Michigan vs Boston College

willmingtonwave
Fri, 23 Feb 2007 14:24:27 +0000

also know that Michigan’s peer assessment score is sky high which means that among intellectuals and academe, Michigan is very highly respected all over the nation.



We both know that Peer Assessment is a stat which is both arbitrary and highly misleading. First of all, many of the surveys that get sent out to the Deans, Presidents, etc. are not returned. Also, don’t you think that their vision of a college is somewhat distorted? Do you honestly think that they distinguish between Graduate and Undergraduate education? Of course not. That is why schools with strong graduate programs also have higher peer assessment scores. This offends me particuarly, because at my school you get a top notch undergraduate education, yet we are routinely screwed in the Peer Assessment section of the rankings, ranking near and behind mediocre state schools.
Now, both of us are biased. You love University of Michigan, which I do think is among is the best schools in the country for Graduate education, but to say that the education is far superior to schools like BC, Tufts, Wake Forest, etc which are much more personal, is a little bit pretentious in my opinion. Harvard has great faculty and such, but a routine complain among the students is that there is no interaction between faculty and students. At my school, some classmates and I went to dinner at a teacher’s house during the first week of school. Our classes are small and the priority of our instructors (and no they are not TAs) is teaching, not their own research or their own agenda. This is not to say that I am not biased, because I am. Nonetheless other factors do have to be considered.