Top 10 versus Top 25

shawbridge
Tue, 19 May 2009 16:47:42 +0000

I’ve posted on this type of topic before, but there are a bunch of things kids can get out of college (social skills, orientation towards the world, etc.). I’m going to focus on three.

Education. I believe that one can get a good education at a variety of schools, top 10, top 25, top 1000. Top 10 schools that do not pay attention to undergraduates may provide a worse education than top 100 LACs. Even here, I would not be categorical because an astute Harvard undergrad with useless TA’s may (or may not) learn as much from his/her classmates as kids at other schools learn from professors. So it is hard to say.

For kids who want to become academics, being at a top research university can (but need not) enable a student to have as an advisor/thesis advisor/supervisor in research one of the world’s great researchers in an area. If the kid does a good job, this will grease the wheels for getting into grad school and beyond. This happened to me. This is unlikely to happen at an LAC or a 2nd tier or 3rd tier research university. But this comes from research rankings and not USNWR’s rankings that combine school reputation with admissions selectivity with lots of other stuff. So, there are clearly schools in USNWR’s top 25 that are decent but not fabulous research universities. Some great people there to be sure, but not overall. [Based upon my incomplete knowledge of a number of academic fields, I’d guess that schools in the top 25 like WSUTL or Emory get their rankings more from their students than from their faculty. I don’t see Georgetown pop up in rankings of academic departments at all, outside of the political science/international relations areas. Even Brown is pretty spotty. Some very good departments and others that are relatively undistinguished]. This is not damning – as the really good LACs will obviously not be on the list of great departments in any field – but it does mean that while you get bigger classes than an LAC and may get TA’s in many cases, you are a lot less likely to have access to research greats who can help you in your career and provide you a window on the most cutting edge work in the field.

Horizons. The top 15 schools (or something like that, and I would include universities and LACs in making this list) differ from other schools in their influence on the aspirations and horizons of the students. Kids at McGill may want to be the best in Canada. Kids at the University of Georgia may want to be the best in Georgia (or a well-situated lawyer in Atlanta). Many kids at Harvard and Princeton come to want to be the best in the world at what they are doing. Some of that is the drive/ambition of the kids, but some is clearly the institution. Somehow the scale and scope of the ambition is different and this is influenced by the schools.

Contacts. The top 15 schools (university and LAC) give kids contacts that can be very powerful. My college friends include the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the Dean of a highly-ranked law school, the head of a large charity, several private equity folks and VCs (of course), medical school professors, World Bank economists, etc. HYPSM are probably the strongest at this, but we were touring Amherst and the guide had an internship the summer before at Goldman, Sachs that an Amherst alum there kept for Amherst kids. I think Dartmouth is similar. Some schools, like BC, do this on a regional basis. [It is possible that as the expansion of the Ivies from largely regional to national to global applicant pools over the past 50 years has pushed so many good kids to other schools that this effect may diminish over time.]

In short, I think that it is hard to know where one gets the best education. It need not be in the top 10 or top 25 and may not be correlated well with USNWR ranking. But, I think the top schools (my list would differ from the USNWR ranking) shape horizons and offer contacts in ways that other schools don’t. These latter two effects can change the course of kids’ lives. You may think that those effects are good or bad (e.g., setting really high expectations both increases performance on average and probably leads to depression or other psychological issues for some of the kids who don’t meet the elevated expectations).

So the messages are: a) Since the top 10 schools generally would be in my list of 15 or so, there may be a difference between top 10 and 25; b) you have to ask what benefits you want and then ask if these are conferred by particular schools.