Thank you for posting this. I’ve been saying for years that the differences in quality are overhyped. Now I have an article to point to! 
My kids all went to different levels of “prestige” and the differences in difficulty in the curriculum were fairly dramatic, as were the differences in the level of performance of peers, a big factor in educational quality not covered here.
That said, those prestigious schools, such a the Ivies, that tend toward lectures with assistants leading discussion, will have a different level of personal contact with professors (as opposed to TF’s) than a school in which professors teach directly to a class of 20 (for instance, our local state university’s liberal arts classes, which have very high level teaching quality and personal contact, but the difficulty of assignments and quality of discussion are not very high).
Honestly, the presence of talented peers at any institution, regardless of reputation, makes for better classes. For my kids this was one of the most important aspects of their education.
I can only offer one measure for comparison as I am not familiar at all with any others.
As many know, Medical School admission highly disregard the name of the UG on the application.
There is a reason for it. While at Med. School, everybody is on the same footing, Ivy / Elite graduates have no advantage at academics. Even Masters in Science do not have advantage, with only one exception - Masters in Anatomy have a huge advantage in one class - Anatomy. As an ultimate measure of the success at Med. School, residency matching process completely ignores the name of the UG institution on the residency application.
I do not know if it proves something or not, but it is one measure that I am familiar as the graduates from various colleges are going thru exactly the same process at the Medical school.
Another thing to consider is all that push for the “talented” peers. Some kids while being surrounded by the highest caliber HS kids at college, specifically looking for the great diversity of friends, they do not want to be only in this academically intense type crowd and those are the ones that do not need any kind of push from their peers, they have set up their own standards for themselves way high in the sky. These students will not find a variety of people at Elite colleges. As my D. mentioned, if she ended up going to Ivy, then she would be in the same crowd as she was at her private HS. Her goal in addition to academics was to grow personally and be able to connect to the variety of people, her academic goal has always been an A in every class. She did not need to surround herself with academically focused crowd for that…As far as academics, her goal has been achieved time and again without going to Ivy / Elite college. Was her academic level enough for Med. School? As good as the next medical student who graduated from Harvard, which was admitted by many such students who wished that they never attended at expensive Ivy and saved family resources for the Med. School.
Well, I do not know where it makes the difference. It probably does somewhere, but I cannot comment on something that I do not have any knowledge.
Some courses at some schools have course materials that can be found on-line (sometimes even videos of class sessions). Those can be used to check cognitive complexity and expectations of students, if someone has enough knowledge of the subject matter to evaluate that subject.
Of course, many high school seniors do not have easy access to people with sufficient knowledge of the subject matter who are willing to evaluate courses in the subjects of interest at the various colleges under consideration.
Yes, they do differ. Years ago a friend did grad work in computer science at a major public U with a quarter system then taught at a different state’s lesser ranked U. She told me she was supposed to cover less in the semester course than she had TA’d in the quarter course.
Another- gifted HS student took regular calculus at a top public U as well as a local private average U then more at an Ivy. Her ranking was AP, local U, top public U then her Ivy for rigor/material. She may have ranked the top public U higher if she had taken the honors version.
These may be anecdotes but, especially with science courses, one can see a difference. I did not read the article but also note that there is a different peer group doing the discussions in and outside of the classroom. The article authors basically did an anecdotal research with such a limited sample size of institutions.
Regarding medical school admissions. Most medical students are not elite scholars, just as with most physicians. Most are students with the goal of medical school in mind and not risk takers in taking classes for personal benefit instead of the almighty gpa. Medical schools DO pay attention to the undergrad school. More points awarded to some than others if they hopefully continue the practice from my day. Yes, there are great students from Podunk U who master the needed undergrad material and show they know how to learn the medical school material. Examples include those who choose the affordable option, or as in my classmate’s experience, parents would not allow a school (an August Vietnam war era campus bombing HS senior year). Observing fellow physicians in the lounge shows the differences in academic inclinations.
