<p>…besides tuition? What about college life? Academics? and so on…</p>
<p>Look at student teacher ratios.</p>
<p>“National Universities” like HPY, UVA, GaTech Wake Forest, Tulane, UGA, Clemson and so on tend to favor graduate students and research over undergraduate instruction. The odds are better that you as an undergraduate will get some attention at schools with a lower S/T ratio.
These are generally privates with a lot of money.</p>
<p>An Ivy with a 4/1 S/T ratio costs about 3.5 times as much as a state school with a 20/1 S/T ratio. In terms of S/T ratio the Ivies are a better buy (if you can get in!!!). </p>
<p>Question: Do you need that much faculty?</p>
<p>Purdue and Georgia Tech have a 14:1 student-teacher ratio, about the same of that as a average private college such as BC</p>
<p>There isn’t a big difference, state funding for state schools is decreasing steadily every year</p>
<p>There are less differences than you would think. A lot of private schools have excellent finaid departments that whittle away at the high price tag in order to be competitively priced, and most public schools have decent student-teacher ratios. Schools have discovered what it is they need to work on, in other words.</p>
<p>But typically…private schools have more prestige, more individual attention, cost much more, less opportunities, are much smaller, and less ‘campus spirit.’ Typically public schools are less prestigious and offer less individual attention, cost less, more abundant opportunities, are bigger, and have more ‘campus spirit.’</p>
<p>As private schools increase their finaid commitments and state leg’s decrease higher ed funding, that difference will probably be leveled out. As public schools raise tuition and increase fees to pay for more professors and cap freshman class sizes, the student-teacher ratio will probably be leveled out. Obviously a school that is smaller is going to give more attention to each student, there’s no debating that. And obviously a school with 20,000+ students will have countless more research/organizational/internship/cultural/etc opportunities than a school with 10,000 or less.</p>
<p>The key difference is do you feel you need more individual attention in order to prosper, or do you think you want more opportunities if the trade-off is that you have to go out and make them happy for yourself? It’s like comparing living in a small Texas town to living in Dallas. Some like the slower pace of living, but others will take the stress if it means life is more interesting. It’s all up to what kind of person you are.</p>
<p>In many respects there are no differences between publics and privates. But in the delivery of educational services, there can be significant differences. IMO, most of the differences derive from issues related to funding and to the different missions of the publics vs the privates. Some questions might illuminate some of these differences:</p>
<p>How large are the classrooms and how many students in a class? How does this change from year to year?
What is the student-to-faculty ratio?
How frequently are Teaching Assistants used?<br>
How big are the freshmen writing seminars and what is the quality of the instruction for this?
Is there ever a problem registering for classes that one wants to take, especially in the freshmen and sophomore years?<br>
How strong are the students in the class and how consistently strong are they?<br>
Is there an Honors group that gets special privileges?<br>
Is teaching undergraduates an institutional priority or is it subordinate to other demands on professors and staff, eg, research and/or the pursuit of outside income.
Are professors involved in academic advising and how many students do they advise and how often?<br>
What is the quality, breadth and depth of the career counseling resources?<br>
What are the dorms like and how new are they?<br>
How about the rest of the school’s physical plant?<br>
How generous is the school with respect to financial aid?<br>
Is there a difference in how different students are treated for consideration for financial aid?</p>
<p>There are other questions you could ask, but I think you get the idea. Nothing inherently says that a public or private school can’t do well in response to any or all of the questions above, but the execution does differ in many, many cases and particularly for the highest ranked privates against any of the public universe.</p>
<p>^ How about a few other questions to add to Hawkette’s list:</p>
<ol>
<li>What’s the variety of majors offered?</li>
<li>Does the school offer breadth and depth across academic disciplines?</li>
<li>Cost of attendance?</li>
<li>Location and distance from home?</li>
</ol>
<p>13:1 student-faculty ratio for THE Ohio State University (the best kept secret of the largest university campus in the country!!)</p>
<p>ucb,
Those are all good questions and hopefully others will post still more. The more that prospective students ask these types of questions, the more informed they will be in making their choices and the less of a shock it will be when they matriculate to ABC College.</p>
<p>Also, don’t just assume that “things that most people consider bad” are things that are going to be bad for YOU. Here’s an example:</p>
<p>
Common conception is that TA’s are bad. They aren’t real professors with degrees and might not be as knowledgeable about the subject and sometimes are only a little more knowledgeable than the brightest student in the class. That’s not debatable. BUT if you’re someone who definitely might want to go to grad school…a school that uses TA’s frequently might actually be a GREAT thing. TA’s are regular students just like you that have been given the opportunity to teach a subject they’re good at and receive a stipend. Usually the first step to becoming a professor is getting a TA’ship.</p>
