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<p>I have no doubt that that is the expectation. But do you have any evidence that it is in fact the case?</p>
<p>As far as your assertion about income levels, two facts: (1) control for entering capabilties, and the difference in outcomes will have some meaning, and (2) if you’re talking about the value of the credential rather than the quality of the education then yes, prestige matters.</p>
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<p>NIU offers 37 junior and senior level math courses.
UIUC offers 62 junior and senior level math courses.
At the very least, there is a larger selection at UIUC.</p>
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<p>And how many “junior and senior level math courses” does the average undergraduate math major take? 8? 10? 12?</p>
<p>The idea presented in this thread seems to be that a more prestigious school will give the same student a better education. This is flawed for a few reasons. First it cannot be denied that at top tier schools more opportunity exists but at the same time it is up to the individual to capture that opportunity and convert it into a real outcome. Second when looking at outcomes they must be looked at with inputs in mind. To say that students from Harvey Mudd and MIT end up being PHDs at a higher rate and make more than any other schools students may be true but it is also true that the SAT scores and GPAs of these students are better than any others students. All that these stats tend to prove is that the best indication of future performance is past success. Lastly based on the previous two statements successful people will be successful no matter where they gained the knowledge needed to do so.</p>
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<p>Your line that I was responding to here was that a student “…can get a quality education at almost any college. While I agree with this for the very rare student, I believe that even the highly motivated student at a lower tier school will have a much harder time. Additionally, where is your evidence that the professors at lower tier schools all have PhDs – I’ve read that this is not always the case. Also, the salaries for professors at top-level schools far exceeds the average level at lower-tier ones. My bet would be that they don’t pay these teachers a substantial premium without good reason.</p>
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<p>Yes. I’ve been on two extended tours of a broad array of colleges in the past five years, and the facilities were far superior at the so-called elite schools. It doesn’t take an aeronautical engineer to realize that a school with an endowment that exceeds 5 billion is going to have newer and higher quality facilities than a second-tier (or lower) school that has a fraction the economic resources.</p>
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<p>“Stories” also abound that most lower-tier schools have been closing programs, and cutting back on funding for many programs – to a much larger degree than the wealthy schools at the top. My on campus experience relating to three top-20 schools is that the opportunities still abound, even in today’s economic downturn.</p>
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<p>If this “evidence” exists (that the student population is comparable from top and average schools), then it is flawed, based on my experience, and based on my reason. It is also flawed based on statistics which show that the top schools have students with much higher academic stats, and that the preponderance of their students end up in more desirable better paying jobs. Finally, it is flawed based on the fact that the faculties of lower-tier schools are not nearly as well paid. I’ve viewed many studies of academic quality over the last few years – they’ve been linked to here on cc ad infinitum. They tend to support the fact that the top schools have a clear advantage – statistical outliers not-with-standing.</p>
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<p>Minimum is typically around 8, but since we are referring to the most highly motivated students in the subject, the actual number of courses is likely significantly greater (especially since such students will likely have come in with some or all of their freshman and sophomore level courses already fulfilled, clearing even more schedule space for advanced math courses). In this case, the greater choice of courses would certainly benefit the student.</p>
<p>Also, UIUC offers some honors courses that are not available at NIU. In addition, the catalog descriptions for junior level abstract algebra courses at UIUC list more topics covered than the junior level abstract algebra courses at NIU.</p>
<p>This is not to say that NIU is “bad”, but it means that there are differences in educational opportunities available at each school. Of course, some students may benefit from the apparent slower pace of the courses at NIU versus UIUC, so (depending on the student) the differences could go either way.</p>
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<p>Browse a few websites of so-called “lower tier” state schools. You’ll find that the huge majority of professors have PhDs.</p>
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<p>You misinterpret. The evidence shows that there are students at all levels of colleges who apply themselves and grow intellectually and that there are students at all levels of colleges who don’t. It has minimal correlation with entering academic stats and absolutely nothing to do with first job salary.</p>
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<p>“Your bet” is hardly evidence. Can you cite evidence that links faculty salary that to the quality of the education delivered to undergraduates? And the reason they pay a substantial premium is likely to have far more to do with the quality and quantity of the professor’s research (easily measured) and far less with teaching ability (not easily measured).</p>
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<p>“Academic quality” defined how? By criteria that have been correlated with student achievement? Please do link us to some.</p>
<p>@annasdad, post #27</p>
