<p>Excerpts from an interesting article:</p>
<p>"If youre the parent of a high-achieving high school student prepared to spend whatever it takes to send your kid to an Ivy League college, authors Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker have some unlikely advice: Dont do it.</p>
<p>Dreifus, a New York Times writer and an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and Hacker, a veteran political science professor at Queens College in New York, spent three years interviewing faculty, students, and administrators and crunching statistics for their book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids And What We Can Do About It. Their finding? That many of Americas colleges and universities especially the elite arent worth their tuition and serve faculty over their undergrads."</p>
<p>"2. Research universities are no place for undergraduates.</p>
<p>Professors at big research universities are often more interested in doing research and working with graduate students than teaching your child because their prestige (and their universitys) depends on publishing. So they tend to host huge lectures and then foist undergrads off on teaching assistants who may or may not be supervised. At Harvard, we ran into students who said they never had a professor who had enough of a relationship with them to write a recommendation for grad school, Dreifus says. How to avoid that? Go to a school thats completely dedicated to teaching, like a four-year liberal arts college with little to no research. Look for seminars where 15 to 20 people sit around a table, Dreifus says. The big question we want parents to ask: Is this a place thats about developing my childs mind?</p>
<p>"4. The star professors touted in college brochures probably wont be teaching your kid.</p>
<p>Universities and colleges are increasingly relying on underpaid, part-time instructors to lead undergraduate courses. Contingent teachers, including paid-by-the-course adjunct professors, now do 70 percent of college teaching, up from 43 percent in 1975. (The elites arent immune: At Yale, the figure is 70 percent.) Most adjuncts dont even have an office on campus, and because they make on average only about $3,000 a course, they often teach at three or four different colleges. Its hard to be a great teacher and to be there for your students when youre juggling that many jobs, Dreifus says."</p>
<p>"5. The colleges best professors may not even be on campus.</p>
<p>Though they get their summers off and breaks during the school year, tenured faculty at many universities are encouraged to take frequent sabbaticals. What will that mean for your undergrad? At Harvard, where senior professors get a sabbatical every three years, 10 of the 48 professors in the history department more than one in five were off doing research in 2010/2011. During a recent year at Williams College, another school with a great reputation, a third of the professors in the religion department were on leave. If you choose a school that gives its faculty a lot of time for research, your son or daughter might find that his or her senior-thesis adviser is on sabbatical in Tuscany."</p>
<p>"6. Dont be seduced by the luxuries they show you on the tour.</p>
<p>Todays students get suites, private bathrooms, and food courts with chefs that make sushi and Dijon chicken, not to mention jumbo Jacuzzis and five-story climbing walls. Its all part of an extravagant amenities race thats helping to push up tuition rates. When we sneaked in on parent/student tours across the country, we were shocked at the number of questions parents asked about amenities, Dreifus says. A college doesnt have to look like Club Med. In fact, Id say you should be suspicious if a school has a lot of amenities. When a college has every kind of plaything, that tells you something about its priorities.</p>
<p>"9. Going to an elite university does not guarantee success.</p>
<p>To prove this point, Hacker and Dreifus tracked the 900-odd students who graduated from Princeton in 1973 to see if the school was delivering on its promise to prepare students for positions of leadership, whether in business, public service, or the arts, which Princeton administrators claim as their goal. We were very disappointed, Hacker says. There were only a handful of recognized names in that class of 900. What that tells us is simply this: In America, if you put your talents to their best use, by the age of 35 or 36, youll be passing people from Princeton, no matter where you went to school. Sure, the authors acknowledge, a designer degree might help you get into medical school or law school at Harvard, Stanford, or Yale. Thats a nice bonus if you can pay the full sticker price, they say, but not enough of an edge to saddle your child with many thousands of dollars in debt."</p>
<p>I know this article probably doesn't give the whole story about research unis, but it may be something to think about. I'm sure there are many exceptions. Find the whole article at: 10</a> Things Every Parent Should Know About College | Reader's Digest</p>