<p>And OP, the book’s author happily sent his academic, high-achiever daughter to the University of Rochester. I’m a big fan of the school and encouraged my older daughter to consider UofR, but it’s not a top 25 school. If you’re going to use the book to bolster your argument, you need to drop the “everything outside of the top 20 is rubbish” argument. I see you yourself attend Johns Hopkins. It’s a wonderful school–you don’t need to beat other schools down to make that point.</p>
<p>Even if what I have said has been completely absurd, which has not, you would drop your respect for a school based on 1 person’s controversial opinion? Shows how naive you are…</p>
<p>Yes, of course, there are a “few” exceptions. Surely, with the research you’ve done on this topic, you could tell us what schools outside of the pantheon would be considered “legitimate”, as well as the criteria for that judgement? </p>
<p>Also, how exactly are you defining top 20? Is this only drawn from universities, or are you also considering LACs? Would you be taking the top 10 from each category, or are you considering 40 schools overall? Are you using the USNWR rankings, or are you drawing from some other source? One of your early posts mentioned disdain with state schools. Are those excluded entirely? </p>
<p>That earlier CC thread on the book mentioned a list of party schools. I went searching for it…and couldn’t find it. Here’s what the author says about the missing list:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My emphasis there at the end. The author himself says that his evaluations are “too subjective” and couldn’t be backed up with solid information. And this, OP, is the book upon which you are resting your analysis? Methinks you’re not getting your money’s worth from JHU, if this is the type of critical thinking exhibited by their students.</p>
<p>NYU, Tufts, UMich Ann Arbor, UNC, BC, BU, and Purdue</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Rankings I would give:
Yale
Princeton
Harvard
Caltech
Columbia
MIT
Stanford
UPenn
Duke
Chicago
Northwestern
Dartmouth
JHU
WashU
Cornell
Rice
Berkeley
CMU
Georgetown
Brown</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This issue does not need “critical thinking”. It’s simple logic and if you had any interest in business, you would have realized the validity of my arguments.</p>
<p>Osprey, the parents on this forum don’t need a college student with zero real-world experience purporting to tell us how life runs and what employers value.</p>
<p>I am not telling you how life runs or what employers value. I am simply stating my very logical and reasonable opinions. A lot of people on these forums share the same views that I do. Just because they don’t run parallel with your thoughts doesn’t mean that what I have to say is absurd.</p>
<p>“Critical thinking” skills allow one to weigh the accuracy of any limited set of experiences- including limited reading- before drawing absolute truths about an entire category. The fact that others might agree does not make it so.</p>
<p>If you had posed this as a question, I think you would have received a different response. Some of us have broader experiences with a number of colleges and some work for colleges. Critical thinking starts with the notion that there can be different perspectives.</p>
<p>Critical thinking also realizes that authors of public books are often motivated (even encouraged) to take a radical position…to draw attention and sell books. You DO need critical thinking to evaluate what a variety of colleges may be up to- and you really should have the deeper and broader research into institutional goals, how admissions works, the impact of retention, what the student “market” expects when valuing a college, how various colleges (even within a tier) treat teaching responsibilties, etc.</p>
<p>Wait … is osprey from Ballimer or did he just go to school in Ballimer. If the latter, I won’t hold it against that lovely city on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. If the former, well …</p>
<p>osprey: Fail! on using that one perspective. Read: Excellence Without a Soul. That is also from a former dean of Harvard College and he apparently observes the same things. That presents an alternative viewpoint. Again, other than the appearance that top schools are educating better, there is no proof. If anything they have better students that naturally know how to test better w/less effort (and yes, are willing to work harder to get an A…sometimes) or “work the system” to self-inflate their grades. Just because we get into top notch grad. schools and etc. does not mean we were educated significantly better (If most are great standardized test takers, just take a prep. course or get a prep book and mission accomplished. The coursework need not be more rigorous all of the time). We do, however, have more resources and easier access to opps. All we need to do is keep our grades up (through either working hard or “working the system hard”), make connections, get involved in meaningful ECs, and test well. We need not actually learn in the classroom to have an advantage over lower tier counterparts. A huge part of elite schools is socialization and resources (human or other). It ends up being kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you get in. You and the school can provide yourself w/a much weaker than expected (or much weaker than its price) education and you won’t necessarily suffer as much consequences if you socialize and test well.</p>
<p>Also, despite your perceptions of prestige, we deserve to be on the list (it’s UG education among research Us I take it). Most undergrads. here will get a more nurturing and rigorous education than at Berkeley (and some others you have up there) except in engineering and CS maybe merely because we don’t have engineering. I’ve sampled Berkeley’s work in the natural sciences and it isn’t as rigorous and the classes are HUGE. Also apparently, Emory does as well as many of those schools w/natural science (seriously, we have gone out of our way to make a science curriculum for Tibetan Monks. Schools that are not serious don’t do this and they certainly don’t let a bunch of them come and take intro. science courses on campus. If you have patience to educate a Tibetan monk in science, you clearly have amazing skill and patience required to educate highly qualified undergrads) and even social science/humanities undergrad. education (rigor, teaching, not rankings or amounts of Nobel Prize winners, many of