<p>A couple of grace notes, against the background of near complete agreement with what Cue7 and 45 Percenter said.</p>
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<li><p>Students reading this thread should understand that talking about the University of Chicago in this context is a little misleading, because it really is an outlier in American higher education. Unlike almost any other college, it really DOES have an orientation towards theory over practice, and that affects the kinds of students who go there, the kinds of courses offered, and the way those courses are taught. And, of course, even there you would find a huge variation from one course and one professor to another, and department to department. But the fact that it makes sense to talk about Chicago as a theory-oriented college does not mean that it makes sense to evaluate the curriculum at other colleges, like Penn, on a theory-vs.-practice basis.</p></li>
<li><p>Except in two respects:</p></li>
<li><p>First, the higher you get in the academic food chain, the more theory you are going to tend to find mixed in with everything. Institutions that are highly selective in who they admit, and that see themselves as training elites, tend to rate the educational value of teaching theory much more highly that institutions whose primary role is employment qualification for average students. So there isn’t really any difference among Penn, Columbia, and Brown in the extent that they teach theory, but there is a meaningful difference between all of them and, say, Millersville State University, Buffalo State College, or Central Florida University. Not that you can’t take theoretical courses at those schools, but you may have to seek them out.</p></li>
<li><p>Second, shadowzoid might have asked a slightly different question and gotten more of an answer, or at least provoked a little debate. The teaching of theory vs. practice does not differ meaningfully among elite colleges, but the interest level of the students in theory vs. practice does differ. Not in any absolute way (except, perhaps, at Chicago, which pretty much does everything it can to ensure that students who do not like to approach topics via theory don’t apply, don’t get accepted, don’t enroll, and don’t stay if they happen to slip through all of the prior filters). But I think there is a meaningful difference in the vibe at Penn vs. Brown or Yale in this respect. Penn has a bunch of students (lots of engineers, nurses, many but not all of the Whartonites) whose educational goals and curricula are very specific and practical, much more so than at Brown or Yale, and that affects the experience of other students as well. I think students at Penn whose interests are highly theoretical have no lack of mentors or peers, but they tend to think of themselves as being in a minority, part of a subculture. And the engineers at Yale feel the same way. (Yale DOES have engineers, by the way. Just not a whole lot of them. As of a few years ago, the ratio of undergraduate engineering majors to engineering faculty was 1:1.)</p></li>
<li><p>Some of the posts above don’t draw what I would consider an accurate line between theory and practice in an academic context. At least as I understand it, quantitative poli sci can be (and usually is) highly theoretical, although it may be amenable to practical applications. Using mathematical models to analyze things is an enormous hallmark of theory and abstraction. And at the same time, an historical approach could be extremely empirical and anti-theoretic.</p></li>
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