<p>I got into a bunch of good schools with engineering and I need to decide which one to matriculate at. BTW I got deadline extensions b/c of family issues in case you're wondering.</p>
<p>Schools:
GaTech (half ride)
Yale (20k / year)
Princeton (8k/ year)
Harvey Mudd (full ride)
Harvard (no money :( )</p>
<p>I am leaning towards GaTech just because I have heard it's warm weather and they have good cafeterias. Any thoughts? Thanks</p>
<p>Okay dude, I hate the word “■■■■■”, but you epitomize what a ■■■■■ is. You posted a Chance thread for MIT not long ago, and now you have been magically accepted to HYP? Haha…very funny.</p>
<p>I would actually take Harvey Mudd at $0 a year if I were you. GaTech at a half ride is good if you are in-state, but Harvey Mudd has the second best undergraduate engineering program (if you care about USNWR) and is definitely worth graduating debt free. Harvard isn’t worth the entire $50k, but Yale gave you some nice money (I don’t think the $120k to go to Yale vs. Harvey Mudd is worth it though). Are your parents going to be paying for any of it or are you taking all the debt? </p>
<p>If not, I would say Harvey Mudd would be best (0 debt is huge!). If they are willing to pay, take Yale at $30k a year, IMO.</p>
<p>Hope this helped.</p>
<p>can you post your sat scores?</p>
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<p>… of schools that don’t offer a doctorate. </p>
<p>As I’ve said many times, that’s like winning the Div I-AA championship in football. Are all Div I-A teams better than all Div I-AA teams? No (see Michigan and App State). But is the best Div I-AA team as good as the best Div I-A team? No, so it’s a misnomer to call the Div I-AA champion the best team in the country. Would Richmond even make the Top 25 in Div I-A? Very doubtful. So who’s the national champion in football? Florida, not Richmond. </p>
<p>Need another example? It’s like calling Shane Mosley the world champion in boxing because he won the welterweight title. Meanwhile, the rest of the world accepts the Vladimir Klitschko, the heavyweight champ.</p>
<p>So is Harvey Mudd the #2 school in the country? No. Stanford is the #2 school in the country. Harvey Mudd is the #2 school that doesn’t offer a doctorate.</p>
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<p>As stated above, he’s ■■■■■■■■. Three days ago, he was trying to figure out how difficult it is to get into Harvard engineering. Now he’s magically accepted, already has an award letter, and is trying to make a decision. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/727843-chance-mit-etc.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/727843-chance-mit-etc.html</a></p>
<p>And his SAT scores change on a daily basis, ranging from a 2300-2400.</p>
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<p>I’m not really a big fan of rankings as I feel that the ‘best’ school is largely an individual thing, and what may be a great school for one person would be an awful school for another.</p>
<p>But I just have to say that I completely disagree with your characterization of schools that do not offer a doctorate degree as ‘inferior’ in education to those that do. Completely disagree.</p>
<p>The liberal arts and undergraduate only colleges do an abnormally good job of getting their students to complete PhD’s for example. Many Nobel Laureates and highly successful CEO’s, engineers, professionals, etc… have gone to undergraduate-only colleges.</p>
<p>So please, I have no problem with you contesting rankings and their value, but please do not immediately assume that undergraduate colleges are automatically inferior to doctoral degree granting schools. Do some research, read the countless threads and discussions that have taken place on collegeconfidential, before you make such a comment.</p>
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<p>And I guess you’re automatically assuming that not offering a doctorate innately makes it a lower tier in all respects…</p>
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<p>As someone who has written many of the threads and has taught at multiple top engineering colleges (including a visiting stint at a college without a PhD program), I am speaking from an authoritative position. </p>
<p>So perhaps you should be the one doing some research, or at least get some experience outside of your home institute, before challenging others.</p>
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<p>Not if you read my post. No one doubts that there are many Heavyweight boxers that Shane Mosley could knock out. At the same time, there’s no one that would claim Shane Mosley would take out the top boxer.</p>
<p>Richmond could probably beat plenty of Div I-A football teams, but if they played Florida or Ohio State or Texas in a game, Vegas would have them 50-1 underdogs, at least.</p>