whom can’t teach to save their life). Berkeley is too damned big to put it above us. Over shared depts. at both, it actually makes a difference in the rigor of the course and level of student-faculty interaction. I’ve watched some of their lectures online and many of our teachers in the counterparts (say biology, psychology, organic chemistry whatever) are MUCH better and actually attempt to make it more interactive and engage students. Berkeley and some of the others seem stuck on their traditional lecture format for those courses. Many profs. here, even in larger lectures (only like 50-120 here) have moved on to things that actually enhance learning and introduce more rigorous content. Try getting a person who isolated the highest selling HIV drug to teach a section of undergraduate organic chemistry (AND WELL) at some of these places. I have a million other examples that make us qualified to be there. We are a research U that seems to take teaching more seriously than some of those. We at least try to strike a balance and get great researchers that can teach and explain concepts well and not just to upperlevel and grad. students. I would think a place like UVa is also deserving (for a public school, their class sizes, especially in intro. courses rival some of the top privates, in fact in several cases, they do better…much better). </p>
<p>I could literally sit here and do a side-by-side comparison of some courses (the coursework, exams, p-sets, w/e) I have took here w/say Brown, Berkeley, and some of those and show you the difference. It will surprise you, but it would take all day. Also, why isn’t Georgia Tech up there? When it comes to providing a rigorous, useful education, it is no joke.</p>
<p>“…lower tier/mid tier schools simply don’t care about the students’ education.”</p>
<p>“I am simply stating my very logical and reasonable opinions.”</p>
<h2>"Once you realize this FACT, you will just have to accept it as it is. "</h2>
<p>Wow, we have an expert in our midst! Actually, you are really obnoxious. Numerous people I know who attended third-tier schools, two-year community colleges, or NO college have better critical thinking and debate skills than you do. Your spelling and grammar are unacceptable for someone who attends (by your ranking) the 13th-best college in the country. Also, you contradict your own argument by saying your high-school chem teacher who only went to community college was a better teacher than the professor you have at JHU. </p>
<p>I don’t know what you have against state schools (and you may not have noticed, but you have one on your list), since you don’t attend one. Kids from my son’s high school routinely receive acceptances from top schools but then choose to attend our flagship state university. Apart from the obvious cost issues, they may want to stay closer to home, seek a more genuinely diverse environment, or have other reasons for making their decisions. But you are too closed-minded to recognize that some people may not think exactly the way you do. No wonder you hate college.</p>
<p>You have no experience and you’re just making stuff up based upon an opinion you read in one book that was set out to be biased. I read such a book, but I’m not going to say…“Harvard…What a Horrible School. It should be booted out of the top 20”(in reality most schools are just like it. They just have students w/lower SATs). </p>
<p>If you are going to make stuff up, especially that list. Go to their websites and look up syllabi and coursework (where available. Many schools have course websites available and viewable) that they all share, compare them and present your findings and then make a real list. I bet you’ll find that your rankings are unjustified and that many of the schools, whether public or private are more alike than different. Most, while somewhat challenging, lack the amount of challenge they should have (we are no exception) despite how students at said institutions complain about the rigor or “grade deflation” (seriously, only MIT, Caltech, and maybe Princeton and an LAC like Reed should have bunches of whiney students). Or go tour and take courses known to be challenging at each school and then present your findings. You have no experience or true insight to back this stuff up. Your generalizations just don’t work. I want to see syllabi, coursework, and perhaps lecturers, not data showing SATs, Nobel Prize winners, and grad. school entrance (Ivy begets Ivy), and “reputation scores” (some schools have “halo” effect anyway). At a certain point, the latter ones do not influence educational quality at all and nor does hearsay or one’s perception of prestige. What happens to them in the classroom or in the research arena does. Go one by one and chart me the experience of students in the classroom of each one of these places you list or don’t list. Oh wait…you can’t. That’s just too bad, guess everyone on here will have to take your word for it (though I clearly will not).</p>
<p>After you go beyond this book and take that tour I speak of or look up the things I suggested, and then present your findings, I’ll consider taking you seriously. Your conclusion should read: “Most of the schools I listed are as full of crap as the lower tier schools I speak of, they just cover it up better and are lucky to have the students and resources they do as these help to make the crap almost smell like roses…but not quite”</p>
<p>Oopsie, OP, you forgot to include Rochester as one of your acceptable exceptions. Rochester is where the author of “The Five Year Party” sent his daughter.</p>
<p>Also MIA: the service academies. Small schools that offer unique and totally free educations to all (Beria and Deep Springs, and, once upon a time, Olin). Any LACs at all–Swarthmore, Wellesley, Carleton, Pomona, Amherst, Williams, Reed, St. John’s, and many, many more, all apparently not offering a true education according to the OP’s in-depth analysis. Not a single honors program–no mention of Schreyer or Austin’s Plan II. </p>
<p>Clearly, on the nature/nurture question, the OP believes in nurture. The school is all, creating an educated human being. Most of us will give a little credit to the college, but we’ll give far more to the nature side. It’s the student who is the one who must take the initiative, do the work, seek out the opportunities and take advantage of them. That’s true at any school. If the OP wants to wait for a top 20 school to sprinkle its magic fairy dust over his/her head, she/he might be waiting a long time.</p>