<p>A friend of mine at an Ivy League school claimed this. I was pretty ****ed when I heard this, as I felt this was demeaning to students of “lower ranked” colleges, and public universities. But then I thought that I wasn’t the best person to judge, seeing as how I’m a high school student with absolutely no college experience.</p>
<p>What do you think about this?</p>
<p>There probably is some positive correlation (though I have not looked this up at all) between time spent studying and prestige, but if there is it will probably won’t be so because of the prestige of the college. It would most likely be a third variable problem - students that study a lot tend to get good grades and thus end up in prestigious colleges.</p>
<p>“students that study a lot tend to get good grades and thus end up in prestigious colleges.”…well that is assuming that the colleges take the best applicants in terms of academics and not the best fit applicants. e.g. Ivy leager’s close friend got higher SAT, SAT II, GPA, and better ECAs and got rejected by all colleges in the US and ended up in UofToronto.</p>
<p>I never said the correlation coefficient had to be equal to 1 (almost nothing is like that in real life), but rather “some positive correlation.”</p>
<p>I’d agree with aldfig0. More prestigious colleges might have students that study more, but that’s because they’re more likely to accept students that study. Going to Harvard isn’t going to magically turn you into some incredibly motivated student who spends ten hours a day in the library. There are slackers at any college and academic superstars at any college as well. The people who study the least at Harvard certainly are NOT studying more than the people who study the most at [insert public university].</p>
<p>I think it depends a lot on how intense your high school is. Mine was extremely bad, so I got good grades without studying or anything, and I got into a really good school for how much time I spent on schoolwork in high school.</p>
<p>In my own experience, academic expectations are highly correlated with the selectivity of the university. The expectations have been higher at Stanford than at Penn than at Haverford than at Bryn Mawr. However, that doesn’t necessarily translate into “more time spent on schoolwork.” It might just mean, “faster paced and fewer exercises to reinforce any single concept.”</p>
<p>Maybe a better question to ask would be: “If you took two equally motivated, hardworking, intelligent students and placed one at Ivy League and another at a StateU, would the one at the Ivy League spend more time studying simply because he goes to a more prestigious college?”</p>
<p>Time spent studying is related to the dedication of the student. If a prestigious school has the ability to select some of the most dedicated students out there, then that’s generally all there is to it. A student with a passion for what’s being learned will study until the desired level of comprehension is attained, no matter what pile of bricks that student attends.</p>
<p>Maybe…but college prestige is a distant third after 1) Work ethic and 2) Major.</p>
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<p>Prestige has a correlation with the quality of instruction (there are exceptions. Reed, for instance, assigns much more work and probably teach on a much higher level than many Ivies), and if they’re serious schools, tend to assign more work. Here at Carleton any serious student works around the clock, barring the odd student organization or two they’re a part of. One of my close friends is a slacker, but even he admits that he would do less work because he simply would get less, had he gone to some other school.</p>