<p>Simba, I deal with probablilty for a living. :)</p>
<p>I’m in agreement with what you said in your last post that you wrote to me. #1026.</p>
<p>In my life, I haven’t found IVY Leaguers to be more educated than other people I have met.</p>
<p>Education occurs in many places.</p>
<p>Let me ask you a question or two. </p>
<p>Is a person who is a math genius and studies math all day more educated than a person who studies political science all day? A person who studies sociology, psychology, frogs, the environment, great literature, etc.?</p>
<p>Is a person who studies math at Princeton all day, more educated than somebody who studies Shakespeare all day somewhere else?</p>
<p>Is a person who studies math all day at Princeton more educated than somebody who joins the Peace Corp or Backroads, and spends years living in different cultures?</p>
<p>To answer your question, for you, the answer is yes, you can get a better education at Princeton than a low-tiered state school.</p>
<p>Quantity does not mean a thing. Actually, it may not promote interaction. </p>
<p>My son’s group consists of hispanic, african american, indian, singaporean, chinese, korean, russian, yugoslavian, pakistani, white jewish, and some WASPs.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, your analogy doesn’t work. Ivies do not cost more than all the other colleges!! They just admit a smaller percentage of applicants. The analogy would be: You go to Brooks Brothers (a store that has been known for a long time to produce quality shirts) to buy an expensive shirt. Mind you, there are plenty of other stores that have just as or more expensive shirts. But they won’t let everyone in the store. You complain that it isn’t fair, but you’re only saying this because you desperately want a Brooks Brothers shirt. The manager points out that the store is 200 square feet, so it can only hold so many people at one time.</p>
<p>Also, was there anyone on this board who delighted in someone screwing up at their job? I hope not.</p>
<p>We all believe fundamentally that it’s who you are that determines where you go in life?
Certainly, apart from some professions where you needed to go to a certain school, going to an Ivy does not confer a special advantage.
Certainly, they are great schools which are rather different from each other.
Cliche as it may seem, what you get out of it is what you put into it.
At several large state universities, there are wider course holdings, more comprehensive resources in terms of both literature, research, and the professors themselves, than at Ivies.
But will you “get more out of” an Ivy or a large state school or a community college, or a less selective liberal arts college?
That depends on you.
If you get into an Ivy, and then kind of coast for 4 years, figuring you’ve got it made, then you’ve wasted 4 years and a lot of money.
The same is true at any college.
The same is true of any 4 years of your life after college.
So, one solution is to get to know yourself and your own habits, and be honest about your strengths and limitations. Will you get lost at a big school? Will you be stifled at a small school?
Will the school run out of courses for you to take in your subject area?
Are you self-motivated, preferring to master the material on your own in a Keller course and take the exam?
Do you need someone to tell you what subjects to study for a significant portion of your academic career by fulfilling distribution requirements?
Does having a small or large classroom experience impact you a great deal in your interest and level of participation in learning?
Once you’ve answered a lot of these questions, then you can start to do the research and narrow down your search for a school at which you’ll be happy.
If an Ivy ends up on your list, great. If not, that’s fine.
Perhaps you’ve decided to question the value of a college education completely, after discovering what you want out of life.
I know of so many people who are at the top of their field who did not complete college. Of course, these aren’t academic fields.
But they found something to pursue that college did not provide, got into it, got better at it, and are happy with their choices.</p>
<p>The top 10 public universities by enrollment for 2005 are:</p>
<ol>
<li>51,712: Arizona State University - Tempe, AZ</li>
<li>51,175: University of Minnesota Twin Cities - Minneapolis, MN</li>
<li>50,504: Ohio State University - Columbus, OH</li>
<li>49,650: University of Florida - Gainesville, FL</li>
<li>49,333: University of Texas at Austin - Austin, TX</li>
<li>45,166: Michigan State University - East Lansing, MI</li>
<li>45,090: University of Central Florida - Orlando, FL</li>
<li>44,647: Texas A&M University-College Station - College Station, TX</li>
<li>43,021: University of South Florida - Tampa, FL</li>
<li>41,480: University of Wisconsin-Madison - Madison, WI</li>
</ol>
<p>It’s interesting that you would single out the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, since public universities recruit heavily from their home states and both these schools are in states that are not known for ethnic diversity. However, many large public universities (especially those in California, New York, Michigan, Texas, and Florida) are known for ethnic and economic diversity.</p>
USC is a large private university. It’s total enrollment is approximately 32,000 students. Thus, 21% of the students attending USC are foreign students. The percentages for the public universities are: UI-Urbana - 14%; UT-Austin - 10.8%; UM-Ann Arbor - 11.8%; UCLA - 12%; and Ohio State - 8.1%.</p>
<p>Religious diversity is a more complicated issue and I admit it is not one that I can adequately address. We know that most Ivy League colleges and many private colleges were affiliated with or established by specific religious denominations. Although most of these colleges (particularly the Ivy League colleges) are highly secularized now, they remain popular with some students because of their religious heritage. I submit that large public universities are more likely to attract students from a diversity of religious backgrounds and, in general, to be more neutral than even the secularized Ivy League colleges. In addition, the sheer enrollment numbers suggest more diversity because there is a bigger pool of students at large public universities than at most private colleges.</p>
