<p>Re my #52 and TheGFG’s #55: The public flagships cover a wide range, as the Times rankings suggest.</p>
<p>On one ratings site I find convenient to use, UMass would rank in the top 5 (considering both publics and privates) of most states, often in the top two or three, for a number of states it would rank as the #1 public university (sorry Wisconsin) or #1 overall.</p>
<p>In Massachusetts, it ranks #16.</p>
<p>College-shopping is a little bit different in New England.</p>
<p>In Michigan, the top-ranked privates are Calvin College, Kalamazoo College, and Hope College. Maybe I am a parochial New Englander, but I don’t think anyone is mentioning these schools in the same breath as Harvard and MIT. </p>
<p>As for Zoo-Mass… the partying at UMass is no worse than at any other school, but because the school is looked down on by certain news organizations that are filled with grads from certain Boston-area privates, it gets a lot of negative press.</p>
<p>It occurs to me that all you have to do is look at the USNWR rankings and their methodology. For me, the constant question about those rankings since they began years ago is their persistent under-valuation of world-class public universities. THE has Michigan and Berkeley among the elite universities of the planet – as they are – and USNWR tells high school students and their parents that they are, at best, comparable to places like Emory or Wake Forest. (Which are fine institutions, by the way, but definitely a rung or several below Michigan and Berkeley in the faculty-strength department.) And you get into the 30s and 40s of the rankings before you start to encounter public universities that are not world-famous. Texas and Washington aren’t even on the second page; they are two clicks away next to GW, Fordham, and Pepperdine. And right behind Florida, for heaven’s sake, which I would not think was in the same league academically.</p>
<p>This is both cause and symptom of the problem we are discussing. Cause, because students and parents who are not to the manor born, so to speak, and plugged in to elite university gossip from birth, look to rankings like this for information. And they are being told by USNWR – which is not some ignorant 17-year-old snob – that public universities are mediocre compared, not just to HYPS, but to a wide range of selective privates. Symptom, because USNWR didn’t set out to diss public universities. It has created a rubric that measures objective data that someone in good faith thinks means something for the quality of a student’s experience and education. And when they apply that rubric, the public universities somehow get diminished.</p>
<p>A lot of it comes down to the fact that public universities try to educate as broad a range of students as possible. They don’t skim the creme de la creme off their applicant pool. They let in kids who have a chance of succeeding, and some of them succeed brilliantly, and some of them don’t. So they aren’t as selective, don’t have stats as high, have a broader range of outcomes, have some kids dropping out. AND they have large introductory classes, with small discussion sessions, just like Yale, but at Yale a course that draws 10% of the class has 120 students, and at Michigan that could be 400+ students. </p>
<p>Of course, the democratic values the public universities are expressing are those most of us, even the elitists, would endorse. Do we want faculty to educate as many students as possible, or as few? Do we want to give lots of people chances and see who emerges as the best, or do we want to pre-select the best, declare the contest over, and marvel at their greatness? Is the university a temple of knowledge anyone can approach, or some ultra-hip nightclub where the bouncer has to recognize you from Vanity Fair or Page 6 in order to gain admittance?</p>
<p>Remember we are discussing Michigan, not all public flagships. Check the lecture size in some Harvard courses. Small does not mean better- interacting with an average professor as your only source of information versus hearing a renowned professor’s large lecture with follow up with a TA who may one day be a professor at a top school. I also think about the range of courses available. Linguistics, for example- son took some as a math major. Languages offered were much beyond the usual half dozen and opportunities to work in labs and take grad level classes also. Size does have advantages for those who want to explore uncommon areas.</p>
<p>Here is a list of the top 10 national colleges with the highest percentage (more than 75%) of classes under 20 students. All of them are private. Harvard, Columbia and Yale make the list.</p>
<p>[10</a> National Universities Where Most Classes are Small - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/2013/09/24/10-national-universities-where-most-classes-are-small]10”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/2013/09/24/10-national-universities-where-most-classes-are-small)</p>
<p>At U Michigan, 45.7% of classes have less than 20 students.</p>
