Someone posted here on CC that their relative, a graduate of the University of Chicago, was interviewing with a Silicon Valley company. The interviewer asked if that was part of the University of Illinois! I guess because UChicago isn’t in the ESPN Top 25 he had never heard of it.
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DH tells a story of how his HS friends asked him what was such a big deal about his fancy north east school when they were all using the same book.
When they compared actual work? The difference is that DH was doing what he calls the “back of the book” problems (the extra work/challenge problems) while his friends were getting assigned the “did you get it?” problems at the end of each unit.
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You don’t want to go to work at that company. They don’t seem to hire good people.
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Im finding out with my son applying for music major that instructors matter more than the schools overall reputation basically. His private voice teacher tried to help us but all the “good teachers” she knew were at schools that would not be affordable in any way shape or form for us.
So I started finding weblinks and sending them to her about teachers at schools that are affordable for us!
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For the college selection, I have found the best way is to ask the students, parents, etc, and listen.
Examples: one kid in Engineering at a well-known state school lamented it was easier than HS the first year or more. Calc and physics were worksheets and quizzes based straight from notes, tests that were not all challenging, and a majority of classmates that did not grasp material fast enough so the profs and TAs did a lot of repeating. Many classmates did find it challenging. Compared to the kid’s elite private school HS courses, there was a large lack of intellectual rigor and depth of analysis/challenge in what is supposed to be a good Engineering school. The kid was not a super star in HS, so did not get into “better” schools, and was right around the 75th%ile SAT for this school, so by no means the brightest kid on campus or anything. And was completely bored. After asking around, the same info kept coming up on this school so we never considered it for either kid.
Different family, super-star kid who landed at what most consider the top STEM school in the country, smartest kid in the HS with all the top scores, was impressively and deeply challenged from day 1 on campus, worked harder and thought deeper than ever before but loved every minute of the challenge.
On the humanities side:
My freshman in an “intro” niche-history class, found out used the same text as a HS friend at a top 20ish LAC. My kid’s prof had them read the entire text and held discussion summaries in the first 4 weeks. The spent the rest of the semester on primary sources tied back to the text, debating contradictions and analyzing on an extremely deep level. She was in heaven–it was extraordinary to have that level of discussion (but she noted a small minority of the class had never used primary sources or read so much material so fast, so they struggled a lot). Her peer at the LAC spent the whole semester just on the text. Also loved the class and reported great seminar discussions. But it highlighted the differences in teaching.
With so many parent friends and colleagues around, I have been able to get a lot of first hand info, gathered over a decade, that has helped sort it all out. Some can be guessed by rankings and looking at SAT ranges and professors but much of it requires information from current students or professors.
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Right in some cases, wrong in others.
A long time ago I hired actuaries (haven’t in years, so my perspective is decades old). No company can afford to interview thousands of students to find the five they need (or the tens of thousands of interviews to find the 50 they need). Some pre-sorting is required.
Guess what- schools vary. There are U’s which admit more talented/harder working/more curious students than others, and U’s which teach a more rigorous program even though the course content is allegedly the same. And hiring a bunch of students with the same degree-- only to see year after year that the graduates of certain U’s perform at a significantly higher rate (more sophisticated analysis, deeper thinking, higher degree of curiosity) than others, even if everyone has the same “certification” after their name (once they’ve passed each level which takes time), well you’d have to be an idiot not to notice.
I’m sure there are places that don’t care- an actuary is an actuary. And certain places that DO care- the higher performing employees create a LOT more value for the organization over time than the lower performing employees. So nice shortcut- hire from the U’s that produce the really talented folks. I wasn’t getting paid to “prove” that I could find a smart grad from the University of East Overshoe. I was getting paid to meet our hiring targets in the most efficient way possible.
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So many people don’t understand this, or don’t want to acknowledge it 
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I think the hard part in understanding that schools vary is that many assume if they personally don’t know a school - that school can’t actually be rigorous nor have more talented/harder working/more curious students.
Extremely high selectivity doesn’t necessarily correlate to those characteristics as smoothly as many would like to believe. Conversely, less selectively doesn’t necessarily indicate less curious, less hard working, less talented students.
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When my son has been comparing programs, he has looked very closely at the curriculum, books used, and where possible the prior exams and course notes posted online, but this kind of difference is harder to figure out from afar:
The other thing that is not so easy to evaluate from afar is whether courses are challenging in a positive and useful way, versus just difficult with lots of work but not necessarily as much of a mind-expanding learning experience. I have had both kinds of difficult courses in my own time in college and grad school.
Some programs are obviously very difficult with tons of work and are packed with very talented and accomplished kids complaining about the grind on reddit, etc., but that doesn’t necessarily correlate to the ideal learning experience where the kids learn the most.
Anyway, I would appreciate any tips on how to identify challenging programs that also support their students in learning and have great learning outcomes.
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It depends on the major . And then you ask kids that are in top programs in that major what they think are peer programs.
