“Fame does not equal qualilty” – this. There’s a fascinating young woman on the international forum, who studied math at Bryn Mawr, then did her master’s at Stanford. She has some enlightening things to say about Stanford, as well as the nearby UC Berkeley:
“Prestigious” universities often teach introductory math courses poorly. For example, Math 51 at Stanford (linear algebra and multivariable calculus in a single quarter) is possibly the single worst-conceived course at the university. Students come out of it not knowing much more than how to multiply matrices and take partial derivatives. Students who took linear algebra and multivariable calculus at a community college are better prepared for their upper-level coursework…
Berkeley has a reputation for poor math instruction, and the math department has recently sparked a national controversy for firing a sequence of well-liked math instructors (when one of them decided to sue). Rumor goes that the tenured faculty don’t care about teaching non-majors and don’t want to look bad in comparison to more engaging junior instructors. Again, students are probably better off getting their math foundation elsewhere…
Many other “prestigious” universities like to teach their introductory math courses too abstractly in a way that goes over the head of many students in the room. (The youngsters are smart enough to adapt and figure out how to pass these courses, but that does not mean that they learned much in the process. Abstraction is useful and valuable, but not as a first introduction to a topic). I saw that happen a lot at the University of Pennsylvania."
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/international-students/1815390-change-of-residence-p3.html