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<p>I have had summer internships at large state schools and I am attending a very respectable program in my area of specialty for graduate school. I also did a whole smorgasbord of research before deciding to go to my undergraduate college, and have several friends who have had experiences at both doctoral and non-doctoral granting schools.</p>
<p>You did not answer my complaint against your post. You immediately assumed that the top ranked doctoral-granting schools are superior to the top ranked non doctoral granting schools, and by implication that for example the #10 ranked doctoral-granting school is immediately superior to the #10 ranked non doctoral granting school. Or at least that’s very much what it sounded like.</p>
<p>But you did not at all explain what you mean by most highly ranked, or what makes a school ‘better’? Are we talking about number of publications, grant money, endowments? Then of course the doctoral-granting schools are going to defeat the undergraduate only colleges simply because they have the resources (graduate students, time to apply for grants and what not) to do so. </p>
<p>But if we are talking about things like average class size, the success of alumni, personal fit, etc… then an undergraduate only college could be just as good or better for a particular student or a particular reason. For example, look at some of the highest ranked per-capita producers of PhD recipients various fields: [REED</a> COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html]REED”>Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College) . Undergraduate colleges do indeed hold their own.</p>
<p>Quite frankly, you simply asserted that so-and-so ranked doctoral-granting school is immediately ‘better’ than so-and-so ranked undergraduate college, without laying out what you meant by better or giving specific examples. </p>
<p>And another thing, I don’t care if you are a Nobel Laureate. If you make a claim, you better back it up with evidence. So don’t give me the ‘authority’ spiel. If you want to have a discussion with me on this, by all means go ahead and give me your reasons.</p>
<p>You really want to get into this?</p>
<p>The biggest factor I consider is the quality of professors. The other factors are either irrelevant outside of the school (class size, etc.) are subjective (personal fit) or are inherently biased (e.g. the claim about the per capita size of PhD recipients - LACs have many less employers visit and are on average offered lower salaries, so applicants self-select with a graduate degree-seeking bias - in short, if you want to work for NASA, you’re not going to Reed College, whereas someone seeking a PhD wouldn’t necessarily rule out the school).</p>
<p>The common claim is that teaching schools have professors that “care more”. That’s not necessarily true. First of all, the professors that go to teach schools are of lower quality. Research schools pay more, are more prestigious, and are more lenient with tenure. So if you have two MIT graduates and one goes to Harvey Mudd and one goes to Stanford, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Stanford-bound student was the overall better candidate.</p>
<p>In addition, research professors are experts in their field and are developing the field via grants. Why this is important may not be entirely intuitive but those invested in the state of the art (vs professors that read journals but haven’t heavily researched in years) have different fundamental levels of knowledge and understanding. The professors with the deeper level of understanding can teach the material based on the principals of the phenomenon, rather than a practical overview, which leads to a more thorough understanding. While I know that schools like Mudd do perform some “research”, this is generally limited to practical experimentation that is very different than what is happening at research schools. </p>
<p>We could pull Mudd syllabuses and compare, as well, but they seem to keep those under pretty tight wrap.</p>
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<p>I think class size and personal fit are very important for the individual student. Some people would not do well at all in a small school and would prefer the research university, and vice versa. I dont think it is fair to brush it off as unimportant.</p>
<p>I am not sure about your claim that LAC graduates make less money than research university grads. It may very well be true, but I would need to see some hard data. But I still think the data pretty conclusively shows that liberal arts colleges can do very well in getting their students to complete a PhD or other higher education. I suppose we cant make complete judgment without comparing to the total number of students who actually wanted to get a graduate degree, but you cannot immediately point to undergraduate schools as automatically inferior when this data very well suggests that in one measure that people care about (PhD production) they can compete against doctoral-granting schools.</p>
