<p>I thought I agreed with both JHS and xiggi, so I don’t know which part of me is backwards.</p>
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<p>When did colleges make class ranks public? Seems like you would be asking for something that not even the students know (beyond dean’s list and similar thresholds).</p>
<p>Also, if I were hiring new graduates, I would not care about whether the student started at CC or four year school. What I would care about is how the student finished (i.e. major, upper division courses, grades, internships, research, etc. plus actual knowledge of any relevant material from school work as it relates to the job as determined by technical questioning in the interview).</p>
<p>I see that this forum has gotten back to transfer student bashing. The apparent implication is that high school achievements should determine all future educational opportunities, with no second chances for those who are late bloomers, those who started at CC for cost reasons, or non-traditional students who start at CC for practical reasons.</p>
<p>[At</a> just 14, UCLA math student Moshe Kai Cavalin has written his first book, ‘We Can Do’ / UCLA Newsroom](<a href=“http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/at-just-14-ucla-math-student-moshe-229359.aspx]At”>Newsroom | UCLA)
[Top</a> graduating senior a rags-to-academic-riches story](<a href=“Berkeley News | Berkeley”>Berkeley News | Berkeley)
[Aaron</a> Benavidez | Department of Sociology](<a href=“http://sociology.fas.harvard.edu/people/aaron-benavidez]Aaron”>Aaron Benavidez | Department of Sociology)</p>
<p>(Yes, your teaching fellow at Harvard may have been a non-traditional student who started college at a community college.)</p>
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<p>No, the implication is that any ranking of colleges that uses high school GPA or SAT scores as a measure of a college’s quality are inaccurate, because it does not take into account the large percentage (I think I read 20% in USC’s case) of grads whose scores were never counted and were likely much lower. In the context of this discussion (state schools v. Ivies), it is significant, because most Ivies take virtually no (meaning very few) transfer students, vs. state schools, which take thousands.</p>
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<p>The service academies publicly hand out the diplomas for the entire graduating class, from top to bottom, in academic rank order. I have not heard of any other colleges also ranking to this extent.</p>
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<p>Yes, I guess I am mistaken that a grad would know this. Some grads do know (cum laude, etc), and I remembered that John McCain graduated last in his class, I believe. Law schools also give you (or used to) give you your rank. I don’t know whether any other colleges do this.</p>
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<p>You are looking solely at the individual case. It is obvious that transfers, be it upwards or downwards, are part of the academic life of a student. It is also obvious that the CC or JUCO route is an integral part of the California system of education. And there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all!</p>
<p>On the other hand, when it comes to COMPARING schools, and especially in the context of many discussions in these forums, this factor is simply buried as the inputs are based on high school performance and admissions to the freshman class. In so many words, when looking at a graduating class, an observer ends with apples and oranges. In the above example, Princeton’s graduating class is entirely composed of students who started as freshmen, and mostly with four year students. Cal’s class is a different animal with a hodgepodge of 3 to 6 years graduates (depending of the use of HS credits) plus the JUCO transfers. All in all, that accounts for a different student body, including students who would never have been admitted based on their HS performance at Cal, let alone at one of the schools that Cal might be compared to. </p>
<p>And, again, all of that is in the (incomplete) context of comparing schools through the sole lens of their top students from high schools.</p>
<p>xiggi, I am completely not getting the relevance of your point, and you obviously aren’t understanding me. </p>
<p>"[T]he student bodies are NOT interchangeable." Of course they aren’t. Who said they were? And what difference does it make that the student bodies are “NOT interchangeable”? </p>
<p>Berkeley is educating five times as many undergraduates as Princeton. Maybe a handful of them applied to Princeton and were accepted, and turned it down to go to Berkeley. Probably a few hundred were legitimate candidates for Princeton or equivalent schools, applied, and were rejected for whatever reason, and maybe a few hundred more were legitimate candidates but didn’t bother applying. And everyone else, based on their records at 18, were not in the same league as Princeton students.</p>
