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<p>^^ Not to mention that they’re poor and probably have had to do without a lot of things that other kids take for granted. I’m a low income independent student and it’s a blast going without medical insurance, doctor visits, and dental appointments. Whoopee! WOO!</p>
<p>"Nursing majors from Penn have 100% job placement "</p>
<p>I thought that all nurses had 100% job placement. Not true?</p>
<p>Talk about Myths and Half-truths. I would really like to know which job in geology, dental hygiene, or clinical laboratory science offers a starting salary of $71k for someone with a freshly minted BA."</p>
<p>My wife made that first year as a nurse, with an AA degree, and not in southern California.</p>
<p>What part of Hunt’s statements qualifies as half true? </p>
<p>Small classes are sometimes better than large classes, and sometimes not. It kind of depends on the teacher and what he or she is trying to do. Most students I know actually prefer a mix.</p>
<p>Being taught by a professor may be better than being taught be a TA, except when the professor is a crappy teacher and the TA is great, each of which happens not infrequently. It may make sense to notice that not all TAs are created equal. High-prestige graduate program attract top-quality graduate students, and in turn they generally do not require/permit the graduate students to TA for several years. You are going to get a better quality of TA from such a program than from a middling program that has grad students teaching from their first week on campus.</p>
<p>Myth or Half-Truth: There is a “perfect fit” school for every student.</p>
<p>Selecting a college involves sorting out/balancing the good and bad attributes of a particular school to come up with the best choice from the options available. Parents and students need to step back from the idea that a school will be “perfect”.</p>
<p>JHS, that’s exactly what I meant. I see so often here on CC the idea that (for example) LACs are better than research universities because at universities you have large classes and are taught by TAs. Personally, I had some great large classes and some great TAs.</p>
<p>Moving out of the house and attending a CC is always much less expensive than moving out of the house and attending a 4 year.</p>
<p>That one is huge around here where kids leave home to attend CC in a community where the avg room and board exceed 10K for nine months and kids have to sign year long leases. When it’s all said and done it is about = to the cost of attending a CSU and living on campus.</p>
<p>Myth: expensive SAT prep courses are necessary inorder to have high SAT scores.</p>
<p>MYTH-1: Legacy is a guarantee of admission.</p>
<p>Truth: Playing the oboe - now THAT"s a guarantee! </p>
<p>Extension Myth: If you meet any legacy students at college, assume they don’t deserve to be there. </p>
<p>Extended Extension Myth: SImilarly, all athletes and URM’s lack academic talent. Be sure to resent them, as they took over the spot that should have gone to your BFF from home.</p>
<p>Entry level nurses indeed can make 75K. But it is false to therefore conclude that Nurses make more than Doctors, who start out making 28-30K their first year post grad. Nurses will cap out at 30-40% more than their starting salaries, and even under managed care, a dermatologist or cardiologist in a major metro will increase their starting salary 20-fold.</p>
<p>So context is important- no knock on Loma Linda or any of the fine colleges which graduate vocationally oriented students. But my neighbors like to tell me that their kids who go to the local State U (not the flagship) out-earn my kids who went to pricey privates. While that is often true in years 1-3 career-wise, that has not been the pattern I have observed over time. </p>
<p>So the half truth about college is that someone can always find a statistic to promote the decision that someone in their family has made. (Mini- aren’t you fond of saying that data is not the plural of anecdote?)</p>
<p>Over time, physicians make more money than nurses. Economists make more money than dental hygenists. Statisticians make more money than nursery school teachers. But there are many talented nurses, hygienists and nursery school teachers who will out-earn those other professions in years 1-3.</p>
<p>My company hired a guy with a BS in Econometrics and a couple of years of experience last year. It took forever to fill the job, his starting salary was in the low six figures (double what he was making at a government agency) and we felt lucky to get him-- in a couple of years he’ll go to an insurance company or a large bank and will be worth $400K.</p>
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<p>Someone’s a little arrogant. 