I taught at a third tier private college. If I had taught the way I was taught at an elite LAC, I would have needed to fail the entire class, as there’s no way they could have mastered the material. The idea that “Bio 101” or Calc II are the same everywhere is ridiculous. My son took the same named Computer Science class at an elite LAC and a just barely second tier school (top 30, likely, he took it as a summer class as a HS Junior; the elite LAC doesn’t accept such courses for the major). He said they covered twice as much material at the LAC.
^ That would be the “cognitive complexity” factor identified in the study.
The answer iis “Yes.” From an article about returning Iraq War veterans at one elite college:
http://www.courant.com/education/hc-wesleyan-veterans-20151108-story.html
That’s assuming that all five factors should be equally weighted. The one that stood out as different was 1) cognitive complexity. The other ones were 2) standards and expectations of the course work, 3) the level of the instructors’ subject matter knowledge, the 4) extent to which the instructors “surfaced” students’ prior knowledge and 5) supported changes in their views.
4 and 5 are specific pedagogical strategies and it doesn’t surprise me that they’re more in use in lower-prestige schools; if you can’t push the students cognitively as much you have to do something with them. I don’t think those factors should be weighted overmuch. 3 is the result of PhD overproduction - you can find good instructors anywhere in the system these days, because there are more bright scholars than there are jobs.
So what we find, in the end, is that higher- and lower-prestige schools assign an equal amount of busywork (2), but in hgiher-prestige schools it’s more mentally demanding (1). That to me doesn’t point toward basic equivalence.
I took German 1 at Harvard and then for review at Pasadena City College. The Pasadena course covered most of the same grammar, and a somewhat more practical travel oriented vocabulary. What we didn’t do was read an unabridged mystery novel by a respected author on top of learning vocab and grammar. We also didn’t learn all the songs and poems the Harvard course included. And fewer people (ie none) dropped out of the Harvard course.
5 "most medical students are not elite scholars" ?? Are you kidding me? Most accepted medical students must have near perfect GPAs not only in the sciences but also in a foreign language, English and the social sciences which are required. Of the five valedictorians at Ds university, 3 were going to medical school. And they have to maintain these grades while volunteering, doing research and taking leadership roles in campus organizations.
They may be good students but that’s different from being a scholar. My H is a physician and was a biology major at an elite school with a near perfect GPA. He would easily agree that I’m the more intellectual / scholarly of the two of us. For him, science was what he needed to understand / master to get to med school to get to take care of people. Medicine is his calling but he’s not a scholar. He’s very practical in his pursuit of knowledge.
I suppose it depends on the definition of ‘scholar’. ‘Scholar’ usually means someone who has studied and knows a lot about a particular subject. So someone could be a scholar in biology or in medieval literature or the history of pizza or Corvettes, whatever. To my mind, scholars are also good students.
I would like to see the full study to determine how faculty were taught to see how professors “surfaced” student’s prior learning. Does this mean that the professor in a class on say, America during the Cold War, asked “so who remembers who the president during the Bay of Pigs Landing was” or does it mean there is an assumption that the students knew it was JFK? Is there a third way the students’ prior leaning was surfaced?
People interested in this subject may want to review this old thread, paying particular attention to comments by @bernie12 , who compared the courses in some of the basic sciences among several schools.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1619090-schools-that-are-considered-to-be-on-ivy-league-level-for-undergrad-p1.html
Elite School courses: The answer is: Not neccessarily, very complicated, and depends on the school and department lol. “Harder” maybe, but sometimes it could be harder in a not so good way given what we know about learning now. Like many profs. at elite schools consider rigor as “making students rote memorize more content then at a less elite school” instead of asking them to understand content better. There is good rigor and kind of not so useful rigor (as in, “I will forget this when the test is over and will have gained no new skills”)…Lots of this at many elites. However, you may be more likely to find instructors who at least try to do it right as described by the poster who charted their Harvard course experience.
