
According to the common dataset, 4% of the classes have even 100 students or more. 70% have less than 20 students, which would make your statement that lectures with 200 students are “the norm” another mischaracterization.
Stanford also reported that 2 out of more than 500 subsections had 30 students or more. I’ve never seen more than a short handful trying to access a single TA unless if it was to pick something up.
Finally, I’ve attended and taught at a number of schools and frankly, as a whole, the Stanford faculty is top of the heap in terms of their dedication to undergraduate teaching.
It appears you didn’t attend Stanford for undergraduate, so maybe you could tell us exactly what “Stanford experience” you are describing.
That says more about the financial aid policies of the university than the socioeconomic background of the students.
Under the new policy, Stanford will expect no parental contribution toward tuition from parents with annual incomes below $125,000 – previously $100,000
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/march/new-admits-finaid-032715.html
Class sizes look very different from the perspective of the registrar’s office than from the perspective of a student. Easy example: suppose 10% of the classes have 200 students and 90% of the classes have 10 students. Then 69% of the courses on the average student’s schedule would be lectures of 200 students. Do the math.
That aside, class sizes vary by department and I was specifically saying that I was referring to “tech departments” (CS, engineering, etc). It’s no secret that the engineering departments at Stanford are much larger than e.g. math or languages or the humanities.
The classes I had a bad experience with did not have sections at all. The TAs were not teaching sections, just holding office hours.
Going back to socioeconomic status: there’s been ongoing conversations on campus about students from underprivileged backgrounds not being integrated into the campus community. It’s not really surprising either. On one hand, there are real financial barriers to being fully integrated. Poor students may not be able to afford eating off campus with their peers, the expensive equipment required for some classes, and they may not be able to participate in many student activities either, particularly activities that expect students to have previous experience from high school. On the other hand, due to vastly different life experience, it can be challenging to find common topics of interests to talk about.
lol @ the Stanford rah-rah.
Do you know where Stanford lacks and where Harvard, Yale, Princeton excel? Financial aid to international students. Which translates to international socioeconomic diversity on campus. I am truly convinced that HYP, and perhaps even Columbia (cant find data for Columbia) and Dartmouth, are far more cosmopolitan colleges than Stanford.
Let’s compare budgets!
Stanford: $7,316,190 awarded to 135 undergrads in the ENTIRE campus.
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Harvard: $27,986,494 awarded to 524 undergrads.
Princeton: $17,786,464 awarded to 400 undergrads.
Yale: $17,987,511 awarded to 322 undergrads.
MIT: $14,208,960 to 320 undergrads.
Dartmouth: $14,599,112 to 286 undergrads.
And now for the need-aware schools with far smaller endowments:
Duke: $9,173,384 to 173 undergrads.
University of Pennsylvania: $14,030,020 to 314 undergrads.
University of Chicago: $5,945,857 to 123 undergrads.
And now let’s throw in liberal arts colleges with far smaller endowments and students:
Amherst: $8,573,670 to 154 students.
Mount Holyoke: $13,540,205 to 413 students.
Smith: $7,583,628 to 156 students.
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@b@r!um how long ago did you graduate from Stanford?
This is just more misrepresentation on your part. There is no math to be done. I gave you the absolute numbers of classes which fell into the ‘large’ category.
I just finished making the rounds of the new Stanford graduating class. When you ask them if class size were too big, they struggle to come up with a class they took which was ‘large’. Most of them volunteer that their classes were surprisingly small - many of them said “less than 20, for sure”.
@International95 “rah-rah” is quite a bit different from correcting mischaracterization. I’m discerning enough to be the first to agree with any shortcomings, but you’d have to demonstrate what they are first.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
At this point, let’s agree to disagree. People are posting their opinions and other readers are free to take from it what they will. I will assume that any further back and forth between these two posters will be limited to PM’s and not off-topic comments in this post.