There are differences to be found even in advanced classes. Harvard’s Math 55 is widely regarded to be one of the most difficult freshman math courses in the country. And while the claims that it covers the entire undergraduate mathematics curriculum in one year are exaggerated, they do quite a bit. The honors freshman math class at my state flagship definitely covers much less, maybe a quarter of what they do, over a year. That being said, there is a PhD program in mathematics at my state flagship. So someone attending, who would be ready to take Math 55 if they were at Harvard, could take upper division or graduate courses, or maybe even try to do independent studies and research their freshman year instead. But that will be a different experience than one would get at Harvard.
@warbrain That is a valid pt. It is the approach our ds is taking with physics. He is a freshman, but only has the 2 quantum physics classes left for his undergrad physics requirements. He will be taking grad level classes the rest of undergrad.
I think this is an astute comment that bears repeating. This discussion reminds me of some we’ve had in the Café in the past about whether it “matters” if somebody gets a tattoo.
Let me put it this way: if somebody expresses his goal, I can have an opinion about whether attending an elite college is a sensible part of a strategy to achieve that goal. For some goals, it absolutely is, and for others, it isn’t. When you think of it in terms of strategy, the fact that there are some people who achieve the goal by following a minority strategy is less relevant–you want to know what strategy succeeds most often. As I’ve said before, there may be an Olympic runner who trained by running up and down Mount Kilimanjaro barefoot with rocks in his pockets, but that doesn’t mean that this is the best general strategy for becoming an Olympic runner.
What’s the best college to attend if your goal is longevity?
To riff on the motivation thing, yes, in theory, anyone can be motivated enough to achieve any amount of knowledge or skill just by reading books. However, there’s a poster on CC who notes that he recruits from only 5 schools (public & private, Ivy and non-Ivy, but all with elite CS/CE programs). That’s not so much because of the names of the schools, but because he knows that the curriculum in those subjects at those schools is really demanding, so he knows the top students there have to be really good. At some other schools, a student may have the talent to become that good but may not be pushed to be.
So yes, if you want to work in IT, likely any school for CS would do. If you want to work in that guy’s lab (or a handful of other places like that), that’s not so true.
The School of Good Sense versus the School of Good Luck, Hunt? I guess this thread is s lot about predicting hindsight. Not always possible.
Realistically speaking, we can’t know if it matters til the kid is out and underway.
Of course it matters. It is four years of your life, and a unique period of personal growth at that. Where you go to school will determine who you meet, who you become friends with, the kind of intellectual experiences you have, what climate and cultures you are exposed to…the list is endless. All of this will have a profound effect on who you become, no matter WHAT school you choose.
I don’t think of “matters” as being something defined by dollar signs. That’s an awfully impoverished view of life.
"Many tell me how well their offspring is doing at college; I tend to assume they’re truthful, but I suppose they may not be. They go on to say things like: S or D is on the dean’s list/getting straight A’s/just got a student-athlete award for high GPA, etc. This always puzzles me a bit, since presumably college should be more difficult than high school, and these were kids who weren’t ever on the high school honor roll and never got the high school student-athlete awards. "
Oh well. You can always console yourself with knowing that you won the parenting contest.
@Consolation, arguably, HS matters even more, then.
Just a bit of thinking aloud on the ‘if you go to a state school no one will be doing internships and you will fail at life’ (kidding!) tangent -
If high stats, high motivation students can find similar peers at the public high schools a good amount of them attend, why wouldn’t they be able to find that at a public state schools? In those with well-established honors colleges, I highly doubt a student wouldn’t be able to surround themselves with like-minded, high-stats, high-motivation peers who would also be applying for internships in November. I mean, I guess if they couldn’t then they’re obviously bound for failure 
but I find the premise that any decently ranked public school somehow lacks a significant population of ‘elite’ students somewhat bizarre.
irlandaise, I’m not sure if undergraduate schools have those “scattergrams” showing who was admitted and who was rejected, based on test scores and GPA, but for law schools, a mid-tier law school can have just an applicant or two per year that has the same numbers as the median of the class for a top-10 school.
@HappyAlumnus, law school may be more stratified, in part because everybody goes to law school for the same general purpose, in part because opportunities by tier differ a lot compared to most other professions, and in part because numbers matter a LOT more in law school admissions.
I showed in another thread that the Ivies and equivalents literally do not have enough spots for all the 99th percentile kids (those who scored in the 99th percentile in either the SAT or ACT).
And they don’t just fill their classes with high-stats kids. They want a variety of talents, a good fit, kids with a “spark”, and to fill institutional wants, and many of those kids are definitely below the 99th percentile in stats.
Also, kids don’t all head to undergrad with the same goal(s) in mind. That’s how UIUC CS in Engineering manages to have an entering class with an average ACT of 34. And CMU CS is even harder to get in to. Many of those kids would only be applying to other schools that are strong in CS while ignoring many/most Ivies.
Law school != undergrad. That has been pointed out numerous times before.
I never claimed to be presenting facts in post 82, but rather to be sharing the content of some conversations I have had, and my musings about them. On this thread we are all extrapolating opinions from our own experiences and personal knowledge about the quality of our own local schools, which clearly varies a good deal. Reporting personal observations has to be the way it is for the most part, since it is obviously impossible to conduct an experiment in which the same student attends two different colleges at the exact same time in his life so we can compare the outcomes and definitively determine if there was a big difference or not in the education he received.
