<p>Excellent teacher is a relative term. At a place like MIT, an excellent teacher would necessarily have to be one of the best in the field. That is the nature of the beast. MIT has a more limited set of offerings in terms of majors as compared to many other schools, but it is among the top 3 in virtually all of its offerings. </p>
<p>To understand the differences one can make the analogy with athletics. An excellent Div I football coach is fundamentally different from an excellent Div III football coach. A Div I coach trains some of the very best football players in the country and will place very different demands on his players as compared to a Div III coach. In Div III athletics, academics take priority and success on the field is secondary. </p>
<p>By analogy, a math teacher may be considered excellent at Williams and mediocre at MIT and vice-versa. In the same way that a school like Alabama identifies itself through its football team, so does MIT through the success of its engineering and science departments through various competitions, as well as the number of students who move on to advanced degrees. Math and science proficiency IS the core of the school. An excellent math teacher has to be able to motivate and drive some of the most talented math students on the planet. At Williams, the school is more concerned about providing each student with a basic understanding in math and science, as part of a broad liberal arts education, not turning out Putnam Fellows. An excellent math teacher at Williams may be one who helps students with no a priori interest or strong background in math achieve a reasonably solid foundation. The objectives are simply not the same.</p>
With the exception of very specialized fields, I would say no. The schools are all strong enough that they each have their own strengths, and none of them (not even Harvard) is stronger than any of the others in every subject. </p>
<p>Take Hopkins, for example. It has top-notch programs in BME, public health, music, and Ivy-level programs in pretty much everything else. Georgetown has SFS and a great nursing program, and the rest of the university is decently strong. Emory has top-notch programs in religion, (biological) anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and several others. </p>
<p>Remember that a typical undergraduate chooses only ~30-34 courses; most of these colleges offer at least 1000 courses. Needless to say, it’s certainly possible to select courses that would be sufficiently stimulating and challenging.</p>
<p>I disagree with much of cellardweller’s posts, which seem to be written with great vehemence; apparently the honor of the venerable MIT is at stake. A great researcher does not necessarily a good teacher make; would that were true! My own high school math teacher taught math far better than any of the professors I had at Duke. That she lacked a PhD and didn’t teach in a top 20 department was not relevant; she knew the material well and could make it accessible to students. My experience with top researchers is that they are unfortunately prone to pushing their own views in class to the detriment of others; while they are often brilliant and have good points, it’s often good to have a well-rounded view of the subject matter. I also disagree that undergraduates do not compete with graduate students for faculty attention. Any faculty member has a finite amount of time for students on top of time spent teaching, researching, grading, working on committees, etc. While the “neglect” of undergraduates is overstated (indeed, I think it’s often the grad students who suffer), there is no denying that competition for attention usually exists. This is especially true for large departments like biology and political science; it is less true for small departments like geology. </p>
<p>That said, it’s silly to think that less-than-elite colleges will necessarily have better teaching. The function of a research university is the same regardless of level, and many one-step-above-CC universities attract faculty who would be perfectly qualified to teach at Harvard but suffer from the glut in academia; they will want to pursue their research regardless of the level of their current institution. If you want teaching quality, or faculty who teach with a side of research rather than research with a side of teaching, pick a LAC.</p>
<p>“A great researcher does not necessarily a good teacher make; would that were true! My own high school math teacher taught math far better than any of the professors I had at Duke.”</p>
<p>Amen! </p>
<p>My ninth-grade Latin teacher, Sister Margaret Eulalia (a/k/a Mammy Yokum in a Habit), taught Latin better than any professor I’ve ever studied with, anywhere, including Harvard Div School – and I can guarantee she didn’t go to Harvard. We drilled our little heads off and got through the grammar, including the subjunctive, well within our first year. Whatever Latin I still remember is all thanks to Sister Margaret Eulalia. (May she and her ruler rest in peace.)</p>
<p>“If you want teaching quality, or faculty who teach with a side of research rather than research with a side of teaching, pick a LAC.”</p>
<p>Exactly. As you say, it’s no guarantee that they’ll be better teachers…but, at an LAC, they’ll certainly be more focused on teaching, and they’ll likely give you more individual attention.</p>
<p>BTW, one of my favorite professors at Harvard Divinity School was a visiting professor from Duke, Professor Steinmetz. I think he may be retired by now.</p>
