<p>At some of these prestigious and expensive universities are departments which are generally considered to be the best in the country, if not internationally, in a particular area of study. For a student who knows what he/she wants to study and is already prepared to take advanced coursework, most other educational experiences will not be equivalent. This sort of student is not unusual at this sort of university.</p>
<p>I have a lot of doubts and concerns about elite universities and colleges in the US but the education they offer students, capable of taking advantage of it, is not one of them.</p>
<p>So does Deresiewicz’s story give him more or less credibility? Also, I don’t think he went to Yale–I think he went to Columbia, which has a core curriculum.</p>
<p>But don’t listen to me. Go to the Yale forum, and look at the results threads for the past couple of years. Look at the backgrounds of the kids who got in, and tell me which ones you think are likely to cruise through college.</p>
<p>Deresiewicz is an interesting case though, since he figured out how to be a snob and a reverse snob at the same time.</p>
<p>I think there’s a lot of reverse snobbery in your position - that IMSA is the most academically demanding thing that squeezes every drop out of its students and pushes them all to greater heights, but Yale is just an easy ride. </p>
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<p>You’re credible as an IMSA parent regarding IMSA but Hunt’s not credible as a Yale alum / parent regarding Yale?</p>
<p>Great universities used to produce iconoclasts as well as conformists. Mr. Deresiewicz seems to fear that it is all the latter now. He may have a point, though I do not doubt the quality of the education available at Yale and other elite schools for those who revel in the world of ideas as well as accomplishment.</p>
<p>You really have a chip on your shoulder regarding Yale. What did it ever do to you? What a priori reason do you have for believing that Yale is an easier ride or more of a place to slack off vis-a-vis the other places you mentioned?</p>
<p>Obviously, I have a personal investment in Deresiewicz’s perceptions being wrong, so I have no problem with anybody taking what I have to say with a grain of salt. Hey, you don’t even have to believe that I really am a Yale grad. But his perceptions are really not based on any evidence that I can see. Yale admits high-achieving students, and they continue to achieve highly after graduating from Yale in terms of graduate and professional school placement, salaries, and whatever other measure you choose to name. Maybe they would all do just as well if they went someplace else–the whole value-added question. That’s a reasonable question, certainly.</p>
<p>I also don’t get this claim that Yale has become an anti-intellectual setting. Is this because of the growth of STEM majors and engineering at elite schools? Or maybe because students are more likely to go into business or law than in the past (if this is even true)? Could Deresiewicz himself, in good conscience, advise a student to go to graduate school in English?</p>
<p>If you can cite an article by a long-time IMSA teacher that makes comments similar to Deresiewicz’s about Yale, then readers of this forum can make their judgments about who has the credibility. I might even change my mind, since I only know IMSA from the perspective of a parent.</p>
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<p>I have absolutely no reason to have a chip on my shoulder regarding Yale. Had you read my earlier post, I said that the only reason I was picking on Yale is because that is the university that the author of the article I was referencing described. I would not be surprised if the situation was the same at Harvard, Princeton - or for that matter, Northwestern. I suspect it is different at MIT and CalTech, but I don’t claim to know.</p>
<p>With reference to Yale/Harvard/et.al. vs. the other places I mentioned, when I look at Yale’s 96% graduation rate and read Deresiewicz’s article, that leads me to believe that students at Yale are not being challenged or stretched - except for the minority who choose to stretch themselves.</p>
<p>Because alums (especially), parents of alums and current students (even more especially), and current students tend to get very defensive when anyone on CC suggests that their alma maters are less than perfect. Your sparring partner barrons is the extreme example, but the forum is full of the type.</p>
Of course Yale has a high% graduation rate. I’m surprised that it’s that low, honestly. It simply doesn’t admit any students that can’t perform academic work at a very high level. The only people who don’t do work at a high level are those who choose not to, and maybe a few who get sick in one way or another. And the kind of student recruited by these schools is almost always somebody who worked very hard in high school–if not in academics, then in multiple extracurricular activities.</p>
<p>And if I’m a “type” who defends his alma mater, it’s fair for me to point out that there’s also a type who likes to argue that the Ivies aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Maybe they aren’t, but the idea that they’re full of a bunch of anti-intellectual slackers who constantly need excuses for late work is just silly.</p>
<p>They all graduate because they are all more than qualified to do the work. And they are pretty much self-directed, type A personalities!</p>
<p>You can believe whatever you want. You don’t have to believe me, especially since I’m just an anonymous poster on the internet. But I’ve heard HYP professors talking about their students for 25+ years (a whole lot of incredibly really boring & tedious talk ;)) and sometimes they are very critical, but never have I heard anyone claim the students weren’t challenging themselves or working hard. </p>
<p>I don’t know Deresiewicz. Obviously he wrote a popular book. Maybe it made money. I am now going to try and search to see if he has published any serious scholarship in his field.</p>
<p>I am okay if you want to bash HYP but bash it for something sensible
You might, for instance, question whether a school is too pre-professional.
