<p>Ok, so silence_kit, you are telling me that someone who does enought to get by at MIT automatically gets a better education than someone at a state school who works their butt off. I find your logic to be ridiculous.<br>
You also realize that you must not take rankings as all that accurate. Once a school is placed as being a “top” school. Others are not able to even rise in rank. IIT in Chicago has competed with MIT for top rank. As we can see, MIT won that battle, but not by very much. IIT has sadly stayed in its same spot, but is actually one of the best engineering institutes in the nation. You can see this when it comes to some competitions that IIT competes in, such as the hybrid car competition.
Prestige does not automatically equal a better education, and anyone who believes that demonstrates true ignorance. You automatically feel that MIT students have a better education without even experiencing what exactly their education is.</p>
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<p>please read what I wrote. notice how I compared the average student from both schools. i’m no snob. i go to a state school.</p>
<p>^^but how can you be sure that they will learn more if you have never experienced the program at MIT? I never said you were a snob either. I just don’t understand how people can focus so much on rankings and prestige without actually looking at the programs offered.</p>
<p>Looking at the programs is insufficient - the caliber of the student has a huge impact.</p>
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<p>I can’t make a comparison based off of my personal experience, but I am confident in other people’s opinions that a student at MIT will learn more than a student at a less competitive school. </p>
<p>If you go to a school with smarter students, the professors will expect more out of you and as a result, you’ll learn more. I thought this was obvious.</p>
<p>Students at places like MIT are at a distinct advantage, but at the end of the day it is the individual student who decides how much they will get out of their education. If the people from MIT do better than people from other places, it’s not so much that MIT gave them the education that made them into that, but that they were already going to be great. Had they gone somewhere else, and perhaps worked harder to compensate, they would end up with just as much benefit.</p>
<p>I think super-achievers tend to congregate at MIT because it is known as a place where others do. Therefore MIT having a high ranking is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>^^true, AuburnMathTutor. It is all up to the individual student.<br>
silence_kit, sometimes the “top” schools are more focused on grad students and then they have TA’s teach the classes. This doesn’t exactly give an advantage. As Auburn said, a lot of the students who flock to MIT are those who naturally wish to acheive more, making the school have a better record. This is what gives the school a high ranking, the students. The professors are going to be good professors, but even at a state school or other “lower” ranked school the professors may be just as good. People always rank professors based on how their school ranks, but that is just not the case.</p>
<p>In fact, places like MIT have some of the best researchers in the world. However, they do not select for teaching ability or experience.</p>
<p>Many professors who are better at teaching undergraduates, and therefore have not been as successful at research (relatively speaking, naturally) end up at somewhat less-well-ranked universities.</p>
<p>Basically, professors are “good” when they’re good at research, and this is how the best universities pick out their teachers. Therefore, plenty of professors who are good teachers are left over for the lower-ranked schools.</p>
<p>While the makeup of one’s class does in some sense determine how much can be covered in class, this is not really my experience. Usually, what happens is that the professor will blow through the material and half the class will fail, after which a curve is drawn up so that most of the class passes. So the grading is pretty much a joke, but the level of learning doesn’t necessarily suffer.</p>
<p>This may not be the best comparison (I can only go off of course descriptions), but I compared IIT’s electrical engineering coursework to my school’s and it looks like at IIT, they spread out the material over more classes.</p>
<p>I know for a fact that the intro computer class for electrical/computer engineers at my school is split into two classes at the University of Texas-Austin. They are similar otherwise.</p>
<p>You learn more in your coursework at better schools.</p>
<p>edit: I have a friend who studies computer science at a not very well ranked university. The school doesn’t even offer an undergraduate class in the theory of computation or an undergrad course on algorithms. School quality matters, although it is arguable about how much once you start comparing the top-ranked programs against one another.</p>
<p>edit: edit: sorry DocT for using your arguments without giving you proper credit.</p>
