Michigan vs Boston College

College Search & Lists
81

<p>Rabban,
I’m relieved to know that you think that facts don’t matter in the admission of a college class or in the evaluation of a student body. And all this time I thought that the academic world valued measurable data. </p>

<p>What is up with you people. Boston College gets more applications, admits almost 5000 fewer people, has an SAT average that is higher and Michigan people still claim that Michigan is more selective. I may not be the brightest bulb on CC, but something does not add up here. Please explain that one to me. </p>

<p>And what are you saying about the quality of the students at Boston College? It seems that you (and other posters) are implying that they are a bunch of dolts who would never get into Michigan. Am I reading you right? No need to tap dance in your answer-give it to me and the world straight so that we can unambigously know what a Michigan man thinks of everybody else.</p>

82

<p>I couldve got into Michigan…but I didnt even apply. Why? Because the simple fact is that many students at Michigan do not deserve to be attending a “top” school. And let me tell you, I am from Long Island and if I had gone to Michigan, people would not have been “wowed” at all. They would just say…oh, Michigan, theyre the ones that got destroyed by OSU in football this year. Michigan is a good public school, but let me ask you think. If Harvard had all the same facilities and endowment, but had students with 1100 SAT scores and 3.0 HS GPAs, would it still be considered the same as it is today? Seems to be a silly question, but it really isnt considering what the Michigan people on this thread are saying. Why does the fact that Michigan has more well known academics make it a better school than BC? We are talking about undergraduate education here, not quantity of research or anything like that. How is having a professor who is a great researcher but hates being in a class of freshmen going to help me learn intro physics? Quality of students has much more bearing on undergraduate experience than any other factor, and the simple fact is that the average BC student is better than the average Michigan student. Sorry.</p>

83

<p>Stats obviously dont matter to these people unless they back up the fact that the current rankings should look like</p>

<ol>
<li>Michigan</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Everyone Else</li>
</ol>

84

<p>lol, don’t get mad. Im not bagging BC or other any school for that matter. What I said was UMichgan is a much better school than BC. Period. No need to google stats after stats for refuting that- The world knows that. Heck, even my dog knows that.</p>

<p>Well, I’ve never said I don’t trust stats. What I’ve said was that I found all the irrelevant stats that you posted for your sake completely useless. However, since you are insisting on hard facts, I guess I’ll just play along for the time being. Then let’s see…… (turning around and putting on an academic cap). The ultimate holy gral , aka USNEWS :wink: , says:</p>

<p>Mich: 24
BC: 34</p>

<p>The Newsweek says:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14321230/site/newsweek/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14321230/site/newsweek/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Mich: 11
BC : ??? (um I cannot find BC )</p>

<p>The THES says:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.paked.net/higher_education/rankings/times_rankings.htm[/url]”>http://www.paked.net/higher_education/rankings/times_rankings.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Mich : 29
BC: ???</p>

<p>Well, I don’t know about you, but to me they are all saying the same thing: UMich is better than BC. In fact, I will challenge you to go find any ranking that says otherwise.</p>

85

<p>The fact is people who are great researchers are often great people too and make great teachers. Most research work involves managing and motivating a small group of people–there is little research that is done by just one person. You have to have the ability to get the best out of people–just like in teaching.</p>

86

<p>Rabban,
I have posted many times on the unreliability of rankings that include subjective data. Beyond the obvious personal bias inherent to each response, it is quite likely that these opinions are the remnant of impressions formed many years ago and may no longer reflect a current environment. Peer Assessment certainly falls into this category. This completely untransparent measure does not tell who responded, what schools they commented on nor what they said. Out of curiosity, how do you feel about using assessment by employers rather than by academics? Would you agree with the thought that employers are better placed to judge the quality of a college and its graduates as our capitalistic society is interested in results? </p>

<p>For USNWR, Ex-Peer Assessment, BC and Michigan are virtually tied. Which hard stats do you consider to be “useless” and “completely irrelevant?” Which ones do you believe are useful and relevant? </p>

<p>barrons,
Would you mind expanding on those comments? I’m not sure how you relate those to the quality of the students at a school, the quality of the education that they receive and, perhaps most important of all, how you would measure the effectiveness of the teaching from institution to institution? And regardless of your answer, how do you know about the quality of the teaching that goes on outside of your own environment? Does a provost or some other academic at Michigan really have any idea what is currently going on at Brigham Young…or what is currrently going on at the University of Tulsa…or what is currently going at the University of Georgia…or what is currently going on at Boston College, etc? Maybe you can help me and others interested learn how these evaluations and judgments about colleges are made.</p>