<p>All that means to me, though, is that the simple fact that someone is a Berkeley student or a Berkeley grad doesn’t let me infer as much about his academic ability as the fact of being a Princeton student or Princeton grad would. That’s the biggest reason why Berkeley ranks lower than Princeton, despite essential equivalence at the faculty and grad student levels. But that does not mean that a Princeton-quality student (or, if you insist, a near-Princeton-quality student) at Berkeley gets an inferior education. A good student at Berkeley is studying the same material as a good student at Princeton, with equivalent faculty and grad students, and enough peers to get the benefits of having peers. What does it matter that there may be 1,000 people who will graduate in his class who may be meaningfully less intelligent or accomplished than he is? Is that going to hold him back in any way, besides forcing potential employers/adcoms to think about specifics on his resume, which they were going to do anyway?</p>
<p>What I thought we were arguing about on this thread was not whether Princeton and Berkeley were the same, but whether the differences between Princeton and Berkeley justified the difference in price for a hypothetical Princeton admittee who could get in-state tuition at Berkeley. I think that’s a tough question, and honestly in my family I answered a similar question “yes,” but I wasn’t sure at all that my answer was right. Because I think it’s easier to learn, and to achieve, and to set ambitious goals for yourself at Princeton, but I think a motivated and skilled student can get as much or more out of Berkeley as he might have out of Princeton.</p>
<p>I even have a relevant anecdote. I happen to know two people, about seven years apart, one who went to Harvard and the other who went to, as it happens, Berkeley. Both were English majors interested in arts journalism, both did a lot of relevant stuff in college and built up nice resumes and clipping files, both decided to press on in the real world against all reasonable advice. Mr. Harvard, now in his early 30s, has a great position at the pinnacle of the (shrinking) profession. But for a while there in the first few years after he graduated, I would run into him and worry whether he was eating regularly. He was really scrapping to get by on freelance work. Mr. Berkeley is younger. He has been trying to get traction, too (and seems to have gotten it), but he has had a much easier time than Mr. Harvard had, and in what has become a much tougher environment than Mr. Harvard faced 10 years ago. He had a series of paid internships with first-rank organizations (NPR, The Atlantic), which finally led to a quality permanent position (whatever that means in journalism these days). He has been continuously employed since the day he graduated – and I don’t know any other young journalist who could say the same.</p>
<p>No one could argue responsibly Harvard and Berkeley have equivalent student bodies, or that, if you were ranking colleges, they would rank equally. But it’s entirely possible for there to be students at both colleges who are equivalents, with equivalent interests, and for them to have equivalent success in the real world coming out of college, or even for the Berkeley student to do better than the Harvard student, notwithstanding that the Harvard guy was a very good student.</p>
<p>Ranking schools in general is a pretty stupid activity, unless you are doing it to sell ads. It’s like ranking baseball teams before the season starts and the rankings become irrelevant. Ranking schools for an individual student, on the other hand, is worth doing, especially if you are that student. At the student level, whether it’s a top, Princeton-equivalent student, or a bottom, just-made-it-in student, a broad-spectrum public university will often be the most competitive option, even if it doesn’t mean the same for every student.</p>
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<p>THIS. Add this to the list of useful CC aphorisms.</p>
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<p>Actually, I think that it is you who is making quite an effort to not understand my very simple posts. And speaking of relevance, would you mind reading the post I answered to? Here is it:
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<p>How is that for relevance? I gave the example of Berkeley as it is a school that some try to compare to the Ivy League school despite having little to nothing to do in terms of student body. </p>
<p>I am not sure what there is to argue. Different schools for different folks. Different schools with clearly different missions and targets. </p>
<p>Fwiw, your deliberate inclusion of faculty and especially GRADUATE students is duly noted, but also quite irrelevant as the faculty at Cal is essentially dedicated to research while Princeton is essentially an undergraduate institution. As it is typical for almost all discussions about Cal, some think that it is important to bring in faculty and the graduate schools, despite that the major theme of these forums is the undergraduate education. </p>
<p>Unless I have been “ass-backward” on that also for more than a decade.</p>
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<p>Didn’t I talk about comparing schools? Perhaps, I should reread my posts, but I am pretty certain that I did not use the term ranking in this discussion. </p>
<p>Anyhow, fwiw, for the Cal JUCO transfer, I’d think that ranking schools must have been a rather futile exercise, as Cal was his or her best bet both for freshmen and transfer admissions. And I think that is the point I made about the differences between schools. Or was I unclear?</p>
<p>I also believe that you bring up points you know I am bound to agree with!</p>
