Choosing A School That Is Better For Your Major Over A School That Is Better Overall

Applying to College
21

<p>Allow me to take a boring, middle-of-the-road approach:</p>

<p>In the case of Cornell engineering vs. other Ivy League engineering, it's perfectly sensible to choose Cornell, because "engineering" is a "school" in and of itself. Sure, people often change majors and whatnot, but an eighteen-year-old who says, "I want to be an engineer," is not unreasonable (assuming he/she has put thought into it). It's when he starts saying, "I want to be a mechanical engineer," and starts looking at the best mechanical engineering departments and ignoring all other forms of engineering and sciences, that he's taking things too far.</p>

<p>Areas like "engineering," or "architecture," or "art," or "science" are obviously not specific fields, and if you feel like you belong in one of these general areas, then by all means investigate colleges that specialize in these (not everyone has the luxury of attending a school that is supremely awesome in everything). Just be careful about getting too specific. For example, if you're interested in social science and economics in particular, the University of Chicago is an obvious good choice, as it is top-notch in economics and is also strong in areas you're likely to convert to (math, political science, history, sociology, etc.). Contrast this with MIT, which is also top-notch in economics, but if you decide to change your major, your little social-science-loving-self is rather screwed.</p>

<p>Oh, and in closing I'll make the obligatory remark that "fit" is more important than anything else.</p>

22

<p>great topic</p>

23

<p>Depends on the major, I think, and whether or not you intend to go on to grad school. I know for the degree I chose, a B.Arch, the department reputation was hands down more important than the university reputation.</p>

24

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<p>Could not put it better. If you are comfortable and happy at your school, you will do well and in turn get a good job. I have seen too many student choose a school based on rank and end up miserable.</p>

25

<p>I knew I wanted an ME degree. So I chose the best program I got into. All other factors were secondary.</p>

26

<p>"Well, reputation IS good. BUt not necessarily the most important part. A 4.0 from community college looks better than a 2.0 from Harvard."</p>

<p>Eh, not really. Especially if the Harvard person was majoring in something like engineering or math.</p>

27

<p>I'd take a 2.0 from Harvard over a 4.0 from any community college. At least I can try to hide the bad GPA. You can't hide the associate's degree. ;)</p>

28

<p>GPA's better than prestige :)</p>

29

<p>If you are comfortable and happy at your school, you will do well and in turn get a good job. I have seen too many student choose a school based on rank and end up miserable. Pat2323.</p>

<p>Right on the mark, P.</p>

30

<p>I currently work as a transfer counselor but am also familiar with freshman admissions and graduate school admissions. From my experiences, the GPA is considered within the context of the school at which it was earned. The level of academic challenge one has undertaken is a key factor, and part of that is determined by the quality of students with whom one has studied.</p>

<p>As long as a school is considered a quality school (top ranked privates as well as flagship publics), then overall reputation and department reputation are both important factors in the decision process. For some majors, especially those requiring some specialized knowledge (such as business, some sciences, or engineering), the department reputation may be an even stronger factor than overall reputation. If the major is very narrowly focused, such as food science or sport management, then most small colleges do not really have the resources to field a powerful and comprehensive program, so the only valid choices may be large privates or flagship publics.</p>

<p>Once students have identified several good schools with either a good overall reputation or a good department reputation, then fit becomes the most important factor. Happy students are more likely to be successful students.</p>

31

<p>I think it's a balance. When you're picking between Cornell Engeneering and other Ivies (assuimg fit is not an issue)...go for Cornell! I mean, it's not ranked as high as HPYS, but dude...it's still one of the best schools in the country, and no employer is going to turn their nose up at a Cornell graduate, even if you do change manjors. You will get a great education either way. This goes for any highly ranked school vs. any other highly ranked school.</p>

<p>When the differeance in the schools is great enough that you might actually get a less good education/be surrounded by students signifigantly less engaged than you/etc, that's when you should start thinking about chosing the school that is better overall, IMO.</p>

32

<p>Whoa! Wait a minute here...we are borderline elitist in that last comment. I know you didnt mean to be offensive, but it was. I went to a lesser name school (Jesuit institution) and I had an absolutely LIFE CHANGING experience. I can tell you that ALL of the kids (30 years ago) were FULLY engaged. I was deeply challenged...and hence excelled, graduating with HIGH HONORS. I wouldnt trade my experience there for all the Ivy League schools combined. In all four years I had ONE professor who was awful and I withdrew because I was bored and he was a waste of my time. Other than that, I had superb professors (some of whom were Ivy educated, another from Tufts, several from Georgetown, and an amazing Phd from Stanford whom we called "the Penguin" because he looked like and laughed like the Penguin in the original Batman cartoon show of the 60's, but who was positively brilliant. I am friends with several of my classmates. We still chuckle over the Philosophy classes, the Hegelian dialectic, Walter Lippman discussions (that were VERY heated), and trashing Ayn Rand (my favorite past time.) So just because a school is full of kids that arent perfect SAT's and high school 4.0's doesnt mean its a dullard school, that your education will stink, and you will be a loser for life. By the way, my alma mater has produced more than a handful of Rhodes scholars, Truman scholars, and Fulbright scholars. All from a school you would probably brush off as second rate. But rate it as FIRST rate. And its better now than ever before, from what I read.</p>