As for the “had to get near a perfect GPA for med. school!” Don’t go there! There are ways to get a very high GPA even at an elite college (or any place today…lots of nice grade inflation and perverse incentives for both faculty and students) with careful course and instructor selection. The thread uc alludes has me highlighting in my books of writing lol how many pre-healths actually have a much softer courseload than science majors pursuing PhD’s in their areas of interest…perhaps that has something to do with GPA differentials. Pre-grads are often encouraged to take more serious advanced special topics courses or graduate courses. Pre-healths are told to basically “stick to a formula” which may involve finding easier upperlevel instructors or courses to pad the science GPA. Pre-health necessarily often involves more strategy than scholarship, though the best have both!). Also, many intellectually brilliant people do not make the best grades as they are not focused on them. A story (I believe I saw a documentary) about Bill Gates charts how he focused very little on his courses during his relatively brief stint at Harvard. He was perfectly content with B’s from cramming apparently. I would not consider him less scholarly than a med. student or perfect pre-med or any 4.0 person for that matter. Even academics separate good “students” from good “scholars”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM_qwntrzjY
Faculty at my alma mater would not have made this video if they thought the two were indistinguishable…Hell, if you read Ken Ono’s background story…he was not a good student either (nearly failed a graduate course)…now he is most certainly a top scholar in mathematics (and his mentorship has kind of produced and assisted brilliant students). Part of getting the most out of an elite school is indeed recognizing the difference.
I’m fascinated by this subject because I’ve guinea pigged myself with several colleges, and I have an upcoming computer science class that my daughters are interested in comparing to their AP and IB comp sci classes. Current guinea pig class for me is 3-D design. I took it at Carnegie Mellon in 1988 and I’m re-taking it now.
Similarities: materials. We’re using the same materials that I remember using in 1988. The professor is good and has a fairly similar grasp of the context and application of design in relation to the projects.
Differences: My CMU teacher was the guy who designed the DustBuster. The studio was gorgeous (we’re in a dank basement in the current class at the University of North Georgia). I’m one of the stronger students here vs one of the weaker ones at CMU.
The best classes I’ve ever taken have been at Florida Atlantic University, where I discovered many of my professors were retired Ivy League professors. It was the best of both worlds-small, incredibly interesting (Lit) classes taught by engaged, world class teachers, and I was at the top of my class in terms of ability. I loved it.
The worst school shall remain nameless, but the syllabus had so many spelling errors it freaked me out and I withdrew from the class after the first test-the teacher (not a professor) simply couldn’t phrase questions correctly or legibly. It was frankly shocking and I felt very bad for the other students who thought they were dumb for not being able to pass the test. The test was unpassable the way he had written it (it was an adobe illustrator class-not rocket science).
Here is my own personal experience. I graduated undergrad from a CC top university with a degree in engineering. Later, after working for several years, I attended an ivy league business school. In between these two, I took some courses at a small college close to where I was working. The classes at the small college were easier than anything I had taken in high school. There is even one incident that I remember clearly because it was so awful, where a professor actually did not understand the very basic mathematical relationships of what he was teaching. That was the last class I bothered taking there. So yes there is a difference.
BTW, my undergrad classes at my university were much harder than my graduate level classes at the ivy, though that could have been due to subject matter.
It’s the subject matter…MBA programs are not about the same type of rigor as any engineering program which usually must have ABET accreditation to be taken seriously. MBA programs at an Ivy League may be competitive (as MotherofDragons alludes to), but that doesn’t make the intellectual challenge as intense, though places like Harvard certainly make it interesting. Also, graduate programs grade less harshly more often than not because they simply aren’t about grades as much. Some Ivies (like Harvard) do not even report class standing. It is simply not comparable to an undergraduate science (especially engineering) degree in terms difficulty of getting a grade. Also, often engineering programs are accused of the wrong type of rigor. At least when you talk some of the absolute best MBA programs, they tend to do things like give open-ended and ambiguous cases (usually real life) which is at least intellectually challenging because of that.