I said, “it’s hard for me to believe…” How does that phrase in any way communicate that I am purporting to share facts? That’s a clear lead-up to a statement of opinion. But yes, I still stand by what I said. It IS hard for me to believe that every one of those average/below-average high school students I know suddenly became ultra-motivated academic superstars once they arrived at college. Yet, according to their parents, they are winning awards at college, earning dean’s list recognition, and getting straight A’s despite never having shown such accomplishment in high school. One such student was the one I mentioned who was in remedial classes at our high school. Another, which I didn’t give additional details on in that post, actually failed our state’s high school proficiency test once, yet was a straight “A” student in college. Regarding that topic, several of you need to re-read my post because you are totally misrepresenting its content. I never said any Val’s or Sal’s were taking remedial classes in college! (or high school either for that matter.)
I allowed that there may be fabrication somewhere on the part of the parents’ account, but I think it’s pretty rude to act as though I have invented my experiences even if you disagree with my interpretations of them. I’ve heard of this pattern enough to wonder about the quality of some of these institutions. So yes, it IS hard to believe that some local institutions where many students we know attend are academically demanding. However, nowhere did I mention where the students I referred to went to college, so I am bothered that some of you just decided to impose your own assumptions on my comments. You just assumed I was talking about kids who attended the state flagship. Even worse, then you went on to berate me for supposedly trashing what you think must be a reputable university. Finally, nothing that I said implied I think I am a superior parent. To imply that was rude.
I guess this topic hits too close to home for some.
- There are scattergrams for undergrad schools; Niche.com is one site that has them.
- "an applicant or two" is a complete exaggeration. Take, for example, University of Arizona... Overall, a solid, but average school (in terms of student stats). As of 2013, 23% of students had > 3.75 GPA in HS, 8% had SAT math scores between 700 and 800, and 11% had ACT scores between 30 and 36. These numbers are in-line with median stats at most "elite" schools... With a total of 31,670 undergrad students, that gives the high performing ones a minimum of 2,500 friends to hang out with who have similar academic backgrounds. Most of those kids are likely also in the honors program, which means the vast majority, if not all, of the students in your classes will be high performers.
^ Source: collegedata.com
To be fair, @fractalmstr, the “applicant or two” comment by @HappyAlumnus was in reference to law schools.
I think the point, GFG, is that it seems as though when there is “happy small talk” that neighbor Janie’s kid Susie is doing well at school, instead of smiling, nodding, saying “how nice” and then moving on to other small talk about the weather and how your major league baseball team is doing – that you pull out your mental excel spreadsheet and keep a tally, because you were SURE that Susie was a poor student and you’ve got to cross-check your notes against what you’re hearing now. That’s what I mean by the parenting contest. It is not a contest. If Susie is happy and doing well at school, what’s it to you? It doesn’t take away from your kids’ successes if Susie gets a 4.0 at Whoville State U. It’s time to let go of knowing that Susie was in remedial math in high school.
I’m also not sure why this topic would “hit close to home” for me - last time I checked, I had kids in fancy-schmancy schools too. The difference is, I don’t need to keep tabs on what their high school classmates accomplished, either in hs or in college. Yay and good luck to everybody. It’s not a competition.
“And the simple fact of the matter is that certain kids become better or less educated depending on the environment, methodology, etc”
- I was talking about different kids in the SAME environment. Besides that, this is an opinion, not the fact and we simply have different opinions. Yours is based on your background and mine is based on my background.
@MiamiDAP, actually, unless all people do equally well or react the same way in all environments (which just isn’t true; I believe psychologists have established pretty clearly than many/most humans react differently when put in different environments/situations), what I’m saying isn’t opinion; it’s actually how humans are.
Gee whiz, some of you act like there’s no such thing as a smart kid or a less smart kid, at least once they get to college. It’s great to be nice to everybody, but let’s be realistic here. The average student at University of Arizona is a significantly less accomplished student academically than the average student at Harvard or MIT. And out of that 8% at UA that had math SATs between 700 and 800 (something that would be true of virtually all students at Harvard and MIT), many of them will have other academic weaknesses that would have kept them out of Harvard or MIT. Does that make them bad people? Of course not. But it does mean that unless there are classes that are limited to only the very best students at UA, the average classroom experience there is going to be slower-paced than at one of the more selective schools.
Look at it this way: if we were talking about what colleges have the best football players, it would be laughable for anybody to claim that the football players at Harvard are just as good as the ones at Ohio State. This is true even if Harvard occasionally gets a really good player. On average, Harvard’s football players are pretty weak (and, sad to say, Yale’s are even weaker). It is hard to see why anybody would go to Harvard if his primary goal was to play in the NFL. He will want to go to a football powerhouse where he can get high-level play and get noticed.
For at least some careers, it makes sense to go to elite colleges for similar reasons.
@Hunt, many HS kids believe that, but actually, the NFL will take take talent from anywhere.
In any case, it really depends on the school & faculty/department culture. You can’t assume that all classes in all departments would be slower-paced. As @fractalmstr noted, the faculty in the better departments (and I would add: at least in STEM fields) would have come from demanding prestigious institutitions and they’d likely keep a high standard (leading to a high attrition rate) in demanding majors at average state schools.
Mind you, what I say would be true at state schools. At nondescript privates, the faculty may be encouraged to not flunk out students (because the school needs the tuition money).