<p>Suppose you’re a high-scoring, high-ranking, ambitious student from a low- to middle-income family (or even an upper middle income family with a couple of children). Suppose you have at least a reasonable shot at admission anywhere (with the possible exception of a few schools that are crapshoots for everyone). For such a student, most out-of-state public schools won’t be affordable (because they don’t offer adequate need-based aid to OOS students.) Your best choices are likely to include about 40-50 selective, need-blind, full-need private schools … and maybe one or two relatively affordable in-state public alternatives. The private schools, after aid, may even be cheaper than your in-state public flagship. For students in most states, most of those 40-50 private colleges will out-perform the in-state public alternatives on many measurements available to assess undergraduate program quality (admission selectivity, graduation rates, class sizes, financial resources, PhD production, major faculty and student awards, alumni earnings, etc. etc.) The private schools are dispersed all over the country and come in many sizes. Your state flagship comes in one size (probably big) and one location.</p>
<p>So for many students looking at so-called elite schools, private colleges simply provide a greater variety of excellent choices. Fairly or unfairly, this is liable to influence many people’s opinions about public v. private colleges (especially in the populous Northeastern states that have so many excellent private schools.)</p>
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<p>Really? Putting the rating sites aside, and more evidence that rating colleges is silly. If you plunked UMass somewhere in Wisconsin…close to Milwaukee, perhaps? How does it trump UW? Beauty of the campus? Course offerings? Student body? Relative regional connections and reputation? </p>
<p>Massachusetts and Wisconsin have roughly the same population. With few exceptions, the best and brightest students in Wisconsin attend UW, and that isn’t the case in Massachusetts. As other posters have discussed, it’s not helpful to compare state flagships in the northeast (especially New England) to those in the midwest and elsewhere. Apples and oranges, and anyone with a wit of wisdom can see a big difference. I live in New England and have a good friend with a very bright daughter who is studying engineering at Michigan. Honestly, she started out somewhat thin-skinned and defensive about Michigan, but now her attitude is "it’s a great school and if you don’t know that, you’re an idiot (or moron or ignoramus). Her daughter loves Michigan. </p>
<p>Where is Pizzagirl? This is thread is more hand wringing about what foolish people think.</p>
<p>Bay, I wonder about this. Schools can vary in what they consider a class versus a lecture versus a section. In my day, students would attend a two or three times a week lecture, with a once a week small section. My son is currently taking Econ 10 at Harvard, and he has a class three times a week with less than 20 students, and twice a month lectures with hundreds. This may be counted as a small class?</p>
<p>Gourmetmom,</p>
<p>I believe the data is self-reported. I don’t know exactly how each is counted, but it describes the classes as having fewer than 20 “enrolled.”</p>
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<p>This is actually preposterous. What about the cheating kids on Long Island who got others to take the SAT for them, or the parents who solicit bogus recommendations or get their kids “internships” by pulling strings with their influential friends, or students who lie on their college applications–all because they HAVE to get into the most prestigious universities possible? </p>
<p>I have heard a lot of ridiculous claims in defense of fancy private colleges over state universities, but this really takes the cake.</p>
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<p>Of course, the pre-meds, biology majors, economics majors, psychology majors, and (these days) computer science majors will tend to find the bigger classes at whatever school that they attend.</p>
<p>Gourmetmom makes the exact point. The brightest kids in a state was a reknown public are highly likely to attend…why wouldn’t you. Most families would not spend $20,000 a year more to send their kid elsewhere. If you can afford $55000 a year you can give a nice $100,000 gift to your kids when they graduate (and I certainly know people that did that including kids who were private schooled for high school). You cannot compare the NE where the public bleed the best into the very good private schools. The caliber of class that remains in the publics in the NE does not compare…even the much maligned Michigan State is equivalent to Maryland and Michigan State is a very good public. </p>
<p>People tend to leave California “alone” and pick on the midwest publics, but California is very similar to the stronghold midwest universities in that the caliber of student that attend the best of the UCs is very, very strong. You simply don’t find “tons of kids” drooling over a private school education and you won’t find that many families who think the “uptick” costs of shipping their kids across the country for $20,000 more a year. Some will but it’s obviously a minority or you wouldn’t have so many of the top performing in-state kids trying to get the available seats.</p>
<p>Sally,
You may not like it, but that is what recs are used for. They offer admissions another layer of scrutiny and another perspective for selecting students with the best personally qualities. They already know what the grades are.</p>
