I’ve been reading along but hadn’t had time to post as I was celebrating my grandmother’s 100th birthday with extended family the past several days. Thus, I’m going to take a little bit of license as the OP to make a comment before moving on (or the mods edit it out).
First, on the definition of mediocre, which has now been edited out of the subject heading by the mods.
- From Merriam-Webster: of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance : ordinary, so-so
- From Cambridge Dictionary: 1) not very good, 2) just acceptable but not good; not good enough, 3) ordinary and not very good
From dictionary.com: - of only ordinary or moderate quality; neither good nor bad; barely adequate: The car gets only mediocre mileage, but it’s fun to drive.
- not satisfactory; poor; inferior: Mediocre construction makes that building dangerous.
Personally, my own definition is pretty close to the one found by Cambridge Dictionary. The word “mediocre” definitely has a negative connotation to it. In my mind, there would not be a binary of elite : mediocre, but rather a continuum ranging from something like:
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exceptional,
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excellent,
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very good,
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good,
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ok (at best, this is as high as mediocre would be),
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poor, (the other location for mediocre)
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terrible.
Most of the Top X schools would probably be classified as exceptional or excellent in that continuum when considered on the whole (though of course, there may be a department or similar that could fall into a different category). Prior to hearing some of the comments in the thread I linked to in the first post, I would generally consider state flagships to be somewhere between the good and excellent categories. So with my rough continuum from above, hearing a flagship called mediocre was at least one to two rungs below what I would consider lower-end flagships, and why I asked my original question.
I do think there are differences in quality between institutions, and rigor can definitely be one of them. I do not think, however, that a rigorous education is limited to a Top X school. Additionally, not all students want to have the most rigorous education available. Thus, I think it’s helpful to know measures to determine rigor and how rigorous a particular institution is (whether the prospective student wants to aim for or avoid rigor), and there is a thread where that’s been discussed recently.
For me, some of the factors that I would use to assess a school would be:
- How do its graduation rates compare to the expected graduation rates based upon the composition of its student body?
- Does it have the appropriate accreditations, particularly if the accreditation shows a level of rigor (ABET, NAAB for architecture, etc)?
- What is the passage rate on licensing exams (teaching, nursing, CPA, etc)?
- How do the college graduates’ earnings (who received federal loans) compare? This is particularly helpful when a school does not have a large percentage of engineering/health science majors, especially at the 10-year mark? (Meeting a particularly minimum floor of earnings can be a sign that a school has a certain level of respect among employers.)
In starting this thread, I was not seeking a comparison between a state flagship and renowned private colleges. I think most can agree that the price tags and extremely competitive admissions of most renowned privates will create a very different environment from most flagships. Thus, my interest is seeing what “barely adequate” or “just acceptable but not good” means and whether people think that any flagships actually fall into that categorization (names need not be given, as we do not want to disparage a particular institution, but people may give metrics that would show that a school would fall into that description).
Graduation rates and resources for students and faculty appear to be some of the criteria people are using. For some, admissions rates and/or the stats of incoming students for the “peer” environment. Are there other criteria that people are looking at? And do the criteria listed above show whether a school is “just acceptable?”