This may sound like a really stupid question to some of you but I was wondering what the difference between top universities like Harvard and typical universities is? Does a university like Harvard have really really good professors compare to others? Do students who go to Harvard make more money or get more job offers? Why does society care so much about which colleges people go to?
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It somewhat depends on what you are calling a typical university. To give some examples from Ohio, are you comparing to Ohio State, U of Cincinnati or Wright State?
At a top university, almost all of of the professors are at the top of their field. Some may have the top award in their field (e.g. Nobel Prize). You will still have some that are at the top at a place like OSU. That would be unlikely at Wright State. However, this is based upon their research, not on their ability to teach intro economics.
From a student perspective, as you move down the range of students gets larger. The top student may be equivalent at H and OSU, but the average and bottom will be lower. At Wright State, the chances of finding a H level student gets slim, but not zero. This can impact what is taught in the “same” class at different schools because they may be targeting the “average” student. A exam may be multiple choice at the low level, short answer/essay at mid level and a research paper at the high level. The same student likely has to put in more effort to receive the same grade as the level of school increases. There is also a lot of difference in SES and geographic distribution.
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Peers may be more accomplished, and work load may be harder. Classes at universities like Harvard tend to have the professor lecture and grad student TF’s run discussion sections and do grading.
Smaller liberal arts colleges would tend to have smaller classes taught entirely by professors, as a generalization. Some LAC’s are quite prestigious as well.
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I do not have any experience at Harvard. I do have degrees from two other universities that are ranked at very close to the same level.
A lot of universities have very good professors. I do not think that you will most of the time have any better professors at Harvard (or MIT or Stanford). There will be a few bad professors at any university. There will be many very good professors at any “top 200” university or “top 50” LAC and probably a lot more colleges and universities than that. I had one bad professor in a really tough course at MIT and to me it was just hopeless – I had to drop the course.
However, you will get a few more famous professors at the top schools. For example my academic advisor at MIT was later the math advisor for the movie Good Will Hunting. Allegedly he make a cameo appearance in the film although I did not notice him when I watched the film. I took a course at Stanford from professor Charles Stein at the same time that an article on Stein’s Paradox came out in I think Scientific American. A few students got him to sign their copy of the magazine. His course was tough. I also had a course in AI from Seymour Papert at MIT – he is a very famous person in that particular field and it was a great course. Some other students I know took linear programming at Stanford from George Dantzig who is the inventor of the simplex method for solving LP problems – apparently he was a great professor although I took a class that conflicted with his session so I took the same class from a far less well known but also very good professor (who then moved to Montreal and taught at Concordia).
The professors at Harvard or other top universities can assume that every student in the class is very smart and wants to work very hard. Some of the classes will be quite difficult. If you have a great professor in a tough course that you like it can be both an enormous amount of work and very interesting. If you get a tough professor in a course that you do not like it can be quite unpleasant and stressful.
One difference I did notice: Some professors at top schools will put really hard problems on their exams. For example the second course I took from Charles Stein had perhaps 200 graduate students in the class. The last problem on the final exam he told me only 2 students in the entire class even tried to solve. This was how he decided whether anyone in the class deserved an A+ (apparently he did not like to give out very many of them). Whether this is torture or fun might depend upon your point of view.
The top students at U.Mass Amherst or Rutgers or The Ohio State are going to be just as strong as at least the top 1/2 of the students at Harvard or MIT, and probably as strong as the very top students at Harvard or MIT. The top students at U.Mass or Rutgers or Ohio State will get great research opportunities also.
I agree with @compmom that the top LACs are going to be just as strong as the top universities. You will often find smaller classes at the LACs and the classes will be taught by full professors. The smaller classes means that it is easier for students to get to know their professors.
As a graduate student at Stanford I noticed that the other students in the same program had come from a very wide range of other universities. A LOT of them had a bachelor’s degree from their in-state public university. This did not stop them from getting into Stanford for graduate school, and did not stop them from being very strong graduate students.
Also, having graduated with degrees from two famous schools, I have since spent my life working alongside many people who graduated from the local public university (which more often than not was their local university in somewhere other than the US). The best coworkers and the best bosses that I have had have probably more often had their degrees from local public universities rather than famous universities.
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The professors are going to be accomplished anywhere you go, because there’s such an oversupply of PhD’s. There will be some profs who are not good teachers at all institutions, because what’s rewarded is research, publications, and obtaining funding, as opposed to teaching.
The academic level of the students will be higher at the more selective institutions. The job opportunities can be better coming out of the more selective, more well-known institutions. The social climbing opportunities, if one knows how to take advantage of them, can certainly be better at the prestigious institutions.
There are many, many people who do very well in life having attended state universities. And there are people who do well in life without having attended any college at all.
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Harvard and like schools have a higher concentration of top students and their student body comes from all over the world. In terms of the actual education - you can get as good an education (if not better in some majors) at many selective LAC/state flagship universities, but they won’t have the same prestige factor as someplace like Harvard.
great post @DadTwoGirls !