<p>Evaluating colleges on your own is very involved. You can read a college review written by a professional source that condemns a college for having an undergrad focus, using a lot of TA’s, and for students that care more about the team say…the Tigers or whatever…than they do about the test. Then you could read a review on the same college written by a professional source that praises the college for focusing on the undergraduates and not making them a second-priority, exuberantly praising the opportunity students have to become TA’s and RA’s and Research Assistants etc, and talking about how unrivaled the school spirit is.</p>
<p>It’s about knowing what YOU want and how to decipher the reviews. The best way is to just visit a college and personally get to know that college for yourself. There are a lot of advantages to BOTH private schools and public schools, but most importantly, there are soooo many different schools that public/private is hardly a worthy way of sifting through them all.</p>
<p>“13:1 student-faculty ratio for THE Ohio State University” </p>
<p>somehow that doesn’t affect intro class sizes</p>
<p>I think Ohio State is including the TAs</p>
<p>And somehow I wasn’t impressed by that little Ohio State plug in the first place, when it was just randomly thrown in earlier…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Generalizations are tough to make, but this is pretty true. </p>
<p>If the size of your high school can seem pretty overwhelming sometimes, perhaps a large public university might not be a good fit. If you go around a small LAC twice and you already bored you might not want to spend four years there. </p>
<p>Much more important is what you do at a school. Find your passion, do something really well or at the very least find something you can build on post grad. Don’t do these things and all you have done is spend a lot of time and money to get a sweatshirt with a name on it.</p>
<p>And of course they are generalizations. A few public schools have better ratio’s and other measures of a good undergraduate education that are better than many private colleges.</p>
<p>I started at a private school and ended up transferring to a large public. My classes have been much harder at my new public school, but aside from that I haven’t noticed any real significant differences.</p>
<p>The biggest difference IMO between top privates and state universities will be in the selectivity of the student bodies. Pubic schools have a mission to provide reasonable access for the taxpayers of their states, while privates can craft entering classes that best suit them.</p>
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</p>
<p>Baloney! My Alma Mater, Wake Forest, is essentially a LAC of under 4,000 undergrad students with limited grad and professional programs. The grad students are invisible and anonymous to undergrads. And my kids at Harvard have much more access to faculty, lavish undergrad programs, and personal attention as undergraduate students than I ever had at Wake!</p>
<p>I think gadad is dead-on here. Public schools exist to educate the public. They are for the tax payers in their respective area. That’s why it’s harder, and more expensive, for students from out of state to attend schools like Michigan, UVA, Texas, ect. Those out of state students hadn’t contributed to the tax base. That’s not to say that all private schools are more selective than public schools. It just means that they could be. It doesn’t mean that they have more graduate student focus, it just means that they could. Schools like Tulane, Wake Forest, and Harvard can pick and choose which students they want to attend. They can figure out where their focus is and where to spend their money. You can get a great education at both, but I think there is definitely a difference between the ‘feel’ of a public vs a private school. That comes mostly from the fact the private schools answer only to their boards as well as their alumni base that contribute to their funds. That ‘feel’ is going to be different at different private and different public schools. That’s why I always encourage people to visit any school to which they are giving serious consideration.</p>
<p>The mission of a public school is to enable as many students as possible to get good quality education… they are basically mandated by their funding sources (state/local government) to provide access to high quality education to students as possible and thus generally have lower standards for admissions and larger class sizes…</p>
<p>Your peers might be different.</p>
<p>““National Universities” like HPY, UVA, GaTech Wake Forest, Tulane, UGA, Clemson and so on tend to favor graduate students and research over undergraduate instruction. The odds are better that you as an undergraduate will get some attention at schools with a lower S/T ratio.”</p>
<p>I’m going to Clemson next year. Clemson has a very small graduate school program (12,000 undergraduates, 3,000 graduate students)</p>
<p>“The biggest difference IMO between top privates and state universities will be in the selectivity of the student bodies. Pubic schools have a mission to provide reasonable access for the taxpayers of their states, while privates can craft entering classes that best suit them.”</p>
<p>I agree. However, I did apply to public schools outside of my state because the University Of Massachusetts system isn’t very good because of all the excellent private colleges in Massachusetts.</p>
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<p>I think Cuse goes to UNC, correct me if I’m wrong? UNC is a fine example of one of the many many public schools that are ran almost like private schools…and lots of prestige, at least. That could just be my perception though, because when I think UNC I immediately also think of Duke.</p>
<p>There are a LOT of public schools that are probably better at being “private schools” than actual private schools. In many ways there are no differences beyond the usual generalizations that often don’t apply.</p>