<p>if you disregard the cost difference, are private schools better than public schools? (if both schools are at equal or similar rank).</p>
<p>This is a meaningless question. You can only compare specific schools, using specific criteria.</p>
<p>There are differences. Ghostt makes a good point about having to compare specific schools. Nevertheless, for good students shopping among, say, the USNWR top 50, one can point out some typical differences. </p>
<p>Typically, average class sizes are smaller at private schools (sometimes much smaller, especially in popular fields and at introductory levels). Introductory classes at a typical public flagship can be 10X larger than as introductory classes in the same subjects at the Ivies, Chicago, Duke, Stanford, or at virtually any private LAC (regardless of “rank”). This means that at selective private schools (or at most LACs) you are likely to get more discussion, more writing assignments (with more feedback from the professor), and more essay-based than multiple-choice tests.</p>
<p>The student body demographics are different. Almost always, selective private schools have more national drawing power, with representation from many of the 50 states. At the public flagships, about 70-90% of students may be from in-state. At selective private “national” universities and LACs, the percentage is nearly reversed, with ~25% of students from in-state (depending of course on the size of the state and the school’s appeal).</p>
<p>Selective private schools usually have much better need-based aid, which can even make them cheaper in some cases than an in-state public school for high-need students, and much cheaper than an out-of-state public school even for students with less need. Schools with endowments per student over $200K are almost all private. </p>
<p>All of the 25 or so most selective colleges and universities are private schools. Students admitted to the most selective public universities (Berkeley, Michigan) and to the most selective private universities (HYPSM, some of the other Ivies) usually choose to attend the latter. This suggests higher confidence in those private schools among students with the greatest number of choices. In addition, a disproportionate number of college professors send their kids to private liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>Selective private schools tend to have much higher 4-year graduation rates (69% for Berkeley, 90% for Princeton) than public flagships. The top ten schools for per capita PhD production are all private, for the aggregate of all disciplines and across virtually every major, non-engineering field. It appears that private colleges and universities comprise a large majority of schools with the best per capita admission rates to elite professional schools. For alumni mid-career average salaries, it appears that all the top 10 schools are private.</p>
<p>So these are some differences that would seem to favor private schools, but of course I’m focusing on a small subset of private schools. I’d say these comparisons apply primarily to schools among the USNWR top 100 or so national universities and LACs, and especially to schools toward the upper end of that scale.</p>
<p>That’s a good description tk. It matches what we’ve seen in our experience with both public and private schools. Pending what one wants (major, atmosphere, merit/need-based aid, either public or private can be a good selection, but they are different.</p>
<p>tk’s description is on target. Just remember that there are lots of exceptions to these general statements: Some states have public LACs in addition to unis, the honors programs at many public unis offer benefits more similar to those at private unis and probably have a similarly high graduation rate, an unusual major (classics, for example) at a private U may offer smaller classes right from the start. That’s why it really matters what schools you are comparing.</p>
<p>Spouse of top 20 national univ prof here and parent of incoming freshman to top 20 public with some further thoughts.</p>
<p>While I would agree with those broad characterizations of key differences, I would suggest that those are applicable only to somewhere roughly around the top 20-30 national private schools and LACs vs. top publics, especially in terms of quality of faculty and opportunities for grad work. </p>
<p>In investigating schools for our student, we realized that once you got outside roughly the top 20-30 LACs, the quality of preparation can fall off dramatically in various disciplines. My husband’s department (humanities, not sciences) rarely admits grad students from LACs because they have not worked closely with serious researchers in the field and are not as well-prepared to do serious scholarly work. As an academic family, we initially focused on LACs for our son because we respect the close relationship between faculty and students. But for someone who wants to go to grad school, LACs may not be (again, a broad generalization), the strongest preparation. </p>
<p>Again, as an academic family, when our son started focusing on public flagships, we were concerned about the opportunity for those close relationships which can be the core of a student’s education and self-exploration. But, if you look at even intro classes at big publics – yes, they have hundreds of kids in intro-to-whatever. At the same time, there are also 20-25 student discussion groups led by grad students – who are generally finished their own grad school coursework and working on their thesis. Add in the opportunity for Honors work and you can have Honors discussion sections led by the professor – so you have the national expert in the field lecturing and leading the discussion. Once you are done with intro courses, at least in the humanities, students are taking seminars in their areas of interest. Throw in the opportunities for undergraduate research with leading faculty, and you have an impressive educational opportunity. </p>
<p>As someone who has seen both sides of this issue, I would agree with the broad characterizations but caution that these are generalizations which apply, in my mind, to a much narrower group of privates vs. publics than the top 100 USNWR schools.</p>
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<p>This may be at least partially due to many of the most selective private universities also being the most generous with financial aid, to the point that they may be less expensive than an in-state public university for students from families in the bottom 95-97% of the income range.</p>
<p>Not all private universities are that generous (e.g. New York University has the opposite reputation), so it is a “depends on the school” type of thing.</p>
<p>Many of the Ivy schools have large intro classes too. Cornell has one over 700.</p>
