@PurpleTitan, unless a faculty member who fills out the ratings is personally familiar with a particular department, he/she most likely will rate it on faculty publications, and possibly, on the record of other students from that school who were admitted his/her graduate program. These are not necessarily the things will most affect the day-to-day experience as an undergrad major in a particular department. You put a preposterous amount of faith in a 5-point rating scale.
@zapfino, you don’t consider the strength of alums turned out by a program relevant at all to any undergrads of that program? I’ll disagree. At the end of the day, learning is also important.
I didn’t say that.
@PurpleTitan, if a student has a successful career and we’re going to attribute it to their training, how much weight does their undergrad, graduate, and postdoctoral training get in their development?
As an MD/PhD student who took graduate courses as an undergrad, trust me, I know that some students are more or less ready for graduate training but the trainings really are different and just because someone is ready to skip ahead to graduate training is irrelevant as to whether or not graduate department rankings are relevant to undergraduate education. Choosing an undergrad with a great graduate school can be a great idea but that doesn’t mean the undergrad program is better.
Speaking of Europe, I know many European post docs who in fact wish they had gone through the American system instead where they would have had more time to explore before going into graduate level training.
@zapfino: “Records of students from a school” is not “strength of alums”? What is it, then?
@iwannabe_Brown, oh certainly, I see the flexibility of American higher ed as a strength, but for some students, a European-style education is more desired. And for some students, a higher-ranked grad department may matter. Also, it’s not as if grad school strength and undergrad education quality & opportunities are completely uncorrelated (while many people on CC act like they are).
@PurpleTitan: Of course, that’s an aspect of “strengths of alums.”
What I said was that faculty raters possibly might consider that aspect when filling out the rating forms. Of course, we don’t know exactly what factors they did consider. Those types of ratings are subject to all sorts of decisional biases.
There are no public Ivy’s. But, if by that you mean there are some terrific state schools, I agree. Because I was used to SUNY schools, primarily the 4 centers, I was blown away the first time I saw Michigan, Wisc, Ill/U, UVA, I thought they’d all look pretty much like state issue, as do the 4 SUNY universities. Throw in UNC, UC everything, Georgia, Maryland, Pitt, William and Mary, Georgia, Florida, Austin, VT…well the campuses are amazing and so are the schools. Many are in wonderful towns with gorgeous buildings and top notch facilities. Rutgers is pretty far up there too.
The term Public Ivies may have been used to describe a group of public universities out East historically, but the Northeast has always had a bias for private colleges that are older and better established. As such Rutgers, Penn State, UMass and the SUNYs are not getting the respect they deserve.
Thankfully states outside the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic are not hobbled by such bias. The state schools in the Midwest, South, Southeast, Southwest and West are much more prestigious to the locals than public schools are to Northeasterners. The majority of kids in my upper middle class neighborhood only care about going to the 2 or 3 local flagships, or another flagship in the western region. The only people who even care about the Ivies or the top 20 are the recent Asian immigrants, of which there are (too) many.
^ As I understand it, when certain public Ivies, e.g., Wisconsin, Michigan, first drew students from the Northeast, many of them were Jewish students who encountered admissions discrimination at Northeastern private schools.
In several Northeastern states, even the money for land grant universities in their states initially went to private universities.
Oh yeah, definitely not totally uncorrelated, but I think less than most people think. Particularly since teaching and office hours is time spent not writing grants/pubs so from a professor’s viewpoint the things needed to be a good undergrad prof are often detrimental to their careers at major research institutions.
Not by a wide margin, and not in every area. For example, the Farmer School of Business at Miami is generally considered better for undergraduates than is Fisher at OSU (and Fisher is very good).
@zapfino, yep, the Northeast traditionally didn’t prioritize good public higher education. MIT got one of MA’s land-grants. Cornell is NYS’s sole land-grant. When Rutgers got NJ’s land-grant, I believe that they were still completely private.
Even PSU (as well as Pitt and Temple) aren’t truly public anymore. They are state-assisted (and state funding is now a small pittance of PSU’s budget). In practice, that means that PSU (and Pitt and Temple) are more like Cornell’s contract colleges; they receive state money and give residents a discount (but not a big one) but are run essentially like a private. UDelaware has the same setup.
^ And Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown received the land grant college monies for their respective states. The Rhode Island monies came from the sale of 120, 000 acres in Kansas. As Brown proved incapable of running an ag school, the school was taken away and Brown fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. (I wonder if Brown ever reimbursed the money.) U Wisconsin almost lost its landgrant monies through mismanagement, but Ezra Cornell made a killing on the Wisconsin lands granted to NY State.