<p>I’m glad garland is making sensible contributions to this thread. Keep up the good work.</p>
<p>The one group of people for whom the Ivy League is surely not worthless are the college enrollment and marketing directors for the less famous colleges in that league. They gain a lot of prestige and a lot of applications by association with the more famous colleges in the Ivy League. See the wikipedia article I already referenced for the historical development of the Ivy League. Note that I think it is more credible to regard Stanford or MIT as a “peer” institution of Harvard and Princeton in certain academic disciplines than it is to say that all Ivy League colleges are their peers.</p>
<p>OOD–I can only comment on my S’s school, but at least there, with an extremely intensive and rigorous Core Curriculum, you’d have to be a masochist or seriously misguided if you weren’t there for the learning itself.</p>
<p>You’ll find some less than stellar profs and non-intellectually-oriented peers anywhere–but it’s whether you find a proponderance of committed ones tht matter. My D had great profs at both schools she went to (the first was an OOS public, the second a good LAC). It was the student bodies that greatly differed for her. (And just to show i’m not prejudiced, when I was in college, I transfered from a mediocre LAC to a fantastic OOS public, for the exact same reasons.)</p>
<p>Tokenadult:</p>
<p>That’s why I prefer to talk of HYPSM, but even then, this is too constricting. What do people mean by Ivies? Only members of the Ivy League? or schools of HYP caliber among which I definitely would include MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Chicago and several others?
Do they mean schools that are as expensive as Ivies, such as Union College or Sarah Lawrence or Skidmore?
How does one treat LACs such as AWSP?
How does one compare tech schools such as Cooper Union or Olin or Rose-Hulman to liberal arts schools such as HYP?</p>
<p>I don’t often jump in these discussions because the ongoing debate that pops up often in some form or another regarding whether the Ivy League is “worthless” generally goes nowhere. </p>
<p>I do want to say that Garland’s comments continually reflect my feelings on the subject.</p>
<p>Garland: I recently talked to a prof friend who went to and taught at both an elite and a state school. He said he would be hard pressed to say that one is better than the other for a good student. “Preponderence” might be important to some but given that most people know or associate with such a small group of students on a campus that whether the whole school is made of top students or just a “critical mass” present does not seem to matter. in his opinion, at the big school a student may have to look a bit initally to find the homogeneous group of intellectual peers but that by doing so maybe benefit from the diversity at the large school and that having the other type of students there should in no way dimisish the chances for an outstanding experience. He said it really comes down to what the student is comfortable doing, in his opinion. This seems to be echoed by and awful lot of folks. </p>
<p>I actually do not think any schools are “worthless”.</p>
<p>Let me chime in and thank garland, too. Her (I think it’s “her”) posts in this thread have eloquently stated what I think. I also liked the Chicago “Aims of Education” address from 2003 that someone posted in a separate thread a few days ago.</p>
<p>I also think that some schools do this consistently better than others: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Chicago, Swarthmore at the head of the list (and I’m sure there are others, too, that I know less about). But there are many, many schools that provide fine opportunities for real education (some more than others, of course), and which combine those opportunities with other things individuals may find desirable or not, and/or which may make them available at a significantly lower cost. There are tons of great options. But to say “Harvard is no better than any other school” is either (a) silly, or (b) true only at a level of generalization so broad as to be completely uninteresting.</p>
<p>“Harvard types”: I used to think there was a Harvard type, and I described it as someone who was excited by the phrase “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” and who looked forward to carving out a niche for himself. I’m not sure that’s so true anymore, not because fewer Harvardians have that attitude, but because more Yalies, etc. do, too.</p>
<p>As for the line about famous professors being bad in the classroom: Of course. Since being good in the classroom has little to do with becoming a famous scholar, it stands to reason that classroom skill will be just about randomly distributed among famous scholars. If you need to have all of your professors at least be concerned about their teaching skill . . . well, that’s one of the reasons to choose a LAC or similar thing.</p>
<p>One of the reasons Ivy grads do so well has to be that 95% of the educated global population accords Ivy students a degree of super-prestige. It’s unearned but it’s very real and it’s a big boost in every single professional relationship.</p>
<p>The Ivies have done a fantastic job of branding.</p>
<p>Cheers you will not find a single Ivy League chancellor who believes that because it does a great disservice to its students and faculties. </p>
<p>The reason Ivy grads do so well is because they are among the brightest and most conscientious grads in the country. And yes, they are very well educated too. Most people realize that once we graduate, it is performance which counts not the name on the diploma.</p>
<p>“What is meant by worth? Expensive? In that case, the most expensive school is GWU–not considered by HYPSM as a “peer institution” by any stretch of the imagination. A few years ago, the honor of being the most expensive college went to Sarah Lawrence College. Ditto re: “peer institution.” There are lots of colleges that are just as expensive as HYPSM.
If the Ivies are worthless, what does this make GWU, Sarah Lawrence, et al?”</p>
<p>I’m so glad you posted that as I intended to come on here today and say the same thing. I don’t understand the concept that people only send their kids to Ivy Leagues because they are blinded by prestige, etc. when there are so many schools out there that cost the same thing. Why don’t people just ask “Are schools that cost over $40,000 a year worth it?” Why do people assume that the choice to go to an Ivy League school isn’t made with the same amount of care as the choice to go to USC? Why don’t we wonder why people are blinded by the smallness of a liberal arts school, etc.? It is worthwhile to question why people go private over public, which is also an interesting topic for lower education, but the topic should be broader than just Ivy Leagues. If they cost $20,000 a year more than all other private schools, I could understand but that is not the case. And someone mentioned the academics – my kid is getting stellar academics at an Ivy League and has taken a number of classes with people who literally wrote the book on that subject. Being able to sit down and talk with someone who is a top expert in their field, has a lot of educational merit in and of itself.</p>
<p>“To state that IVY courses are large would be to speak from not knowing facts.”</p>
<p>Yes, my kid has had many small classes. Her freshman year she was in seminars of 17 students. Last year she had a class with five students in it. Size has not really been an issue – but my kid who went to UCLA and majored in Economics had many, many huge classes.</p>
<p>Large economics classes seem to be common. Harvard’s Ec 10 is notoriously large. I believe that one year enrolment was about 1,000. My S has had/is having a variety of class sizes ranging from 4 to 300.</p>