<p>Large majors at ‘elite’ private schools have lots of large classes. I had 6 upper division political science courses at Northwestern; 4 had at least 150 students in them. All of my intro classes…sociology, econ, geography, astronomy, history were large lectures.</p>
<p>I found the ‘discussion’ sections taught by TA’s in these large classes mostly worthless. Some places do a better job with this than others.</p>
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<p>There’s a lot of misinformation about this. At the top LACs there are almost no small classes. But that is most definitely not the case at most private research universities.</p>
<p>At Cornell, 19% of the classes have 50 or more students. That’s a higher percentage than at UC Berkeley (15%), UVA (16%), Michigan (16%), or UNC Chapel Hill (16%). Not to mention William & Mary (8%).</p>
<p>Cornell is perhaps an extreme case, but Stanford (13%), MIT (13%), and Princeton (11%), among others, have a very substantial percentage of large classes, not so very different from the top publics. The biggest difference on this score is between LACs (small classes) and research universities (many large classes), not between publics and privates. At my daughter’s LAC, Haverford, just 0.3%—that’s not a typo, I mean less than 1/3 of 1% of the classes–are 50+. That means you’re almost 60 times more likely to find yourself in a large class at Cornell than at Haverford; and more likely to find yourself in a large class at Cornell than at my undergrad alma mater, Michigan. At Stanford, you’re about 40 times more likely than Haverford. And even the “big” classes at Haverford are smaller: there are exactly 2 classes in the 50-99 student range, none at all with 100 or more students. At Cornell there are 246 classes in the 50-99 range, and 135 with over 100 students, the largest topping out at about 1300 students in a single class. (It’s an intro psych class, very popular, and the Cornell students take a perverse pride in it being so big, but still . . . )</p>
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<p>Usually but not always. UVA and UNC Chapel Hill say they meet 100% of need for all students. Carnegie Mellon says it meets full need for only 31.2% of its students. So again, it’s not entirely a public-private thing; it all depends on the individual school. NYU, a private school, is notoriously ungenerous with FA, and its students carry one of the highest average debt loads of any school. </p>
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<p>“Tend to,” but this also varies immensely by school. Of the top 35 research universities ranked by US News, the schools with the lowest 6-year graduation rates are the University of Rochester (84%), NYU (85%), Carnegie Mellon (86%), Wake Forest (89%), USC (89%), and Emory (89%). The 5 public flagships in the top 35 are all in the 90% to 93% range, along with schools like Caltech (90%), Vanderbilt, Brandeis, Tufts, and Boston College (all at 91%), Chicago,Johns Hopkins and Rice (all 92%) and MIT and Georgetown (93%). So it’s a mixed bag.</p>
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<p>Yes, and a big part of that is simply that it’s easier to fill a small class with top academic performers than a big class. But look at it this way: 75% of Princeton’s entering class of 1300 or so enrolled freshmen have SAT CR+M scores of 1400+. Pretty impressive. That’s 975 students. At UC Berkeley, only about half the entering class have SAT CR+M scores of 1400+. But Berkeley’s entering class is 4,100 students. That means there are about 2050, or more than twice as many 1400+ scorers at Berkeley as at Princeton.</p>
<p>The point is, the public flagships have a different mission–to educate not just the elite of the elite, but to educate more broadly. It’s a different kind of experience, to be sure. Having attended both public and private universities, and having taught at some of each kind, I can’t say one is better and the other worse. I truly can’t. I just don’t believe the private school propaganda that you’re better off at an elite private where everyone is smart because it just isn’t so; there are students at the elite private who struggle to keep up, and in many ways it’s easier for the top students to accelerate into a faster track at the bigger universities, so that by their junior or sometimes even sophomore year they’re doing graduate-level work (though this happens at some privates, too).</p>
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<p>Yes, and 7 of the top 10 are LACs, but again I think this is one of those illusory statistics based on small numbers v. large numbers; because of their broader mission, public flagships educate a much wider variety of students so that those most inclined and able to go on to earn Ph.D.s represent a smaller fraction of a much larger student body. It’s a fairly meaningless statistic.</p>
<p>“There’s a lot of misinformation about this. At the top LACs there are almost no small classes. But that is most definitely not the case at most private research universities.”</p>
<p>I assume you meant that at top LACs there are almost all small classes.</p>
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<p>Yes, Cornell is an outlier (with a public/private hybrid structure that is virtually unique in American higher ed). When you look across small/medium/large class size distributions at top schools, you’ll see a couple dozen private universities with significantly smaller class size averages than the top public flagship (<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/708190-avg-class-size-4.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/708190-avg-class-size-4.html</a>). That’s without even considering LACs.</p>
<p>bclintonk has done some interesting analysis of class size but I think he overly focuses on the % of large classes. I understand his reasoning but the more critical boundary point, I believe, is around the 20 student mark. At approximately that point is the separation between an effective discussion class and a lecture class. Once a professor is much over 20 students, s/he’s lecturing; whether s/he’s lecturing to 35 students or to 75 doesn’t make as big a difference as whether s/he’s lecturing at all. So it’s easier to stage Core discussion classes for the entire freshman class at Columbia (76% < 20) than at UT-Austin (35% < 20) … although UT does offer a ~similar program (“Plan II”) for 180 students.</p>
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O.K., but instead of cherry-picking two unusually generous public universities, look across the whole spectrum of top public and private schools. There are 49 need-blind, full-need colleges in America. Only two of them are public (Michigan and UVa). These are exceptions that prove the rule.