<p>Yes, I think you are ass-backward on that, xiggi. When I was a college student, graduate students in my main fields of interest were an important part of the educational environment, the scholarly community. I learned a ton from them. They were a plus, not a minus. For an advanced undergraduate, moreover, grad students may be more important peers in his or her main field of interest than other undergraduates. So, yes, for me grad students are worth taking into account. At Princeton, too.</p>
<p>And where do you get the notion that Princeton faculty is less dedicated to research than Cal faculty? Not if they want to remain Princeton faculty, they aren’t.</p>
<p>I think I understand your very, very simple posts fine. It’s just that your point is so very, very simple that I wonder if it has any value at all. And because usually what you say does have value, I have been trying to figure out what that might be, but I am going to stop now.</p>
<p>You say that the student body at Princeton is almost to a person stronger than the student body at Cal, at least as of the date of admission. I think that’s meaningfully overstated – I think there is significantly more overlap than “none” – but it’s still basically correct. But so what? What conclusion are you drawing from that? That Princeton is better than Cal? For every student? That every student at Cal gets an education that is inferior to the education of any student at Princeton? You really believe that?</p>
<p>If so, you are wrong.</p>
<p>What’s more, I might be willing to concede for the sake of argument that each student at Cal could, if he were at Princeton, get a better education in some respect. But how much better? Enough to justify paying an extra $20,000? $40,000? $100,000? Isn’t it possible that there is some price differential in a realistic range at which a rational student could conclude that it wasn’t worth paying the extra for Princeton? </p>
<p>But, sure, if we are being simple, Princeton is better, and it’s admission process is perfect at discerning who will be winners and who losers. It is not possible to provide excellent education to students not extraordinary enough to be accepted at Princeton (or Harvard, Stanford, maybe Yale), or who never bothered to try to get accepted at Princeton. If Cal had any dignity, it would stop trying to educate a whole bunch of normal smart kids, build some eating clubs, and start offering free rides to anyone who shows up with a Stanford admission letter in hand. That would be simply great.</p>
<p>Taylor Wilson is perhaps the smartist kid in the Nation. He chose the University of Reno for his school. [Taylor</a> Wilson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson]Taylor”>Taylor Wilson - Wikipedia). Wonder why he didn’t go Ivy??</p>
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<p>Again, you use that term, but have yet to “splain” why that is, or perhaps what justified the use of such an offensive qualifier. All I see are straw men arguments as you argue points I never made. </p>
<p>For the third time, my posts were about a very simple element, namely that the school I used as an example is different from an Ivy League, and that the study bodies are not interchangeable. Feel free to disagree with me, but I maintain my position based on the evidence that is available for cross-admits and enrolled students. Simply stated, the overwhelming majority (close to all) who were cross-admitted students did enroll at HYPS. Compound this over the years, and you DO have a vastly different student body with a higher degree of homogeneity at HYPS. And that was exactly the item I answered to and (I assume) the point that you called ass-backward (for no good reasons, in my book)</p>
<p>Edit: I deleted the rest of my post. Lost my interest in debating Cal’s purported greatness.</p>
<p>Re: Taylor Wilson</p>
<p>[Taylor?s</a> Nuke Site](<a href=“http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/About_Me.html]Taylor?s”>About Me — Taylor Wilson) indicates that he is attending University of Nevada - Reno while still a high school student (he lives in Reno).</p>
<p>Nevertheless, it may be perfectly reasonable for him to go to a non-Ivy-League school if he decides to go to college after doing whatever he does with a Thiel Fellowship. No Ivy League school has a nuclear engineering major.</p>
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<p>He presumably will have received an inferior education, if he was a transfer to Berkeley from a mediocre community college after sophomore year. He’d only get two years of a quality Berkeley education, not four like the Princeton grad has. Something like 30% of Berkeley grads are transfers, I believe.</p>
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Yeah. Not likely. That was the subject of the very first post of your’s I read in 2009, and you haven’t given up the avocation yet.</p>
<p>Great, Bovertine, it seems that my post was truly indelible, if you remember it that vividly. It must have been a gem in the genre. :)</p>
<p>Xiggi, what you have wrong is the relevance of the inferiority of Cal’s student body on the whole to anything. The fact that the vast, vast majority of Cal students have not been and would not be accepted at Princeton, and mostly don’t look like Princeton students even on paper, does not mean that Cal offers an inferior education. That’s why I said you were ass-backwards to start with, and why you continue to be pointed in that direction.</p>