<p>Simba, no, you were probably not confused. I added a line to make the sentence you mentioned…“To answer your question, for you, the answer is yes, you can get a better education at Princeton than a low-tiered state school”.</p>
<p>Since my alma mater has been mentioned in this thread, I will post a comment I was going to post anyway. I see one of the lifetime advantages of attending one of the top colleges (to keep this reply resolutely on-topic) being that at a nationally top college, one meets young people from all over the United States, and all over the world, in a way that just isn’t matched by the Big Ten universities, including my alma mater. Education quality as gauged by some other criteria is quite good at the Big Ten, and I agree that ultimately the student has to take responsibility for his or her own learning, but opportunities to meet people from other regions of the United States (especially) and other parts of the world abound at the national “top” research universities. I did know quite a lot of international students at the U of MN, but hardly any southerners, Californians, or northeasterners–they were scarcely there to meet. The educational advantage of meeting people with different life experience gained in a different region is large enough, in my opinion, to warrant my children applying to the top colleges of their choice and my paying such a top college’s EFC.</p>
<p>“If you get into an Ivy, and then kind of coast for 4 years, figuring you’ve got it made, then you’ve wasted 4 years and a lot of money.” -montrose</p>
<p>Depends on what you mean by wasting money and time. At my Ivy, you could coast by 4 years without doing much work if you have an easy major like sociology. I even took “graduate” level sociology courses and received A’s doing less than 10% of the work I did in my major. Many sociology majors spent most of their time in EC’s, sports, etc., doing very little work and racking up easy A’s.</p>
<p>Yet many of these sociology would end up at top law schools and other graduate schools because they have near-perfect GPA’s: for these students coasting by 4 years doing little work was not a waste.</p>
<p>On the other hand, you can have a difficult major like engineering where even a 3.0 GPA may require extraordinary amount of effort. Engineers surely put in the work and learn a lot, but are penalized when they apply for jobs or graduate schools.</p>
<p>Life is not as fair or rational as you think; it’s often a matter of figuring out how to work the system.</p>
<p>“On the other hand, you can have a difficult major like engineering where even a 3.0 GPA may require extraordinary amount of effort. Engineers surely put in the work and learn a lot, but are penalized when they apply for jobs or graduate schools.”</p>
<p>There is some truth to the above statement. My employer has decided certain core schools they will conduct campus interviews. They will not interview below 3.2. A 3.1 (or 3.5) gpa from Stanford or MIT is same as 3.1 (or 3.5) GPA from Michigan State or University of Houston.</p>
<p>token–UMn is not know for having much OOS attraction. That’s why somany Minn kids go to UW to get a better rounded college experience. My roommates over the years at UW included 2 from Cali, one from Alabama, one from Atlanta, one from Boston, several from Chicago, NY, and even Wisconsin.</p>
<p>“It’s interesting that you would single out the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, since public universities recruit heavily from their home states and both these schools are in states that are not known for ethnic diversity. However, many large public universities (especially those in California, New York, Michigan, Texas, and Florida) are known for ethnic and economic diversity.”</p>
<p>A reason I singled out U Minn. and Wisconsin was because those were among the colleges that my older S applied to, and as a result, I was very familiar with their lack of diversity. They also are among the country’s largest public universities.</p>
<p>When it comes to California, the major public universities are not known for having lots of URMs. This plummeted after the anti affirmative action policies were implemented.</p>
<p>According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Ed, the percentage of blacks recently was as following:
UCLA: 3.5%
Berkeley: 4%
Irvine: 2.2%
Davis: 2.5%
San Diego: 1.2%</p>
<p>Here are some stats for other large public universities:</p>
I agree regarding ethnic diversity. That’s why I made the same point in my comment. But that doesn’t negate my larger point that public universities are generally more ethnically and economically diverse institutions. For instance, I suspect UMinn and UW are both more economically diverse than Harvard or other Ivy League colleges.</p>
<p>“Do you define ethnic diversity as how many black students a college has”</p>
<p>As a black person, I have to admit that that’s the URM diversity that’s of most interest to me. However, it’s also the easiest URm diversity to track because the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education does a good job of tracking such stats.</p>
<p>However, just so you get to see some other comparisons, here’s info from the US News Premium Edition college guide:</p>
<p>Harvard:
Total enrollment by ethnic diversity
African-American 8%
Asian-American 17%
Hispanic 8%
Native American 1%
White 57%
International 9%
10% of undergrads receive Pell Grants</p>
<p>Stanford
African-American 11%
Asian-American 24%
Hispanic 12%
Native American 2%
White 45%
International 6% </p>
<p>Economic Diversity
Percent of undergraduate students receiving Pell grants: 13</p>
<p>Berkeley Total enrollment by ethnic diversity
African-American 4%
Asian-American 41%
Hispanic 11%
Native American 1%
White 41%
International 3%
33% of students receive Pell Grants</p>
<p>University of Texas Austin
African-American 4%
Asian-American 17%
Hispanic 15%
Native American 0%
White 60%
International 3% </p>