On the issue of company caring, I was asking my son recently what his future employer thought about the functional programming course at his university. He said they like it because it is very theoretical. But they like the CMU version better because it is more theoretical 
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I’ve posted before about my fondness for Missouri S&T. Not too hard to get in; VERY hard to get out! Since their Chem Eng (and other department) grads had the goods, corporate recruiters made the trek to Rolla.
I’ve been criticized (with some nasty PM’s as well as postings) about my “elitism” but I’ve consistently pointed out that if you are looking for a college that punches above its weight, you need to do a little homework. Baruch and Fordham in finance; Holy Cross in Classics/History; U Maine in Paper Technology; Rutgers in Poli Sci, applied math, life sciences. And an ambitious kid can take a “not hugely rigorous” department and turn it into a powerhouse. Your kid is a sociology major at UIUC? S/he can write a senior thesis on trends in the incarceration of women by interviewing ten women in a state prison and writing up some interesting stories. Or s/he can examine incarceration data from ten midwestern states going back twenty years, corelating the findings to federal data on poverty, addiction, age of first pregnancy, rate of sexual abuse among prisoners, literacy rates (who is reading above and below grade level). Thesis A tells an interesting story about a few women in prison. Thesis B is likely to have important policy implications for the criminal justice, medical and educational communities.
If I’m hiring for a large health insurance company and I need analysts who can track legislation at the state level and determine which proposed bills will have an impact on the company’s profitability, who do I want to hire?
A student can create their own rigor.
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As you know, we’re considering this question. I’m curious whether the teacher had any good information about teachers at schools you shared.
I think the first thing to do is figure out what you consider “challenging” in a positive way, what you specifically want when you say “supporting student learning” and what you mean with “great learning outcomes”.
Your specific answers to those questions will inform what questions you’ll want to ask or investigate about a program. You could see several great schools, but maybe only a couple match what you are specifically looking for.
We’ve been through the process twice now, D20 and D23 would have had completely different answers to that set of questions. A lot of this is going to be very specific to each student. The ‘best’ program isn’t the best if it doesn’t work for your child.
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Where I work, we interviewed a Harvard grad once for an IT project manager job. Applicant had been working as a physician assistant previously and during the interview, came across as very cocky, arrogant, and assumed that he could just pick things up. He also talked about how he intended to continue doing PA work on the side while working in this new job part time.
He was a total butt head. We did not offer him the position. He acted like he would just automatically get the job because of where he went to college. And thought he knew it all about IT when clearly that was not the case.
I’m sure that Harvard is a rigorous college. But just attending a rigorous college won’t be the only factor in getting the job you want.
On a side note, there are specific programs are much lesser known colleges which do a great job of getting their students jobs post-graduation or get them into grad school. We are looking at a couple of them for D24.
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No college gets their students jobs post-graduation. At the end of the day, companies are hiring individuals. If your kid waits until April of senior year to saunter in to Career Services to ask “where is my job?” your kid will be sorely disappointed at the “great job” those folks will do! EVEN at a college with terrific resources, your kid has to supply the energy, ambition, grit and shoe leather…
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So, for example UC Berkeley is a very strong school. It is also full of very smart students. The students certainly work hard. No one would argue that this school is not rigorous. But the school often does not do a very good job of supporting undergraduate student learning, and this is not a question of whether the school meets the individual learning preferences of each student. For example Math 54 (a standard Linear Algebra & Differential Equations course required for many majors) has been an absolute disaster this semester for the 1000+ students who are enrolled, with teachers quitting, grading policy in flux etc. (see reddit for gnarly details.) This is the kind of speed bump often faced by students at this school.
We know UC Berkeley pretty well, since we live right next to it and know lots of students and teachers there. So we have a good sense of the challenges involved in learning at this school. (My kid also loves the school and if admitted, would probably be happy to put up with all its flaws.) But it’s not as easy to evaluate umpteen schools in the midwest or east where all we have to go on is a short visit (if that).
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I should have chosen different words. I meant stuff like better career services centers, special agreements with certain grad schools that will guarantee an interview if you’re from College with a certain GPA, etc.
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Yup, some colleges invest more in career services than others!
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And there are important things needed in many professions that can’t easily be quantified…like how well the colleges prepare students to be team players and learners in the workforce.
In my experience, no one ever lost a job because they weren’t smart enough. They lost it because they were not able to work as part of a team, or did not understand the importance and value of the on the job training they were receiving.
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This is often the case for teacher education programs – the most prestigious school in the area is not always the one that has the reputation for training the best teachers. I’ve taught at two universities that are known for large teacher education programs, and they both have better reputations among school districts in the region than the nearby state flagships and other universities with national name recognition. Why? Because they have more outreach with partner school districts, because more teachers in the area have degrees from those institutions, and those networks are important. But I think that school reputation matters more for some jobs (and in some job markets) than for others.
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