<p>Your error – and I think it is a serious error – is to assume that the presence of a cohort of less able students somehow infects the educational opportunities of the more able students, whoever they are. Gives them dumb cooties or something. At Princeton, that really can’t happen much, because everyone is smooshed together ability-wise, and the ones who are really smarter than the others don’t have meaningful peers anywhere anyway. At Cal, if every class got taught to the lowest common denominator, or let’s say the 25th percentile, it might be that better students suffered. But I don’t think that’s what happens.</p>
<p>Your ass-backward view is that the bottom quartile of undergraduates defines the institution. And my view is that the faculty and the best students define the institution, and if some less able students get educated, too, that’s great. It’s admirable, not some sort of black mark against the university. If educating the less able students – and it’s not like the “less able” students at Cal are a group of mental defectives – dilutes the signaling value of a Cal diploma, that’s not such a terrible tragedy.</p>
<p>You have good company for your view, though. It’s what USNWR does, too, which is why places like Cal and Michigan that are amazing world-class universities get ranked way below places like Georgetown on USNWR.</p>
<p>Re: belief “that the bottom quartile of undergraduates defines the institution”</p>
<p>Perhaps an even better example university of this is not Berkeley, but Arizona State.</p>
<p>Baseline selectivity is very low at Arizona State so anyone who bases university quality on the bottom end of students there will rank it low. But there are (given its huge size and co-flagship status) many brilliant students there (perhaps an “embedded Yale”?), some of whom go on to top PhD programs in their majors after graduation.</p>
<p>Note that this comes back to what I have posted previously about broad versus narrow range (in terms of entering student characteristics) schools, and how that may affect the offerings at the schools and how suitable they are for students away from the median at the school.</p>
<p>@JHS: Just so you know, my views on tiers can easily be applied to all fields. In your example, you mention that UW-Madison may be outstanding in a certain industry for their Ph.D. program. I agree, and my parents definitely do, considering they got their Master’s/PhD’s there! That simply means that UW-Madison is in the top-tier for whatever field of study this PhD program is outstanding in. It would be then wrong to equate a lower-tiered school (which could be Harvard—hard to imagine, but perhaps!) as of equal status/caliber as the one at UW-Madison. </p>
<p>What I disagree with is equating the tiers. Making implications like “If I went to UCLA instead of Harvard, got an MBA, and was a success, then we should promote less kids going to the Ivy League, lower the prestige/status of the Ivy League, etc.”. It just doesn’t make sense.</p>
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<p>The perceptions/opinions of educators count for 22.5% of the USNWR national universitites/LACs rankings and 25% of the regional universities/LACs rankings. The other 75% or more of the calculation is based on “objective” metrics. You may not agree with the metrics they choose, or with the weightings, but factors like average class size or retention aren’t simply a matter of opinion.</p>
<p>Moreover, they tend to be mutually corroborating. If you take out the subjective peer assessment and counsellor assements, the rankings don’t change all that much. Actually, the rankings of the Ivies and other prestigious private schools would tend to go UP, not down. The PA scores, if anything, seem to benefit state schools with high research productivity. But even if you based the rankings on a factor as simple as average SAT scores, they would not change all that much. Harvard would be at or near the top whether you counted faculty salaries or the age of the bricks in its buildings.</p>
<p>As for post-graduate student performance, what exactly would you measure? Forbes tries to use these performance factors. Its rankings take a lot of flack on CC. So does payscale.com. My beef with these rankings isn’t so much about their accuracy, sampling methods, etc., as the appropriateness of using alumni salary performance to measure the quality of academic instituitions. Colleges and universities are knowlege factories. They’re also in the business of educating for citizenship and the disciplined use of leisure time. How do you measure any of that? If you focus only on knowledge-production, you can look at bibliometrics (the number of faculty publications or citations). Those metrics tend to favor state schools that attract lots of grant money … as well as the Ivies (and other prestigious private research universities). You can look at PhD productivity, a metric that tends to favor LACs … as well as the Ivies (and other prestigious private research universities).</p>
<p>If it’s true that the rankings perpetuate the status quo, why would that be wrong? Maybe public perceptions, and educator perceptions, are pretty much correct. If they’re not, don’t you think that (with or without rankings) over time the smart money would tend to move toward improving schools and away from declining schools? </p>
<p>I think the rankings are one useful tool in college selection. They shouldn’t be used to make fine distinctions in choosing a college. However, if we didn’t have them (and the data they’re based on) many HS students would be back to Aunt Martha’s and Uncle Fred’s opinions … or guide books that list a couple of measurements like average SAT scores … or the advice of over-extended, under-motivated guidance counsellors.</p>