(Kidding)</p>
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<p>Doctors now make almost $50K first-year post-grad, which increases a little every year. I think.</p>
<p>Paradox7, I’m puzzled as to why you took offense to my “myth”. I certainly said nothing to give you the impression that I was putting down or devaluing LACs or Reed!! In fact, I feel the complete opposite. </p>
<p>You said I was “clubbing” Reed with the state schools. Huh? First, I don’t know why you see state U’s as a blunt instrument in the first place–many have gotten excellent educations at them. See the list? But the myth I was debunking was the mistaken belief by many that attending the <em>Ivies</em> (those 8 colleges) is the only road to success.</p>
<p>I grabbed at a few names of successful people and all the folks I listed did not take the IVY route, and some did not even finish college. </p>
<p>You then further posted: “Liberal Arts Colleges are second tier or inferior to large universities (even evidenced by the poster above)” I found this a little odd. I know many people who think LACs are far superior to big U’s! But no matter that point, I ask, where did you get that I suggested anything of the sort?</p>
<p>They Ivy league schools offer better educations.</p>
<p>Some of the professors here (especially in the sciences) are terrible.</p>
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<p>This is definitely not true. The grad students here are not that bright.</p>
<p>I responded to your personal message madbean, so I hope you know what exactly I meant by those posts. Like I said, your list could have done with a little more thinking through or having no list was an option as well. No one’s disputing the worth of state universities, but I do protest when someone says Reed is like a state university, or for that matter the Ivy League.</p>
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<p>For what it’s worth, the only other Liberal Arts College “dabbler” you mentioned-Barack Obama, did in fact take the Ivy route. Columbia and Harvard Law School aren’t exactly state university like, at least as far as prestige is concerned, which is perhaps at the crux of your debunking the myth.</p>
<p>Dbate, I did think the graduate students who taught me at Yale were very bright (although I didn’t meet any of the best ones until after my freshman year). I also have the benefit of having seen what the rest of their careers looked like. My TAs included future chairs of the Yale and Harvard English Departments, and of the Michigan German Department, as well as a successful Hollywood writer/producer. They were pretty cool. I don’t know why today’s crop would be systematically dumber. I only had one TA in the sciences, however, and I’m not certain I ever learned his name.</p>
<p>“Francis Ford Coppola: Hofstra University” (but Masters degree in film studies at UCLA)</p>
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<p>I think some professions may be lumped together here. I can tell you that clinical laboratory science does not pay well. That was the original career I pursued and after 5 years experience my salary was so low that had I not been married I would have been considered poverty level income. I changed careers and the very first day at my very first accounting job I made more money than after 5 years in the lab.</p>
<p>"Entry level nurses indeed can make 75K. But it is false to therefore conclude that Nurses make more than Doctors, who start out making 28-30K their first year post grad. Nurses will cap out at 30-40% more than their starting salaries, and even under managed care, a dermatologist or cardiologist in a major metro will increase their starting salary 20-fold.</p>
<p>So context is important- no knock on Loma Linda or any of the fine colleges which graduate vocationally oriented students. But my neighbors like to tell me that their kids who go to the local State U (not the flagship) out-earn my kids who went to pricey privates. While that is often true in years 1-3 career-wise, that has not been the pattern I have observed over time.</p>
<p>So the half truth about college is that someone can always find a statistic to promote the decision that someone in their family has made. (Mini- aren’t you fond of saying that data is not the plural of anecdote?)"</p>
<p>Who ever said that nurses make more than docs? (though it is interesting to look at the investment value and the time value - the differences, on average, are not nearly as great as one might think.)</p>
<p>I made a particular statement - not based on anecdote, and not based on college brag sheets, but based on a study of 1.2 million individuals in PayScale, that the median graduate of Loma Linda University, in their first year, (which means they didn’t go to graduate school) makes more than the median graduate of Princeton in their first year. I stand by that statement.</p>
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<p>Oh well, it’s still a state university, and that as madbean seems to have established, is in no way lesser than the Ivy League.</p>