<p>It is telling that the first 5 universities regarding salaries for graduates are all top 20 collegiate institutions. It is all the more remarkable considering that PayScale’s methodology is based solely upon alumnae that stopped at a Bachelors degree. Considering that these schools have a much higher percentage of undergrads who go directly on to Masters and PhD programs than lower-ranked schools it’s an amazing reality; one that does not support your position.</p>
<p>Top 5 Universities for Alumnae Salary
<p>Two schools without PHD programs, Bucknell and Cal Poly SLO, also do very well in starting and/or mid-career median salaries if my memory serves me correctly. Somewhere there’s a link that shows a full list of these schools.</p>
<p>^ Those are two more schools that very likely have much fewer graduates who continue on to Masters and PhD programs – this is why certain schools (many strong in engineering) did well on Payscale’s study. Payscale did not factor in the differences between schools relating to alumnae who go on to get their MDs, PhDs, Masters, et cetera. Many of the top rated schools would have had yet better results (much better) if the study had factored in post-grad degrees.</p>
<p>In the case of Cal Poly SLO, it has relatively few of the low paid biology and humanities majors, so it always does well in surveys like the Payscale one that just look at the school without adjusting for major selection.</p>
<p>Cal Poly SLO is a good school, and is one of the few which has detailed career survey information on its web site (Berkeley and Virginia Tech are two others). Most other schools are much less forthcoming about how their graduates do after graduation, which may be why so many students and parents have erroneous ideas about how schools and majors relate to job prospects (e.g. “all STEM majors have good job prospects” – not true, see biology, the most popular STEM major).</p>
<p>Show me salary figures controlled for entry level qualifications (ACT/SAT/GPA) and I’ll be impressed. Show me a distribution that reports what the top-earning students from each college make mid-career, I’ll be even more impressed.</p>
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I feel quite comfortable being skeptical of such a naive claim. I’ve written about this before based on my own experiences. Motivation is all well and good, but there are limits to how far that will get you.</p>
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Trying to be successful at academically weak schools is often like trying to cook cr</p>
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<p>However, Florida A&M does offer majors in some engineering subjects that Harvard does not.</p>
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<p>You may consider it a “naive claim,” but it is a claim based on analysis of real data, which is more than I perceive for any of the claims in your post. </p>
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<p>I can believe that someone who is dedicated to teaching may in fact be a poor teacher - but I cannot believe that someone who is not dedicated to teaching could be anything other than a poor teacher.</p>
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<p>I’ve never claimed that they are. But by the same token: It is by no means certain that professors at top universities are more dedicated teachers or more effective educators than their comrades at less selective universities.</p>
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<p>So the assistant professors at highly selective universities (many of whom have very low percentages of tenure-track professors eventually granted tenure) are not " publishing desperately while working as visiting assistant professors or trying to move up the academic food chain?"</p>
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<p>Subject rankings primarily refer to graduate programs and attempt to assess the prestige and publications of research-oriented faculty, not the quality of education offered to undergraduates (although that does not stop such claims as being made for them). </p>
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<p>Exactly. It has nothing to do with the ability of the candidate to teach undergraduates. Anyone who has earned a PhD in a field has the breadth and depth of knowledge to teach undergraduate courses. And your anecdote really begs the question: if a candidate can get a PhD from a highly prestigious school like the University of Chicago in spite of “shoddy research [that] indicates deficiencies in knowledge and understanding of appropriate methodologies,” then what does that say about the education delivered to undergraduates in the same field at that top-whatever school?</p>
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<p>On this we agree. But for a student who cannot afford a LAC, and who is a serious and dedicated student intent on wringing the most possible from his or her college education, less-selective universities provide the opportunity to get a first-class education.</p>
<p>I am intrigued by a comment posted just today on another thread:</p>
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13676858-post7.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13676858-post7.html</a></p>
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<p>Would you feel equally comfortable sending your kid to UIUC, NIU, or NEIU, if they were all about the same net cost and the kid were admitted to all of them? How much would net cost have to differ to alter the decision?</p>
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<p>Correct insofar as it goes - because it has nothing to do with my position! Which (to repeat, since you apparently missed it) is that a motivated and dedicated student can get a high-quality education at almost any college, because what a student puts into the education is much more important than where the student gets the education.</p>
<p>Your apparent link between your data and my position is based on a chain of logical fallacies, beginning with a confusion of correlation with causation. </p>
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<p>Your position apparently is that ranking of a school is the cause (or at least is a significant cause) of mid-career median salary.</p>
<p>But there are several critical variables you haven’t controlled for - two of which are (1) the basic smarts, academic preparation, and level of motivation of the average student entering those highly selective colleges, versus the average students at less-selective colleges and (2) the majors and subsequent career choices. </p>