<p>Yes, its good to be around a bunch of bright kids. But learning is valuable with all sorts of kids, which explains why Ivy Leagues, Duke, Vandy, WashU and many other schools regularly admit kids from down the SAT ladder further than you would think.....precisely for that reason. They could fill their incoming class EVERY year with perfect SAT's and 4.0 students (u/w). They do NOT want to do that for very good reason.</p>

<p>Some of the smartest people I know went to off the beaten path schools. My D's favorite high school teacher who is positively brilliant, EXTREMELY demanding and serves on the board of national AP examiners went to a podunk school in West Virginia.....and I have the utmost respect for him as a teacher and human being.</p>

<p>I strongly recommend you go see the movie, We are Marshall, as that movie embodies the school spirit that many schools like Harvard would kill to have. (No I didnt go to Marshall and no, my D's teacher didnt go there either.) In fact, after seeing the movie, I emailed the current President. To my surprise he emailed me back and we had a fabulous, but short, conversation about the essence of Marshall and what that movie represents. And that is precisely the issue I am suggesting to you.</p>

<p>I fully agree that Cornell is a superb school and I tip my hat to them, their faculty and student body. But a great education can be had at THOUSANDS of schools across the United States.</p>

<p>My rant is done. Thanks.</p>

33

<p>UChicago gets 100 million...and will give it to lower income kids. Problem however, is it means the middle class still gets stiffed. Raise a family of 4 or 5 on 80 or 90k a year isnt so easy.....after taxes, and its almost impossible to salt away a nest egg both for retirement AND for paying your kids' way through college. However its a nice gesture by Chicago and a superb gesture of good will by the anonymous donor:</p>

<p>Anonymous Donor Gives $100 Million To U. Of C.
Donation Is Largest Ever To An Illinois University</p>

<p>(AP) CHICAGO A graduate of the University of Chicago gave an anonymous donation of $100 million to his alma mater, marking the largest single donation given to an Illinois university.</p>

<p>The money will be used to give full scholarships to about 800 lower-income students each academic year. The grants, called Odyssey Scholarships, will also pay partial tuition for another 400 of the 4,400 undergraduate students at the institution and fund a summer enrichment program for about 50 lower-income students before their first year of college.</p>

<p>"A quarter of our students will have a very different experience than they had before," said Michael Behnke, vice president and dean of college enrollment. "They will be free from this worry about debt. It will transform student life on campus."</p>

<p>For students to qualify for the full scholarships, which will be funded for 15 years starting in fall 2008, the family income of the student must not exceed $60,000. To qualify for the partial scholarships, the family's income must not be more than $75,000.</p>

<p>University officials offered few details about the donor, who graduated from the school in the early 1980s. Officials said as a student, he came from a "modest background" but didn't require financial assistance.</p>

<p>"Our donor is somebody who himself felt that his life had been transformed by the nature of the education that he had," University President Robert Zimmer said. "He wanted to make the gift to ensure that students had the opportunity independent of their financial capacity."</p>

<p>Before the $100 million gift to the University of Chicago, the largest single donation to a university in Illinois was $75 million given to Northwestern University in 2002 from the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation. </p>

<p>(© 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. )</p>

34

<p>I mean, I'm pre-professional (like many people) and plan on working before entering professional school - so for areas like finance going to a top school, rather than a top program, is more important.</p>

<p>Also, a 4.0 from a CC...its pretty cool, but having Harvard on your resume is better, guaranteed. Just forget to mention GPA. If you are going to grad school, you are going to have to transfer away from CC and get a bachelors at a university anyways btw.</p>

35

<p>I don't think that a Harvard-caliber student who chooses Cornell for engineering has a significant problem -- even if he later changes his major to economics or psychology. Cornell isn't Harvard, but it's still a good enough college so that the ex-engineer will find plenty of academic peers and plenty of good grad school or career opportunities after graduation.</p>

<p>The situation is a little different for a Harvard-caliber student who has very specialized interests that can only be pursued at colleges that Harvard-caliber students do not ordinarily attend. For example, let's say that our top student plans to go to veterinary school and would like to major in animal science so that he can get experience working with large animals during his undergraduate years. Most of the universities that offer animal science majors are not the sorts of schools that attract large numbers of Harvard-caliber people (the main exception to this rule, oddly enough, is Cornell, but's let's assume that our hypothetical student doesn't plan to apply there because he doesn't like cold weather or something). Going to Clemson or North Carolina State or Texas A&M for animal science may make sense for this student -- but what if his interests change? Would he be happy in a different major at one of those schools?</p>