<p>“While the makeup of one’s class does in some sense determine how much can be covered in class, this is not really my experience. Usually, what happens is that the professor will blow through the material and half the class will fail, after which a curve is drawn up so that most of the class passes. So the grading is pretty much a joke, but the level of learning doesn’t necessarily suffer.”</p>
<p>As an adjunct professor in EE, you have perfectly summarized for me a failed learning experience.</p>
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<p>“better education” has too many meanings. Is it the person who went to a smaller, lesser known school because they had a full scholarship? Is it the person who went to the best overall school? The person that went to the best overall program? Etc…</p>
<p>I think what silence kit is saying is that at the more prestigious schools the caliber of everything on average is better: The professors, facilities, students. As a result you have class that are taught at a higher level because it is assumed everyone is brighter. Since we are talking about MIT, i wouldn’t think it profound to assume that someone “who does enought to get by at MIT” probably wouldn’t perform the same or better than the student who works their butt off at a state school. I’m not an MIT Alumnus, I did however go to a top 5 program, and it isn’t possible to get by without working hard.</p>
<p>^^haha, DocT… I don’t think that letting everyone fail and then making a curve so that they pass is exactly a good learning experience as DocT has stated. The level of learning does suffer if the professor does not spend the time to teach the subject.</p>
<p>I personally think that experience in the “real” world is more important than experience in the classroom.</p>
<p>Ok, out of curiosity, what is a smarter idea to all of you. Go to a school that gives you a full-ride, but not as well known in their engineering program or to a school that has a very good ranking in engineering, but will put you in debt when you graduate?</p>
<p>This doesn’t really have to do with the discussion at hand, but I am curious to see what all of you would do.</p>
<p>How well known is the school that is giving you a full ride? What caliber of schools are you comparing?</p>
<p>How about a… Bradley University in Illinois full-ride vs. a UMich degree…</p>
<p>“As an adjunct professor in EE, you have perfectly summarized for me a failed learning experience.”</p>
<p>Perhaps I worded my post poorly. I did not mean to imply that the learning here was of a lower quality. Let me rephrase.</p>
<p>The professors generally go over a lot of material. Lots of it is fairly complicated, and they don’t spare on the details. Coverage is excellent in breadth of information and in depth of focus.</p>
<p>This being said, I don’t go to a “top” university for CS, not by a long shot. Still, the program(s) in the CSSE department are fairly good and accredited. However, the relatively lower ranking means that there are a lot of relatively under-performing individuals in the program.</p>
<p>These under-performers usually don’t do as well in the classes, but the level of instruction isn’t necessarily lowered, per se. They just do fairly poorly on the assigned work. For whatever reason, the department see fit to curve the grades so that a respectable number of people pass the courses. For instance, while the grade distribution for, say, an Intro. to Algorithms class may be the following:
90%-100%: 2
80%-90%: 3
70%-80%: 5
60%-70%: 8
50%-60%: 13
40%-50%: 8
30%-40%: 5</p>
<p>The class will be adjusted to look like</p>
<p>90%-100%: 5
80%-90%: 13
70%-80%: 13
60%-70%: 10
50%-60%: 3</p>
<p>etc. you get the idea.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to give the impression that I feel that the learning experience is a failed one. On the contrary, I mean to say that the level of education attainable by good students at lower-ranked universities is not so far below that available to those going to higher-ranked institutions. In my experience, the professors don’t cater to the lowest common denominator.</p>
<p>^^Auburn, thanks for clarifying that. I understand what you are saying.</p>
<p>"How about a… Bradley University in Illinois full-ride vs. a UMich degree… "</p>
<p>Silly questions maybe, but…
(1) Are Bradley engineering programs ABET accredited?
(2) How much debt are we talking for a UMich degree?</p>
<p>If the answer to (1) is yes and (2) is “more than $50,000”, I would go to Bradley in the blink of an eye. If (1) is yes and (2) is “less than $20,000”, I would definitely have to think about it.</p>
<p>humm…i guess another question is how much debt? If it’s too much ($20k+) i’d probably go Bradley and make sure to do coop and research to make myself more marketable. I can of course only say this since i’ve been working and now realize that even engineers from non-prestigious universities even land good jobs.</p>
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<p>It depends on whether the university is public or private, I think. Public universities receive less of their funds from students’ tuition, and care less about standards being too high. Private universities care a great deal about this because they lose a lot of money when students drop out of their programs.</p>