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<p>What makes you think that families of the brightest kids will spend $20K a year more to send a kid out of state? Most of those kids will be eligible for merit scholarships to those OOS schools and may be eligible for FA at some. My son received merit scholarships from two private schools (Top 25) which would have brought the cost down to about $5K more than BSU and one from UMich which would have brought the OOS cost down to less than BSU. And he did not apply for any of those scholarships. As it was, because of FA, his four year COA at his OOS private was less than one year of COA at BSU. BSU is not a renowned public university, but it is in the top 100. And UMich was a safety school, as were the other two privates.</p>
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<p>If you don’t want large classes, look at LACs. Research universities, public and private, tend to have lots of large classes. The percentage of small (<20) classes is very misleading because these classes are, by definition, small, meaning very few students are enrolled in them. You’d need more than 10 classes that size to equal the student enrollment in just one 200-person lecture. Consequently, a school could have 70+% small classes and just 10% large (50+) classes and still have its students, on average and in the aggregate, spending more time in large classes than in small ones.</p>
<p>What determines how much time students spend in large classes is not the percentage of small classes, but the percentage of large classes. And here many of the top private research universities are not so very different from the top publics. At Cornell, 18% of the classes are 50+ students. That’s the same as at Michigan and more than at UVA (16%), UC Berkeley (15%), or UNC Chapel Hill (13%). At Stanford it’s 13%, MIT 14%, Johns Hopkins 12%, very much in the same ballpark as some of the top publics.</p>
<p>It’s lower at some private research universities, but by and large, private research universities are more similar to the leading public research universities on this score than either of those groups are to top LACs. At Williams, only 3% of classes have 50+ students, at Amherst 4%, at Swarthmore 2%. At Haverford it’s 0.3%. My D1 is a senior at Haverford and she’s never had a class large than 20, with most of her classes in roughly the 5 to 12 student range. That’s the norm there. That’s not the norm at Cornell, Stanford, MIT, or Johns Hopkins where it’s a good bet the average student spends half or more of her time in large (50+) classes.</p>
<p>Concededly, though, the percentage of large classes is much higher at some publics. At UCSD, 35% of classes have 50+ students; at Texas, 26%. Not all publics are alike in this regard.</p>
<p>@momofthreeboys </p>
<p>I disagree with your viewpoint about California schools. Although it is true that the UCs have great students, tons of kids do drool over going to top private schools and the parents would not hesitate to spend another 20k a year for that. But it is a numbers game. At our school about 12 kids got into one or more of Ivys but over 50 got into UCB alone. I know it is only one data point, but every one of the Ivy kids chose to go to an Ivy.</p>
<p>Here the knock on UCs is about the difficulty of getting into classes, even those that are required to progress in a major. One parent likened it to trying to shop at Walmart on Black Friday.</p>
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<p>My information on the “Zoo-Mass” name and its hard partying/drinking reputation didn’t come from news organizations. </p>
<p>Instead, it came mostly from UMass older and similarly aged to me alums themselves…including a cousin who went there when that reputation was well-earned and from having worked for several years in the Boston area during the late 90s till the mid-'00s where such perceptions were still strong among many employers. </p>
<p>I do agree with you that it shouldn’t be singled out as I know from some experience that some private Boston area colleges can match/exceed UMass’ late 80’s and earlier reputation in the hard partying/drinking department*.</p>
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<li>Not talking chilling with a bottle of beer or three…but serious binging such as beer/vodka pong or otherwise getting drunk for the sake of getting drunk.</li>
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The site I am talking (it is not USN+WR) about “uses many different measures in determining the rank of a particular school. The most important factors are a school’s ACT/SAT scores, its student retention, faculty salary, and student / faculty ratio.”</p>
<p>They do not use peer evaluation.</p>
<p>Sorry if you don’t like how the rankings came out.</p>
<p>Collegedad, I think the point is that in CA, we haven’t experienced the disdain for even just applying to public schools that the OP experienced. My own kid has her sights set on private schools in and out of state because they are a better fit for her in particular but she’s applying to 3 in-state publics that she likes, offers what she wants and in areas she feels she can be happy living in. Her classmates are all applying to at least 1 public and there hasn’t been any drama about it. Most kids we know are at private schools but they were proud of getting into the public too… outside the local ones (which are actually more competitive but you know… HOME lol.)</p>
<p>^^^^</p>
<p>Haha. Perhaps you should tell me what ranking it is before you say you’re sorry!</p>