“If you took 100 random Harvard Freshmen and made them go to Ohio State I bet that they would go just as far in life. If you took 100 random OSU students and put them at H I doubt that it would change their trajectories that much either.”
The Harvard students would be successful at OSU. Still, I think many of them would be bored, and would not be challenged at the same level. That less challenging environment may help some of them to do better than they would have, but I think that on average their trajectory is likely to be somewhat lower.
However, inviting a spectrum of OSU students to Harvard would be a disaster. The level of knowledge assumed in the courses, the pace of the courses, and the level of rigor would be unmanageable for many and probably most of them. Many of the books may be the same, but the amount of reading, psets, and projects assigned will not be the same. Many students who were doing fine in their major at OSU would suddenly find themselves at or near the bottom of the class and in danger of failing.
I know a lot of people like to believe that there is no difference in these schools, but after seeing what D1 has been asked to do in the last two years at Penn, we did not even consider applying there for D2. D1 loves to be challenged at the highest level constantly. That is good because her workload would crush most students. D2 is a very good student and would be in the top quartile at OSU, but if she had to manage her sister’s course load, she could not do it for long.
Use another metric if you like; the same point would hold. Those who produce the most patents or publish the most wouldn’t have SAT scores far different from the regular 1%, but they may be disproportionately headed to elite schools.
Obviously, whether earning more matters or not is a personal opinion, but it’s also a personal opinion that only some have the luxury of holding. I don’t find many folks near or below the poverty line (who don’t have family who can bail them out) who think that earning more doesn’t matter. Certainly, my parents, when they were in that state, were not of the opinion that being one mishap away from destitute poverty was just the same as being comfortably upper-middle-class (or better), odd as that sentiment may seem to some of you.
@Much2learn, there certainly could be differences in rigor, and many at a Generic State U would struggle at Harvard. However, if GSU has strong grad programs and top profs as well as different tracks and honors programs/colleges, the 100 Harvard students may be able to be sufficiently challenged and achieve their goals as well.
Many Harvard students are not in super high intensity honors courses like Math 55a-55b, so it is not a given that all or most of them will find OSU insufficiently challenging.
This is where I feel I must point out that OSU (assuming we mean Ohio) is the flagship university, and is hardly a repository of slacker dum-dum heads. While about half of applicants are admitted, part of the reason is that there’s room for about 12,000 freshmen on the main campus alone (that’s roughly twice the size of U Michigan, UVA or UNC-CH which have about half the acceptance rate). ACT comp 25/75 is 27-31 and in English it’s 26-33.
I don’t understand why this topic (Ivys/MIT/Stanford/etc) creates such a controversy and defensiveness (e.g. the need to point out that the rest of us are not dummies). I’ve watched my daughter through high school and seen the kids that end up at those schools. The Val last year, from the good public HS my daughter goes to, turned down Stanford for Harvard (I think, it might have been MIT). The kids like her have an extraordinary drive, intelligence, and ability to work through the system. I didn’t have the whole package. My daughter doesn’t have it. No biggie.
I can’t think of a single time in my life that a doctor’s school had any bearing at all on my initial selection and long term sustained relationship with him/her.
For most people, I would bet the most important factors for selecting a doctor is:
@droppedit “I don’t understand why this topic (Ivys/MIT/Stanford/etc) creates such a controversy and defensiveness.”
It isn’t only Ivies. At any level, many people seem to need to convince themselves that they are getting the exact same education.
I was talking to a family whose son was deciding between a scholarship to Grand Valley State or paying in-state tuition to Michigan. They chose Grand Valley State, which is fine, but they felt the need to claim that there really is no difference in the education.
I just don’t know whether Michigan is worth the $14k in in-state tuition for this particular student, but with a 7 point difference in average ACT score, I don’t think that GVSU classes can cover the same material in the same depth and at the same pace that Michigan can.
It depends on the courses, including which courses the student chooses.
A Harvard student who chooses Math 55a-55b (third level honors sophomore-level math) may not be able to find equivalently rigorous courses at most other schools. But a Harvard student who chooses Math 21a-21b (regular non-honors sophomore-level math) will be getting something similar to what students at most other schools will get when they take similar courses (same for the Harvard student who stops at Math 1a-1b (single variable calculus)).
Well, in this Grand Valley State U vs U of M comparison their son is planning an engineering major. GVSU is abet accredited, so they definitely cover a lot of material, but I don’t believe that they cover all the material that Michigan covers.
We in the flyover country call Purdue and Miami Ivy. They produced the first man on the moon and a house speaker. I’d like to see the OP article in a vigorously peer reviewed journal first, but I’m OK if we are talking about the top 100 schools instead of top 10 or 20.
Earning more matters a lot to those who experienced only 1-2 meals a day or went without 1 for a few days. People with $Ms somewhere can’t comprehend. Sometimes I wonder if it’s true too that white can’t imagine being black. I’d like to see a version of It’s a Wonderful Life where George is white but suddenly becomes black.