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<p>It may very well be that the graduate candidates who go on to research universities as faculty have superior research records. But there is a lot that goes into teaching and in my experience, it is teaching effectiveness (things like lecture clarity, coherence, question-friendliness, etc…) that primarily determines hiring and tenure decisions at liberal arts colleges, as opposed to research output.</p>
<p>Let me give you some examples. Last year, Harvey Mudd was in the process of hiring a new physics professor. There were three final candidates. Two of them were not particularly clear lecturers, not that organized, etc… One of them was quite excellent relatively speaking, he laid out his thoughts on the board nicely, was organized, etc… The other two, however, had way more publications, conference presentations, stuff in prestigious journals. From a research standpoint, it seemed fairly clear that the best teacher was the one who had the weakest research record. Guess who got the job? That’s right, the one deemed the best teacher, even though he had the weakest research record.</p>
<p>Another example a few years ago we hired a new math/CS professor from Princeton. This guy is a pretty big shot. Hes an IBM Fellow, a Fellow of ACS, hes even had a complexity class named after him. But by most accounts, he was significantly below average as a lecturer and presenter of the material. Dull, unclear, the like Several friends at Princeton and Berkeley and Caltech and other schools have told me that teaching like this is actually common. There may be some professors who are excellent teachers who care about students and the presentation of the material, but there are also those that are not that great teachers. I bet most of them would not last the tenure process at liberal arts colleges, because great teaching is essential.</p>
<p>It just points to different priorities between the liberal arts college and the research university. The liberal arts college professors on average might have been weaker research students, but they are usually considered better teachers, overall. After all, the emphasis on what is necessary to get tenure is different at each of the different environments, so it is expected that liberal arts professors would put more emphasis on teaching and less on research. Everything I have heard and seen has pointed to the fact that teaching is on average superior at undergraduate colleges. So when you say professors at undergraduate colleges are of lower quality, I would say that they just have different strengths that are more sought after at the liberal arts college.</p>
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<p>Ive compared HMC and other liberal arts colleges syllabi and coursework to that of Caltech, MIT, Harvard, etc Oftentimes they are just as challenging and deep. And in some cases, moreso. I have heard from some of my friends at Stanford that the standards for their graduate courses were less than those of their undergraduate courses at HMC. But anyways, this is a subjective thing, the rigor and depth expected of students, and I dont know of how we can measure it, other than perhaps how well prepped students are to go to graduate school and engage in cutting edge research. And as the data shows, liberal arts colleges do just fine.</p>
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<p>Liberal arts colleges may do less research than graduate schools. But I dont understand how you could say that the research is just practical experimentation when a lot of the research is published in very respectable journals. Sure they dont get as many publications but its not like the ones they do get are for crap work. Otherwise they would not be accepted into the journals they are accepted into</p>
<p>Some examples:</p>
<p>[Publications[/url</a>]
[url=<a href=“http://www.hmc.edu/academicsclinicresearch/academicdepartments/chemistry/research1/recentpublications.html]Recent”>http://www.hmc.edu/academicsclinicresearch/academicdepartments/chemistry/research1/recentpublications.html]Recent</a> Publications](<a href=“http://www.hmc.edu/academicsclinicresearch/academicdepartments/physics/publications.html]Publications[/url”>http://www.hmc.edu/academicsclinicresearch/academicdepartments/physics/publications.html)
[url=<a href=“http://www.williams.edu/Physics/]Williams”>http://www.williams.edu/Physics/]Williams</a> College Department of Physics<a href=“Go%20to%20research,%20look%20at%20some%20of%20the%20publications%C2%92%20journals”>/url</a></p>
<p>Sure its probably not the stuff thats going to make the cover of Nature or Science mag, but if it can get accepted into such respectable journals, surely its got to have more merit than you are making it out to have.</p>
