Public vs private

beyphy
Thu, 12 Mar 2015 03:49:14 +0000

A lot of the top privates in the U.S. just happen to be in the northeast. This includes both colleges and universities. For universities, this would include all eight Ivy league schools, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. That’s almost half of the U.S. News top 25! And I haven’t even gotten around to including the various private LACs on the east coast like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Middlebury, etc.

So the Northeast has a lot of very high quality privates. Outside of the northeast, that’s not really the case. California has three exceptional private universities: Stanford, Caltech, and USC. Stanford has a small incoming class, and Caltech has an extremely small incoming class. And both of these universities draw from a national pool of applicants. California’s a very large state with a big population. So it invested in a lot of public universities to educate its residents. And of those public universities, it invested in the UC system which was meant to educate some of its best students. And that system has educated many prominent people within the state. So it’s very well regarded.

You see similar things in the Midwest. There are a few top privates (Chicago, Northwestern, Notre Dame, etc.) But many more public schools which are well regarded in those states. These include: IU-B, UIUC, Michigan, Perdue, tOSU, etc. And again, like in California, it’s just not possible for those few top private universities to educate most of the people in those states.

The pattern I see for these top schools is that they tend to be where the top students tend to gravitate to. Either in their own region, or in their own state. The northeast probably has enough top privates to educate many of its top students. But outside of that region, I would say that the others don’t really.