Exactly. I know a few kids that went to Ivy schools (broadly defined) and 4 years later went on to professional schools like Harvard MS or Yale Law. They are ordinary kids but with drive, intelligence and social skills. They are the type of SAT 2380-2400 or ACT 35-36 first try, not over prepared. They are not mine.
Eiholi, the term Ivy League isn’t “broadly defined.” It doesn’t encompass elite schools as a whole and it doesn’t encompass PUrdue and Miami of Ohio (never heard either of them referred to that way). It refers specifically to 8 very specific schools in the NE. If you want to say “elite schools” to broaden that out, then it’s best to use that term. There’s a lot of angst on CC when it’s unclear if someone means those 8 schools or elite schools as a whole.
"Earning more matters a lot to those who experienced only 1-2 meals a day or went without 1 for a few days. People with $Ms somewhere can’t comprehend. "
Fully agreed, but it’s not like the choice is - go to an elite school and have enough to eat versus go to a “lesser” school and you’ll still go hungry. Honestly, people manage to be self supporting and have nice lives from “lesser” schools.
Students who really want to learn and are capable of learning more than their peers are not prevented from doing so outside of the typical classroom or taking different approaches than the standard one. Maybe it is the homeschooling experience in my kids’ lives, but learning for them has never been confined to what some one else teaches them. They know how to find resources and to learn what it is that they want to know (and have spent hours upon hours researching topics of interest for no one other than themselves.)
Then there also programs like my son is participating in where he is taking grad level classes as an UG. This semester as a Jr he is taking grad level mechanics and some other grad level physics class that I can’t remember. He will be graduating with his master’s in physics simultaneously with his bachelor’s in physics and math. Even with that, he spends hours each week dedicated to research (he is working for a professor who expects him to function like a grad student. What he has learned from research is invaluable and not connected to any classroom experience.)
His school choice was based on parental ability to pay (or more precisely based on parental inability to pay), not his ability to learn and excel. I personally don’t believe his future is limited by our ability to fund his college education. He is making a name for himself by himself. He will end up wherever his personal drive takes him.
Miami of Ohio is not an Ivy, but it is a real jem for those who happen to fit there. The student / college match is one important criteria that has been overlooked over and over. And while Ivy’s are known for not awarding Merit scholarships, places like Miami of OH are known for the opposite. And this fact attracts many very top caliber HS students who are planning on the Grad. schools and who decided to take a chance at Miami and ended up on top of their game after 4 rewarding and happy years on the beautiful campus taking classes that are never taught by TAs…all while paying no or small tuition.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, I think that at a lot of schools, it’s possible to challenge yourself if you seek it out, but at some schools/programs, it’s easier to hide than others by taking classes that aren’t so rigorous and yet fool yourself by still getting a decent GPA. Some schools/programs will push you; at others, you’d have to push yourself.
@PurpleTitan That misses my point. Students who want to learn more, can. Internal student motivation is a character trait that is not measured by strictly by test scores or GPA or SES or even the school attended. A student who really has a strong desire to learn more beyond the classroom, can. Curiosity, desire to understand deeper concepts which extend beyond natural ability…how does a study control for those types of traits?
Even in high school while DEing in 200 and 300 physics classes, our son would go to professors’ offices to ask questions that weren’t being covered in the classroom. Professors would lend him books out of their personal libraries. He certainly didn’t need to bc even though he was a only high school student, he had the highest grades in his classes.
If a student is restingon their laurels bc they have mastered classroom content and all they do is walk in and out of the classroom, wouldn’t that be a different character trait?
My point is that some things are just not easily quantified by a list of stats (which is equally demonstrated by the entire college admissions process in and of itself, isn’t it. )
" I think that at a lot of schools, it’s possible to challenge yourself if you seek it out, but at some schools/programs, it’s easier to hide than others by taking classes that aren’t so rigorous and yet fool yourself by still getting a decent GPA. " - not going to work. When you apply to your next destination, whatever it is, you are compared sometime to thousands of other applicants, and the people who are going thru applications are not fools. Serious students will do the opposite, they will take the hardest classes to get yourself prepared for whatever, MCAT, LSAT, job opportunities. College is not the place to play a HS game, parents are paying some serious money.
In addition, some classes that appear to be “easy” may happen to be the hardest ones to scrape up that A. Anybody took Paper Making class or any art classes? Good luck in these extremely time consuming classes!! To top it, sometime certain classes GPA is counted separately from the general college GPA. Medical school is looking for 2 separate GPAs - science/math and college general. And no pre-med committee will support an applicant who “padded” his college GPA. There are no fools out there, not on the college side, not at the place that college graduate will apply. Competition is severe everywhere, your “padded” resume will be pitched.
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