<p>And one thing I should note at liberal arts colleges, the research is being done, not just for research sake, but as an educational tool for students. At a research university, graduate students and postdocs would do a lot of work setting up the labs, laying out the plans for the experiment, organizing everything, etc But there are no graduate students or postdocs. There are only undergraduates, so if you are going to start a research project at such an institution, the undergrads have to take charge of a lot of things that in many other places would be carried out by graduate students or postdocs. So obviously you cannot expect liberal arts colleges to be as productive or move as fast as a research university. But undergrads really are forced to have overall a lot more responsibility and intimacy with the project than at a research school. So that is an advantage that is often overlooked.</p>
<p>I wont be able to respond to anymore posts for a few hours as I am out to a movie. I must say I am enjoying this discussion it is quite enlightening.</p>
<p>“The common claim is that teaching schools have professors that “care more”.”</p>
<p>Care about what? Care about teaching, yes, about research, no.</p>
<p>“First of all, the professors that go to teach schools are of lower quality.”</p>
<p>Lower quality (or quantity) research, but higher quality teachers. </p>
<p>We need both kinds of schools, those that do the research, and those that do the teaching (to train the next generation of researchers!).</p>
<p>pensull, I’d say Mudd, excellent all around and full ride, wow. You won’t remember the cafeterias or Claremont’s excellent weather a few years out of school. No one will care if there were PhD candidates on campus while you got your undergrad degree.</p>
<p>Someone must have said something way out of line for me to have to come on here and correct logical fallacies:</p>
<p>“So is Harvey Mudd the #2 school in the country? No. Stanford is the #2 school in the country. Harvey Mudd is the #2 school that doesn’t offer a doctorate” -G.P.Burdell</p>
<p>Well, by your logic (which is faulty) comparing schools across different ranking systems is completely moot. Therefore, you cannot say that Mudd or Stanford are or are not the 2nd best undergraduate schools in the country since they are not compared directly.</p>
<p>BUT what is more alarming to me is that you seem to not understand the difference between a undergraduate technical education and a graduate technical education. The rankings for “national universities” does not make any specific direct reference to the undergraduate students. If you really knew your ****, you would have realized that many “top schools” have quite bifurcated qualities of education between the graduate and undergraduate programs. One of the most popular examples of this is Caltech’s educational assessment, as made by the evaluation of quality of professors accessible to the undergraduates. While I do not wish to argue more about Caltech’s lack of vested interest in really teaching its undergrads, it would appear prudent to your long-term understanding of technical education to consider the institutions that you “rank” on a case-by-case basis.</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd does not have a graduate program (by choice, although a few years back 1-2 students a year would be eligible to continue for a Master’s) and thus the school’s ONLY objective is education of its undergraduates. This means all research that occurs is done in conjunction with the students and there has been proposed pedagogical approach. Faculty actually get together on a regular basis (with student representatives) and talk about what works and what doesn’t work. Furthermore, a top-level committee consisting of the BOD, trustees, and faculty at large converse on the direction of the school every month or so. Every single Harvey Mudd graduate is individually approved for graduation by an academic committee containing trustees and faculty. Faculty know every student on a first-name basis and even know students’ hobbies and often when then were(n’t) in class. Because of this intense attention to the ONLY 720 students at Mudd, there is no possible way to get a degree from just skating on through. Every student has research opportunities and has the power to make his/her life to vary between “very difficult” to “living hell” in terms of technical academic intensity.</p>
<p>Please, by all means, take a Mudd undergrad and match him/her against a Stanford undergrad. You will be surprised at the results. </p>
<p>Well, there is the MCM/ICM mathematical modeling competition:
[MCM:</a> The Mathematical Contest in Modeling](<a href=“http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/previous-contests.php]MCM:”>http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/previous-contests.php)
How is it that a student body of 720 can compete against much larger institutions if the quality of the students and/or faculty is subpar to the institutions it competes against? Mudd’s talent pool has relatively few numbers… Stanford’s is relatively large. Stanford statistically should be able to fashion more refined/better teams if everything else were equal. However, by this objective 3rd party administered test, we see year after year Mudd outperforms many of the “top institutions”. It does only occur in this… how about the fact that with only 165 graduating seniors this year, 2 of them were Churchill Scholars… there are only a dozen worldwide!</p>