<p>In other words: If a representative average of the non-graduate-degree-seeking graduates of Princeton had instead gone to, say, Michigan Tech or Illinois Institute of Technology or Cal Poly or Georgia Tech and majored in engineering, what would their mid-career median salarie be? There is, of course, no way to tell from any published studies that I’m aware of - and that is what renders your causal claim fallacious.</p>
<p>Then by linking your already fallacious claim to my position, which addresses the quality of education, you imply first, that a more prestigious school provides a higher quality education and, second, that the quality of education received is the cause of mid-career salary differences.</p>
<p>As to the first, I can only point back at the two studies I have already cited several times, which shows that yes, there is a difference in the quality of education delivered by different institutions*; but that the difference in the quality between institutions is much less that among students at the same institution, and that there are high-achieving and low-achieving students at all colleges.</p>
<p>As to the second, I agree - I think the quality of education received does play a significant role in success in life, including economic success, but it is far from the only factor - but since the main factor in determining the quality of the education is the individua student, not the institution, so what?</p>
<p>And all this leaves, of course, aside the quite separate question of whether economic success is the only, or even the most important, measure of the value of an individual’s life.</p>
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<li>- I will point out that while the study reported in “Academically Adrift” drew the conclusion that institutions do does matter in determining the level of academic achievement of their students (although less than what the individual students do), the authors explicitly declined to draw any conclusions about what it was at those institutions whose students performed better in the study. So it would be a leap not supported by the reported study to claim that “students at more selective institutions performed better,” although that might well be the case.</li>
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<p>Here I’m going to fall back on my weasel word, which I’ve been careful to repeat (I think) every time I’ve stated my position - that a student can get a quality education at almost any college. I would want to know more about NEIU before I recommended that school to my daughter, although I would not reject it out of hand. (As an aside, I actually co-taught a course as an adjunct at NEIU, but that was a very long time ago and is far too little to base an opinion of the overall quality of the school on; but I found the students, in that course at least, to be on the whole an intelligent and engaged group; but no doubt that was due to the quality of my teaching <wink>.) </wink></p>
<p>When it comes down to UIUC or NIU, I am convinced that a student who is motivated to wring everything they can out of an undergraduate education will be as well-served at NIU as at UIUC, and I believe that the most important thing a kid leaves college with is not the prestige of the piece of paper (where I freely admit UIUC is superior to NIU) but rather the quality of education; therefore I would have absolutely no problem heartily endorsing my daughter’s decision were she to choose NIU over UIUC.</p>
<p>EDIT: I will also say that given your specific example, it was an easy question to answer, because NIU is a nearby school and I know well many people who have gone there and whom I would consider well-educated people. But in truth, I could say the same for any of the other non-flagship downstate Illinois publics - SIUE, EIU, WIU, ISU (leaving out SIUC only because I don’t personally know any graduates well) - or UIC. Assuming that the educational opportunities of the non-flagship state Us in other states is equivalent to that in Illinois (which I have no knowledge of but have no reason to doubt), I’d have no problem if DD wanted to go to Eastern Michigan or UW-Platteville, for example - and in fact, Truman State is right now vacillating between her #1 and #2 choice.</p>
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<p>To say that the post has nothing to do with your position is wishful thinking. Why? … because your position hasn’t been relegated to just one sentence – you’ve written many sentences in this thread, some of which imply that prospective students might as well matriculate into average (or lower) schools, because if your motivated, well, you’ll be fine. This position ignores the advantages that highly-rated schools provide. These advantages have already been described in this thread, so I wont reiterate them. It is my outlook that if a prospective student has the choice between a top-30 school, and a school commonly ranked below 100 (to pick a number), they’ll generally have much better odds for success at the top-30 school despite how motivated they may be.</p>
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<p>That is not my position in the slightest. My position relates to the outcomes that are indicated by that study. Also, I qualified what I posted by describing some of the shortcomings of the study – shortcomings that fall in favor of the high-rated universities, by the way. The rest of your last two posts are, in my opinion, just a convoluted method to try support a potion that makes little sense – again, this is just my opinion, although a strongly held one. From here on in I’m going agree to disagree with you, since it has become quite obvious to me that we have different modes of interpretation, and completely different opinions, with regard to this issue.</p>
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<p>Comparison of courses and curricula (see upthread about math courses) indicates that at least some students will find some differences. Granted, it may be the difference between “ok” or “good” and “better” (and which is “better” is not necessarily the same for all students), but to claim that all schools are academically the same or equal for all students is greatly overstating the case. (And this type of comparison is not about rankings.)</p>