[Need-blind</a> admission - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission]Need-blind”>Need-blind admission - Wikipedia)</p>
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Since almost all of those top 35 are private, it’s not too surprising that private schools span that gamut of highest graduation rates. And it’s a fairly narrow span. Only 5 public institutions break into it. Again, they’re exceptions that prove the rule.</p>
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<p>Well, a lecture is a lecture is a lecture. So if a class has even 5 students and is structured like a lecture, it’s not much different from a larger class that’s a lecture. Sure there’s a little room for questions and such, but if the class isn’t intended to be discussion-based, it won’t be.</p>
<p>Now, a seminar - a class that is intentionally structured around discussion - that has reached a certain size quickly breaks down in discussion. I personally would put the limit at 15.</p>
<p>To the OP, consider that there are some 600 public universities and 2400 private universities in the US. Just based on that alone, I think you can deduce that there is a sizable portion of private universities that are not better than public universities. I think most aren’t worth the price over a public. To be honest, I don’t understand how it is that so many random private universities are able to charge such ridiculous prices and still get students… it boggles my mind.</p>
<p>As for the PhD numbers (which a couple posters have challenged), yes they do require some interpretation. Public universities often have pre-professional programs in fields like nursing and agriculture. This presumably does tend to depress their per capita PhD production. </p>
<p>I’d like to respond, though, to points made by Midwestmomofboys about LAC quality beyond the T20-30. Even if you look beyond the top 10 per capita PhD producers, the top 50 and top 100 still are dominated by private schools. About half of them are LACs, including LACs relatively far down in the USNWR pecking order. They include such schools as Lawrence (USNWR #60 LAC), Earlham (USNWR #68 LAC), Hendrix (USNWR #86 LAC), College of Wooster (USNWR #71 LAC), and Hampshire (USNWR #110 LAC). </p>
<p>Now, does this metric reflect treatment effects of the high performing schools (something “better” about the education at those colleges)? Or, does it reflect selection effects of choosing certain kinds of students to attend those schools? I’m afraid we don’t really know for sure.</p>
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<p>49 is a rather small number of colleges out of the thousands of colleges, public and private, in the US. In other words, most colleges, public or private, do not meet full need, so one cannot assume that because a college is private that it meets full need.</p>
<p>Also, that list is missing at least three public schools which do effectively meet full need: USAFA, USMA, USNA.</p>
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<p>The private school tuition rates may be a much stronger incentive for students to graduate on time. But also remember that the top 35 schools are in no way representative of the overall college situation in the US, public or private.</p>
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<p>Apparently, there is considerable disdain for public universities, especially in-state public universities, in some parts of the US, particularly the northeast, based on students from (for example) New Jersey wanting to go anywhere but Rutgers, even though their other options (private or out of state public) are no better but much more expensive (these are not the students getting admitted to Princeton, MIT, etc.).</p>
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<p>There’s A LOT of stupid people out there that these universities prey on.</p>
<p>TK – on the Ph.D question, my point is a small, anecdotal one – that in my husband’s top 20 humanitites department, he tells me that their graduate admissions come from universities, public and private, and rarely from LACs. His explanation is that LAC students tend to suffer in two ways in admissions – they may be very good writers, but they are not well prepared to do original analysis and scholarship and their recommendations come from LAC profs who are more focused on teaching than their own cutting-edge scholarship. So, the students have learned from great teachers, but not great scholars. Their writing sample reflects that and their recs are not coming from leading scholars who are well-regarded in the field in which the student wants to enter. Now those students may get into grad programs below his institution’s ranking and go on to great careers. So I would look more broadly at quality of grad admissions – where are students getting into leading grad programs – than at per capita.</p>
<p>Not just in the east but also in the Midwest. Many are afraid of state schools…they don’t want to be treated like a number, don’t want their kids to be infected by those crazy gay loving leftist faculty, etc. Etc. My small rural state has somewhere around 25 private small colleges. All but about 6 or so of them are nothing more than a glorified extension of high school. Sometimes they are cheaper than our state schools but mor often than not a similar price; but the qualityis just not there.</p>
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<p>Agreed. I’m not sure to what extent LAC grads’ *ability *to do original analysis and scholarship is hindered, but the above point is a generally recognized phenomenon in higher education, something that many on this site are unwilling to believe. It’s a well-known - perhaps unfortunate - reality that if a prof can’t get a tenured position at a university, they end up at an LAC, which is seen as a last-resort option for most researchers. Yes, many of them are great teachers, but their scholarship is usually not up to par. This does affect the kinds of research that an undergrad is exposed to. It also has an effect on their recommendations - as you said, grad schools want to see recs from profs whose credentials they can trust, and that often isn’t the case at LACs, even the top ones. The course offerings at LACs tend to be very limited, which puts them at a disadvantage relative to the students who have been able to take advanced or even graduate-level classes in a subject at a university.</p>