“That is by no means implying that CWRU’s arts and sciences schools stink, it is across the board a great school. But it is kind of like Wharton/UPenn and Oberlin Conservatory/Oberlin College. One area of study kind of brightly outshines the others.”
@Ohiodad51
While I understand the point you’re making, I don’t think the CIT/WRU or Wharton/UPenn situation is comparable to that of Oberlin’s Conservatory/College except in degree of difficulty in admission…and that’s based on completely different factors(Con == mostly by audition, college == holistic assessment of HS academic stats/board scores and application).
One thing I noticed about the former two is that the CIT engineers and to some extent…some STEM majors at CWRU and Whartonites at UPenn are viewed with respect/admiration as the top students on their respective campuses.
From my own experiences as an Oberlin undergrad and from chatting with classmates from both the college and the con…that is so not as much the case at Oberlin unless it is restricted solely to Double-Degree students.
One good illustration of this was the voluminous amount of old jokes going back years…possibly decades made by students from the college about the con students’ being geniuses of their musical instrument/specialty…but not being able to hack it academically in college classes outside of the con, being mindlessly conformist/rule followers to a fault, snobs(Con students on average are more likely to come from the higher SES than college students when I attended), or sometimes having street smarts outside the hallowed halls of the conservatory. And let’s not get started about the subset of such jokes targeting voice majors…
To be fair, the con students more than returned the favor by regarding us college students as a bunch of uncouth neo-hippies who can’t be bothered to dress properly, “be polite”, and sometimes even bathe/shower properly*.
- This mainly applied to one house notorious for residents who don’t shower for such long periods due to their notions of maintaining their perceptions of neo-hippie cred the stench could sometimes be noticed a block or few away back when I was an undergrad. Many students…college or con who aren’t residents made it a point to make a detour to avoid it…including yours truly. Incidentally, that dorm also happens to have students from the wealthiest families even among the full-pay group when I attended.
They’ve since cleaned up their act according to younger alums after 2003 so this is no longer an issue.