But please don’t bash other people’s kids :(</p>
<p>Just wanted to offer the comment that it is very hard to gain tenure at Yale, starting as an untenured faculty member. One of my friends was a junior faculty member there and remarked that the university was mostly offering its young faculty “rungless ladders.” I would guess that its tenure policies are similar to those at Harvard, which used to have a tenure rate of about 2% in my area, though it may have gone up slightly in the past ten years. A professor I worked with for a while a Berkeley remarked that Berkeley hired young faculty whom they intended to tenure, and wound up tenuring about half of them, while Harvard hired young faculty with no intention of tenuring them (and then tenured a few). Faculty members who do not receive tenure cannot stay on as untenured faculty–they have to go elsewhere. Many of the “top” schools hire full professors from other places, once they have established a research reputation.</p>
<p>All of this is to say that I don’t take the fact that Deresiewicz wasn’t tenured at Yale to reflect badly on him. But on the other hand, a faculty member who has been denied tenure is unlikely to have a truly objective view of a university.</p>
<p>I understand, but my sparring does not challenge Barron’s own experience, and remains confined to generalities. As an another example, I have often sparred with dads of Smithies on a great number of subjects, but when they say that their daughter’s experience was sublime, I have no reason to question that account. Similarly, I have had (quite a few) discussions about the impact of the essays at Chicago, and opined that it did not help the school and surely did not help separate the intellectuals from the “masses.” While this might not please the Chicago fans, it did not challenge the credibility of their opinion. Biased perhaps, but still credible. </p>
<p>As far as being defensive about your own choices, and especially the choices of children, I think that simply comes with the territory. </p>
<p>PS The Yale program I was mentioning is called Directed Studies aka Directed Suicide.</p>
<p>annasdad, I asked ““real requirements that must be fulfilled.” Is this a question of distribution requirements, of rigor, or just of Deresiewicz’s complaint about deadlines that must be met?” and you answered “Answers b and c.” Let’s be clear: you are saying that Penn State, Bowdoin, UIUC, Rochester, Michigan, Oberlin and CMU are all more rigorous than Yale, and are all far more scrupulous about having hard and fast deadlines for coursework.</p>
<p>I don’t buy it. For rigor, you can find courses all up and down the scale at any of these schools. For deadlines, Deresiewicz uses this anecdote in his article</p>
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<p>to illustrate just how tough things are for Cleveland State. Maybe Deresiewicz’s friend was being lazy and didn’t plan well and wrote a lousy term paper. On the other hand, maybe her employer told her she had to stay late, or her bus was late, and the prof said “rules are rules”. It’s difficult to think that the students at Bowdoin or CMU are going to face those same kind of professors. </p>
<p>You don’t want your kid going somewhere that’s not going to stretch her. I don’t want my kids going somewhere where the professors are going to be that unforgiving of circumstances.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, between the two of us, my husband and I have experience as students or faculty members or both at Yale, Harvard, USC, Caltech, MIT, two state flagships, and a highly ranked (according to the rankings discussed in this thread) European university. </p>
<p>Among these, I think Harvard and Yale do provide a superior educational experience for most students with a slight edge going to Yale. Caltech and MIT are wonderful, too, for the right student. </p>
<p>Of course, a motivated student can get a good education and lead a happy and successful life at the others. </p>
<p>The European university is the cheapest–no tuition, and fees are just a few hundred dollars per year. And any student with an appropriate high school diploma can enroll. So students in that country can attend a world-class university without loans and without the whole college admissions ordeal that we put our ambitious students through.</p>
<p>Of course, some very smart kids would conclude that only stupid, pointlessly posturing kids would insist on finding the hardest college on earth to attend.</p>
<p>Now I have lost track of whether your son went to Caltech or did not go to Caltech, sewhappy </p>
<p>Very seriously, I don’t think that the difficulty of Caltech is about posturing. I can’t think of any “pseuds” I know who went to Caltech. It really is about learning very difficult subjects. The number of students for whom it is suitable is very small–maybe somewhat fewer than the number they take.</p>
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