87

<p>just to add a little fuel to the fire</p>

<p>My cousin applied to both schools</p>

<p>-was rejected by Michigan

  • accepted by boston college</p>

<p>take that for what its worth</p>

88

<p>Not really Hawkette. In fact, I think it is a very superficial analogy. Player talent is far and away the primary determinent in putting together a winning athletic team, assuming the coach is semi-decent. In fact, most Michigan Football fans say that Coach Carr at Michigan is a good and decent man, a fine recruiter, a great representative of the University of Michigan and a good role model for his players. But, at the same time, those same fans will tell you that given the talent Michigan recruits year-in, year-out, Michigan should be doing a lot better. The primary reason for Michigan football’s disapointing seasons has been average coaching Carr seems to keep his teams predictible and more often than not relies on Michigan’s raw talent to win games. </p>

<p>The same cannot be said a an academic institution. Without the best professors, a university can never hope to reach the top, no matter how good its students are. Student talent also matters a great deal of course, but not as much as the faculty. </p>

<p>At any rate Hawkette, you seem to like nunbers a great deal. Why don’t you interpret the following numbers? Check out #30 (#5 when considering absolute nunbers) and then, go all the way down to #45 to see who checks in at #79. Michigan’s ratio is comparable to Northwestern, Cornell and Caltech. BC is obviously much lower. </p>

<p><a href=“WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights”>WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights;

<p>Also keep in mind that schools like Michigan, Chicago and Northwestern do well despite their location. The study above admitedly has an East Coast bias. The Ivies and schools like Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Boston College, MIT, UVa and Duke are at a clear advantage. If you substitued a few of those East Coast graduate programs with Midwestern graduate programs, you’d probably have a very different picture. I realize that Law, MBA and Medical school matriculations are just a microcosm, but they are revealing nonetheless. </p>

<p>Those numbers indicate one of two things:</p>

<p>1) Michigan has far weaker students than schools like Cornell and Northwestern, but since it places as high a ratio of its students into top graduate programs, it is necessarily a better university, doing just as much with sub-standard students.</p>

<p>or, more likely,</p>

<p>2) There really isn’t that much of a drop in talent between Michigan and the likes of Northwestern and Cornell and Michigan’s student body is in fact better than BCs.</p>

89

<p>…and my hairdresser’s sister’s mailman has a nephew whose best friend applied to both schools and got into Michigan but not BC. </p>

<p>Come on chillin…try a little harder. You’re too smart a high schooler to take some random data point and expect that to be helpful and substantive in judging anything. For someone in your position and your age, this discussion can have real value. Think critically.</p>

90

<p>I think looking at the overall average quality of students is about the 10th most important thing in looking at a school. Now that UM is unable to give minorities a lift in admissions those stats should improve a fair amount. Is UM all of a sudden a better school?</p>

<p><a href=“http://media.www.michigandaily.com/media/storage/paper851/news/2007/02/19/Academics/Minority.Admissions.Plummet-2727909.shtml[/url]”>http://media.www.michigandaily.com/media/storage/paper851/news/2007/02/19/Academics/Minority.Admissions.Plummet-2727909.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

91

<p>Alexandre,
Welcome back from the back alleys. </p>

<p>Yeah, I agree that the football analogy is not the cleanest and I don’t have any idea about the football coach at Michigan. But you must agree that players do matter on any team and that there are a lot of good players playing college football, just as there are a lot of good students out there and a lot of good schools. Not sure, however, why you feel that the coaches (faculty) are more important than the players (students). Great players (students) will thrive regardless and oftentimes in spite of the coaches (faculty). And as for how universities become the “best” in academia, their research efforts have considerably more impact in deciding this than their teaching efforts. </p>

<p>On the link you provided for Collegejournal, I want to congratulate you on your ability to unearth a really obscure bit of information. Before I get to my response, congrats to Michigan for almost beating out Morehouse and Bryn Mawr College! And mega congrats for narrowly beating out the New College of Florida and Vassar College (and killed BC!!). </p>