<p>The answer is that Mudd’s academics are super-par when compared to these other institutions. That is the ONLY way to get this level of performance out of students in MCM/ICM, Putnum, AMC, PhD %, job placement, salaries, etc…</p>
<p>"As someone who has written many of the threads and has taught at multiple top engineering colleges (including a visiting stint at a college without a PhD program), I am speaking from an authoritative position. " -G.P.Burdell</p>
<p>Now, can you guess what my credentials are? No. You don’t even know who you are talking to on this end. A few of us have had alternative perspectives (in terms of worldly prestige) that make the ivory towers of academia seem a little bit easier to grabble with. For myself, as someone who has graduated from aforementioned institution (it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to figure out), I can tell you that your generalization of Harvey Mudd could not be further from the truth. I will dispel it with one sentence:</p>
<p>Yes, a lot of undergraduate-only technical institutions are a POS and hold no rigor with regards to the professional and technical practices in the top-tier research and development institutions in the world… but primarily the USA.</p>
<p>BUT, NOT ALL undergrad-only technical institutions fall under this generalization. Thus, Mudd may have exemption.</p>
<p>“in short, if you want to work for NASA, you’re not going to Reed College, whereas someone seeking a PhD wouldn’t necessarily rule out the school).” -G.P.Burdell</p>
<p>Really? Been there, done that. Check to see if I’m real. JPL ID 121686.
Dude, you are starting an argument with the wrong circle… I’ll tell you that much. The types of places that Mudd graduates entertain with their employment make NASA seem like the norm. You have no clue, seriously. I could give you figures as to how many people from Mudd get accelerated PhDs from top institutions or go directly into the workforce with a competitive mid-career salary… but that would require even more of my time than what I am devoting here and it is just not worth compiling these stats for you. </p>
<p>I, for instance, have accepted a long-term position with a tight-lipped company that financial/resource ties to a company a little more tangible – Amazon.com
Am I selling books or Kindles? No. I am doing something completely different that the world will marvel at in a year or two. How many young people does this secretive company accept a year? 2 or 3. I graduated from Mudd with a bachelors in General Engineering and was matched directly against Aerospace Masters graduates from at least Purdue (is the only one I definitely know) in the final round of selection. The interview for this job was 1 hour my presentation, 4 hours of technical one-on-one, 1 hour lunch… and all this after making it through the technical phone interview. After that, they actually talked to each of my 4 references for 30 minutes each… not some HR person, but actual engineers.</p>
<p>In conclusion:
G.P.Burdell, you may be a professor or something in a technical field but your experience does not provide judgement on the quality of teaching at HMC or the like. The professors at HMC are surprisingly capable of not only being generalists in their field, but understanding enough nuance and fundamental mathematics to dig into non-obvious and sometimes unexplored realms. You will find many have PhD’s from what you consider top institutions - MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and thus the only “least squares” conclusion is that these institutions’ reputation stems from their graduate programs more so than undergraduate.</p>
<p>that is, by far, the longest post i’ve ever written.</p>
<p>congratu****inglations.</p>
<p>I just have to say “Wow at the Mudd parade”</p>
<p>As someone who works at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences … I will re-iterate our often surprising “party line” … all of the schools you mentioned will provide a first rate education and rich academic and research experience. I’m not going to try to “sell” you one way or the other.</p>
<p>Honestly, it likely doesn’t matter (professionally) where you end up receiving your undergraduate degree (esp. as the undergraduate degree alone in engineering is rarely sufficient for a professional career in engineering — at least in terms of research and certain other high level jobs). In any case, you will be prepared to pursue a wide variety of career paths (in multiple fields) and if your college record is outstanding … you will likely get into a top grad school.</p>
<p>Go with your gut (and what makes sense financially). What place feels and seems right to you? It is not as if you are choosing between a Pinto and a Porsche here. Save your angst for when you are on campus (there will be plenty of opportunities for existential dilemmas then!)</p>
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<p>Bravo! Excellent comments. I agree completely.</p>