36

<p>a 4.0 from a state school is certanly better than a 2.0 from harvard, in the same major, but I dont know about CC. </p>

<p>Go to where you think you will enjoy your time the best, factor in everything.</p>

37

<p>Perhaps I'm just crazy, but I've never been sure why people think department rankings matter for undergrads (at least in liberal arts type majors). Department rankings are based on the quality (and quantity) of research done by the professors, which in many ways has little effect on the quality of undergraduate education (obviously the picture is completely different for grad school). If quality of research done by faculty was such an important factor, LACs would be virtually useless, and even some of the ivies (particularly Brown and Dartmouth), so beloved here on CC, would have be scarcely better than schools most of you would consider far inferior. This becomes even more apparent when looking at specific majors. According to the NRC ratings in 1994 (I know these are out of date, but the basic point doesn't change), Harvard was 21st in linguistics, while UMass was 4th. Does that mean a prospective linguistics major should choose UMass over Harvard? Hardly.
In my opinion, there are four factors crucial to a good undergraduate education, which help explain why AWS, despite having far inferior research faculty, probably provide a better undergraduate education than, say, UC Berkeley.
1. Teaching: Obviously it's hard to measure how good instructors at various schools are at communicating information, but one can compare the degree to which resources are devoted to teaching undergraduates. At a LAC, teaching is considered far more important than it is at a major public research university, so one would reasonably expect (and probably find) better teaching at Amherst than at the University of Michigan (note: these are random examples).
2. Quality of students: At college, one learns a good deal from one's peers. Having fellow students who are smart and care about learning allows you to learn much more effectively. SUNY Buffalo's Chemical Engineering faculty (ranked 29) may be just as good as Yale's (ranked 32) but I would guess that your fellow students at Yale would help contribute to a significantly better academic experience.
3. Resources for undergrads: When you go to a school like HYP that has buckets of money that it showers on undergrads for things like study abroad, research, etc, you have a much better chance to get a good quality education. Berkeley's German department may be better rated than Stanford's (1 vs 6) but I would bet that you are much more likely to receive institutional support to study German in Germany from Stanford than you are from Berkeley.
4. Opportunities for research: Now this is the one area where faculty research rankings could play a substantial role, but I would argue that they shouldn't. The most important factor here is the ability to actually be substantially involved in research at all (ie actually working on the academic content of the research rather than washing test tubes). I would bet that the percentage of engineering students at Harvard or Yale (with their low-rated engineering programs) actually involved in research with faculty is substantially higher than at Berkeley, despite Berkeley's much better engineering ranking. Berkeley's faculty may be doing research that is more cutting edge, but that doesn't matter if all you can do in their labs is type data into a spreadsheet. Another important factor (particularly in the humanities and social sciences where there really aren't very many opprtunities to be a research assistant) is the ability to do your own research as an undergrad. Places with a lot of undergraduate resources (as described above in #3) will give you a much better chance to do your own research than places without them. </p>

<p>Now this may still lead to the question of whether to choose Stanford over Harvard for linguistics (rank 2 vs 21) since both meet all of the other qualifications. I would agree that once you reach the level of comparison where two schools are roughly equal in the 4 areas above that I would consider far more important, department rankings could play a role. But I don't think it should be a huge role, and certainly should be much less important than "fit." The benefits provided by those top linguistics faculty at Stanford would hardly matter if you are dying to live in Boston. The opportunities would, in the end, be roughly equivalent despite the difference in faculty quality, so the role of faculty quality in decision making should still be small.</p>

<p>One caveat: This is less true for pre-professional programs. The ability of an engineering major to get a good job depends to a much greater extent on the reputation of his university's reputation for engineering than the ability of a history major to get a good job depends on his university' reputation for history. Thus, in a field like engineering, one should give more weight to department rankings, though it still shouldn't be a huge weight (in the engineering scenario I discussed earlier, I think a Yale engineering grad would have a far better chance at a good job than a SUNY Buffalo engineering grad, despite the similar rankings).</p>

38

<p>s snack -- there really aren't any "more prestigious schools" than Johns Hopkins. Maybe some universities are higher ranked by USNWR - but that's just a marketing label. Real quality in every department an in every measure can be found at Johns Hopkins. So, how do you define "prestige." I think you have to answer that before anyone can help you with your question.</p>

39

<p>I would choose departmental strenght for a particular industry/major. I like the example of Hopkins's BME program. If I wanted to do BME, Id go Hopkins over any other school in the nation - Stanford, Havard, Yale, anything.</p>

40

<p>I placed more emphasis on the major than the school. I got into Michigan's #3 ranked business program, even though I was admitted to a couple of higher ranked schools. Since UM is also a top 25 university with a great reputation, I didn't feel like I was compromising at all. UM also turned out to be my favorite when I visted the schools.</p>

<p>Having said that, I believe the USNews ranking should only be used as one tool and it has its faults. When it comes down to it, IMO ranking should not be the top priority.</p>