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Actually, in the professional world, we really don’t care. There are a select few industries that value college prestige, but it’s not a substitute for experience. The reality is that the vast majority of college bound kids go to local/state universities, get jobs and build prosperous careers in a wide variety of industries. The ones that go to expensive schools also build prosperous careers, but have much more debt. The ones that go to expensive schools without debt are the rich kids, and they make-up an extremely small fraction of the workforce. If you have the necessary skills, you usually won’t have to look far. Most employers prefer to hire locally and regionally, because it’s more cost effective that way, and that includes big corporations too.
So to answer your question, the answer is really no. Salaries are near impossible to compare anyway because there’s such a huge difference with the cost of living. A $90,000 salary in Dallas doesn’t mean the same thing as a $90,000 salary in San Francisco.
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@coolguy small point: students from low income backgrounds can also go to certain expensive schools with no debt, due to financial aid.
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The question was about top schools versus typical schools not expensive versus cheap. If I go back to my example schools, the percentage with debt and average debt are listed below.
Harvard 7% $6,170
OSU 50%. $27,242
UCincy 58%. $30,350
I couldn’t find the same data for Wright State.
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Top-flight peer students will give you a good run for your money. There’s value in being surrounded by people who can outmatch you. If you’re admitted to Harvard chances are you’ve never experienced that before. The experience brings out your top game.
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Networking during and especially after graduation.
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This is a statement I’ve read numerous times in various places, and would you mind elaborating? My assumption is that college prestige is important to those with Finance or PolySci majors, but I feel there are other industries that I’m missing where prestige is more important.
Smart and hardworking students can succeed anywhere. A top school has a higher concentration of brain power and relationships, both in its faculty and its student body, than a typical school. The higher density means that a student at a top school can more easily run into an interesting idea or thought, and can more likley be challenged by people around him/her. At a more typical school, the same or similar opportunities are less concentrated so a top student may need to make greater effort to seek them out.
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Money.
Colleges in the COFHE group (which includes Harvard) Consortium on Financing Higher Education, generally spend more money on need-based financial aid (as opposed to merit-based aid), cast a wider net geographically and generally leverage their endowments to a far greater extent in order to do so. As others have stated, an American student from a family of four, making <$99k a year has a better chance of graduating from Harvard with little to no debt than they would from their own state flagship university.
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Definitely important in top Engineering companies (e.g., Google, Tesla). Prestige as measured by the Engineering rankings, not the general one (eg, Harvard and Yale don’t rate as highly).
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For classroom experience, you may want to look elsewhere:
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Google does not appear to be especially college-prestige-focused in its recruiting at dozens or hundreds of colleges. However, its hiring process requires solving difficult problems, so there is some correlation between academic strength needed to get admitted to more selective colleges and strength in solving the difficult problems in Google interviews.
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A bit off topic but it will be interesting to see what happens relative to elite college recruitment / admissions / yield as Google’s professional certification program takes off. How many other tech giants will do the same? Essentially they are creating a skill specific path to outstanding careers without any college requirement. More like an apprenticeship.
Didn’t think that would be a scaled viable option pre covid, but now so many alternatives to schooling and work environment are on the table. Part of me hates that as I see tremendous value in kids going to college just to mature and learn who they really are. Part of me loves it (as I am a big believer in innovation and creative destruction) and know that it’s inevitable so might as well jump on board.
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One thing to understand is that for a large percentage of CS students at elite colleges, the end goal is not Google. For many, Google or its peers are fallback plans.
If I liken it to college admissions, ending up at Google is like ending up at a state flagship. It’s still high quality and and lots of people go there, including some who are exceptionally bright.
But just like a large percentage of the top students look beyond the state flagship and to elite colleges, many of the top students look beyond the FAANGs and look to join much more selective employers like hedge funds, or seek to create their own startup. The number of new employees hired at hedge funds is small, perhaps a few hundred each year compared to the tends of thousands each year at the FAANGs. It is probably similar numbers for people creating their own startup, and at most a few thousand each year joining an early stage startup.
Getting back to the original question, one difference is that the most selective employers have a small number of target institutions where they recruit. Companies that want the strongest CS students recruit at places like Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley, Ga Tech, and Harvard (the last one not because it has a great CS program, but because some of the students entering are really good). These employers don’t have a bias against exceptional graduates from other places, because they will take talent wherever they find it, but because they only need a small number, they focus their search on places with the most concentration of talent.
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A few years ago, there were a number of colleges in Princeton Review’s peer ranking of professors that had far more highly regarded professors than Harvard. I can’t remember what the list was called, maybe the Best 300 professors? I think now the list has to be purchased.
Tiny Kenyon College had at least eight professors on that list, and Harvard had four. Harvard is a great school, of course. It’s not the best school. It doesn’t have the best professors, just because it’s Harvard. I would argue that there a bunch of colleges that are better than Harvard. I bet a lot of people would agree with me, lol.
Someone I know very well currently works with a teaching doctor at Harvard. This doctor’s undergraduate degree is from somewhere similar to Northeastern, BU or NYU. Harvard is a great school, but again, it’s not the be all and end all of higher education. Success is largely up to an individual.
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