<p>Alexandre, this chart actually reinforces my frequently stated point about Michigan’s strength of student body. The school has some excellent students and this chart reflects that 156 of them got into some high prestige grad programs. But 156 Michigan students does not an entire graduating class make. Doesn’t Michigan have 26,000 undergrads or 6500 graduates every year? What about everybody else? Don’t they count?</p>

92

<p>

</p>

<p>Student quality is a top reason many firms recruit at certain schools. It should definitely be a strong consideration depending upon certain career choices someone may have.</p>

93

<p>barrons,
If, in your estimation, the quality of the student body is the 10th most important thing in looking at a college, then what factors would you rank 1-9? And I would still love to hear your thoughts on my questions posed in # 86.</p>

94

<p>No offense to the Michigan homers, but I would daresay that the general public (especially in the Northeast) would a) have no idea where Michigan is geographically and b) would have no idea that UM is actually a decent school. Boston College definitely garners much more prestige here, if not nationally.</p>

95

<p>Hawkette:</p>

<p>It would give me so much pleasure to further discuss these important subjects with you. However, 1) I don’t have time nor desire to sift thru all your past posts, but I’m sure they are all well thought out and 2) it’s about time for me to stop warming my seat and go home and wash my dog. So…without much trouble of going thru your posts, I’d like to pinpoint some of the fallacies in your thinking based on your few posts in this thread.</p>

<p>You seemed to think that all those numbers can somehow substantiate your claim that College X is better than College Y because the average GPAs & SAT scores of X are higher than those of Y… so and so forth. Nothing is farther from the truth. What you fail to realize is that college, broadly speaking education in general, is more than just numbers. Further, I would point to you that if you want to play by the stats, you must consider all other important stats, such as the caliber of faculties in terms of research outputs (the number of journal articles, open literature presentations, reports), student’s opportunities for researches, academic learning and social environments, just to name a few. You cannot just pick and choose the numbers for the sake of your arguments. For example, you marginalize the PA scores while you put way too much stock on the SAT numbers and like. So there- I cannot possibly give you more than B- on your write-up. You can do better than that. Have a nice day</p>

96

<p>come on, i know someone who got into Harvard but not BC</p>

<p>therefore BC>Harvard of course (:</p>

97

<p>did anyone actually read what I said about people in the northeast. Michigan is known for football only in the northeast, BC has more regional prestige. Its not like i care about that, I am just interested in which school is better for undergrad, as the OP wanted to know.</p>

98

<p>Rabban with the way you end your posts, you deserve absolutely no respect from anyone, but I guess because I want to show that BC students arent jerks, ill give you some. I will ask once again, how to undergrads benefit by the number of journal articles published by the school’s faculty. Last time I checked, these articles do not make me learn. What does make for a better learning environment is being around higher quality students on average, and this is why BC is better for undergrad than Michigan. If I were in state for UMich, there is no doubt thats where I would go, but being out of state, I wouldnt pay 45K or whatever it is for Michigan, just like I would go to Wake any day over UNC, or any other examples you can think of (Rice>UT-Austin i guess, as some here seem to think UT-Austin is a much better school)</p>

99

<p>very well done. I am proud of you</p>

100

<p>Ok everyone,
How do you guys score that one (post # 95)? ^^^ Another knockout? These Michigan guys are S-O-F-T. I mean, someone comes and makes a facts-based argument and these guys get all red and hot under the collar and go storming off. Keep that dog inside because it’s cold outside. </p>

<p>Rabban,
Ok, enough of the sarcasm and whatnot. I happen to agree with a large part of what you are saying. Analyzing and grading a school is not easy and there is more to it than just looking at a bunch of data. But you and others do nothing more than stamp your feet, insist that Michigan is better (isn’t it obvious!!!), and act like the world should just accept it because you or some academic said it was so. </p>

<p>When I first posted in this thread, I actually indicated that IMO Michigan had the slight advantage over Boston College based on the USNWR numbers (including PA). I stand by that statement. But the reaction of Michigan posters not to give any respect to Boston College (which after all gets as many applications, rejects 5000 more students and has a higher average SAT than Michigan) is representative of what I see from Michigan posters all over CC. Michigan is a very good school with a nice portion of excellent students, but, overall, its student body is not that special. There are plenty of schools that have stronger or equal student bodies. BC is one of them. </p>

<p>As for your comments about making a broader review of a school and quantitative factors, bring it on if you think it will advance the discussion and support your conclusions because so far you’ve brought very little other than your opinions and your indignation.</p>