<p>Tyler,
No argument from me that U Michigan is viewed more strongly than ND within elite academia. I don’t necessarily interpret that as a badge of honor. As I have posted many times before, my focus is on the student and his/her actual experience and not on the reputation of the faculty in the academic world. </p>
<p>IMO, you will learn far more from your peers than your professors and, for most students uninterested in a career in academia, those peer relationships will have a much more profound impact on your post-graduate life. </p>
<p>As for faculty relationships, I think you will always remember that great teacher or teachers whose classes you took. And you should. However, within academia, the kudos go not to them, but to those who try to get published in obscure publications or do research that most of us will never know about. Not that those things are automatically unimportant, but I do think that, in most cases, they are not of direct benefit to undergraduate students. </p>
<p>The choice between a top private and a highly-ranked public will often come down to how one values the various elements that we have discussed. I emphasize the four major tenets (great peers, small classes, great teaching, deep resources) while you emphasize the faculty’s reputation within academia. Other factors undoubtedly have great importance, eg, money (wasn’t that a major factor in your choice?).</p>
<p>And btw, I think you will find students from many Midwestern colleges beyond ND and U Michigan that have great passion for their schools (Wash U, Northwestern, U Wisconsin, U Illinois, Ohio State, others), but don’t necessarily express it in quite as loud or obnoxious a fashion. </p>
<p>Collegeundergrad,
I think you raise a good point about undergraduate engineering and how a college’s status in this field is very important. I mostly agree. Unlike the vast majority of other majors, one must decide BEFORE matriculation that one wants to do engineering. However, engineering rarely involves more than 15-20% of an undergraduate population, even at places like U Michigan where it has a high profile. Given that there still are 75-80% of the undergraduate population waiting to declare their academic focus (and even then, they may change it a time or two), I think that the prospective student’s focus should be much more on the environment that he or she will encounter rather than some amorphous statistic like Peer Assessment scores. </p>
<p>As for diversity, there are lots of ways to measure this. I personally believe that diversity of thought is far more meaningful than diversity of skin color. Presenting and defending one’s arguments in an rainbow-colored echo chamber is not diversity. Doing so in front of effective thinkers with different ideas most certainly is. According to an informal Facebook study done by a CC poster in 2007, Notre Dame has one of the most diverse student bodies with 30% conservative, 20% moderate, and 30% liberal (and 20% not sure). </p>
<p>Finally, I agree with you that a college should have a sufficient critical mass of students to provide a diverse environment. For that reason, I am less a fan of LACs than you might imagine. I love their intimate learning environment, but as so much learning also goes on outside of the classroom, I am not as sure that the smaller schools provide a sufficiently broad possibility of experiences. I think that mid-size campuses (3000-10,000) are best as IMO, they can give you the optimum blend of the most desirable features.</p>