<p>I agree with lesdiables… it’s frankly a waste of resources if they got Chomsky to teach Intro Ling. Come on, you want someone reputable in their field to teach you for the education you’ve invested in but you don’t need the guy who is considered the flipping father of modern linguistics to teach an intro course which should not need to confer all the advanced concepts of the field. Getting a top scholar to teach an intro class would be more for the impressive looks you get when you say you’re taught by a Nobel laureate than actual results in educational quality. And as for “as if getting taught painting by Da Vinci” that may be more of a result of the expectations one has in attending a class taught by revered faculty. </p>
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<p>No offense, but you got this from sitting in on your D’s class? How can you be so confident in describing this, if you weren’t the one experiencing the class firsthand and attending it every week as a brilliant student being exposed to the material for the first time?</p>
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<p>Math 55 happens to also be a very exclusive class that not just any Harvard freshman can enroll in. I think the final enrollment for Math 55 is something like 20 students with a great number having dropped out before completing the course. It shouldn’t be used as an example of the typical intro class at a HYPSM school.</p>
<p>“An excellent math teacher has to be able to motivate and drive some of the most talented math students on the planet. At Williams, the school is more concerned about providing each student with a basic understanding in math and science, as part of a broad liberal arts education, not turning out Putnam Fellows. An excellent math teacher at Williams may be one who helps students with no a priori interest or strong background in math achieve a reasonably solid foundation. The objectives are simply not the same.”</p>
<p>While i agree that many of the most gifted math students will end up at schools like Harvard, Princeton, and MIT, and indeed, they might not find a sufficient challenge at schools that could not provide very top math faculty, the Putnam prize participants only represent a relatively small number of math students. And this is true even at Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. They are the exception, not the rule. I would argue that students majoring in math at a number of different schools can receive a math education as good as the typical math student at Harvard. (Does this apply to every math student at another school? Of course not, but if you’re talking about an honors student at a public university or a strong student at an LAC, e.g., St. Olaf, I would maintain that it does apply. In fact, if you’re simply good in math, but not at the Putnam level, maybe you’d be more likely to complete a math major at a lower-ranked school because you wouldn’t select yourself out of the field out of concern that you’d never measure up to the best.)</p>
<p>That is definitely not true at MIT and most likely not true at Caltech, Harvard and Princeton. At MIT over one third of all math majors or over 100 students participate in the Putnam. If you remove the double majors, the number is closer to 50%. 30-50% is no small number and certainly not the exception. </p>
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<p>Well, that is precisely the point isn’t it! Strong math students who do select MIT, Harvard, Caltech or Princeton are the ones willing to measure up to the best. They do expect top notch faculty that will be able to challenge them. Their undergrad education is qualitatively very different from that of math students at nearly all other schools.</p>
<p>^If, in fact, they do have such high percentages of Putnam participants in those math departments, then I stand corrected. Math would seem to be somewhat unique in that respect; I don’t know that a similar concentration of talent applies to other fields in quite the same way.</p>
<p>Physics, and to lesser extent chemistry and biology departments would have very similar profiles to mathematics at MIT where they have always been strong magnets for top talent, often identified through results at national and international science competitions. While at many universities bio and chem majors gravitate towards med school on graduation, at MIT (and Caltech) a far greater percentage pursues PhDs.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is true at all. No one I know actually studies for the Putnam (except for the freshman who take the Putnam Seminar), and the people who do well on it also did well on Olympiads in high school, which suggests that MIT and Harvard don’t really do much more for than attract the top math students in terms of preparing for Putnam. Also, neither MIT nor Harvard seem to put as much effort into selecting their Putnam teams as other schools do - they just take the top 3 scorers from the previous year. So I doubt they actually care that much, though their performance (especially MIT’s) is definitely noteworthy.</p>
<p>But one of the nicer things about schools like Harvard and MIT is that there people willing to take the tougher classes like Math 55. At most other schools, these types of courses aren’t offered, or are graduate-level classes or advanced undergraduate level at best, while at MIT and Harvard, the majority of people who take these classes are freshmen and sophomores.</p>