Or does it take a far secondary seat to things like student body, location, employment opportunities, etc.?
I think academic quality is #1, assuming affordability, available major, and that a school isn’t way off in terms of fit (e.g. BYU for an atheistic student).
@usualhopeful Interesting. Sometimes I’m more cynical and think that academic quality matters little for most people who are not going to graduate school, and that really what matter more are the networking and prospective employers.
I would agree with @usahopeful
But I also think there is an excellent chance that you will wind up with better connections, job opportunities etc. by going to the school with higher quality academics as that school will generally attract higher quality peers, teachers, prospective employers etc…
Well, it depends on what you mean by academic quality. I tend to think of schools in groups/buckets instead of absolute rankings. So choosing Georgetown or Boston College over Harvard or Yale, if you prefer one of the former two, probably won’t make a huge difference career-wise. Selecting an excellent public school like Wisconsin or Purdue probably also won’t make a huge difference either. These are excellent places overall.
Where we get into differences is if we’re talking about more regional public universities or smaller private colleges - not simply lesser-known private colleges (as some of those are top quality) but rather ones that aren’t truly comparable to the top schools. And even in those cases, there might be really good reasons to go there - some of those schools have strong local ties to great economies in nearby small or large cities, some of them are specialized in certain areas/fields and have connections in that area, and some of them may provide a really low-cost option for a student who otherwise has few options.
I also think that the balance for each student is going to be different. Some students will value academic quality above all else, but some students will basically look at any good solid school across the board and prioritize other factors.
By academic quality I mean the strength of the classes, professors, research, etc. The research, I think, is important - and maybe some schools have better infastructures, class sizes, or whatever. But I get the impression that past a certain point there’re diminishing returns.
I don’t think research is all that important, especially for an undergrad who is uninterested in participating in research and/or getting a PhD or other academic graduate degree. There are lots of great liberal arts colleges and regional public universities with low research outputs, but where the professors are focused on providing the best educational experience for undergraduates at the college.
Agreed that research is not really important for UG. There seems to be this idea on CC that Harvard beats out Dartmouth for undergrads, simply because Mass Gen is doing more groundbreaking research than Dartmouth-Hitchcock.
Academic quality can influence employer recruiting. For example, an employer recruiting specifically for CS graduates may prefer to go to Stony Brook over Tulane, due to the relative strength of the CS department at Stony Brook and the relative weakness of the CS department at Tulane. Of course, which school is seen as being more desirable to recruit at can depend on which major an employer is recruiting from, or if it doing major-agnostic recruiting.
There is no measure/ranking of undergraduate academic quality.
The dirty little secret about big research powerhouses is that many research oriented professors regard undergrad teaching obligations to be a nuisance.
^I didn’t want to be the one to say it, but yes. Prominent professors at big research universities are not rewarded for good undergraduate teaching - their entire career structure is dependent upon research. Most of the most successful ones minimize the time and energy they spend on preparing for classes so they can write grants and papers.
That said, some of them still manage to be really great teachers despite this. And research expertise can influence undergraduate teaching - your research findings feed into the content that you prepare, so you can tell students where research has extended the findings in the book or talk about new, innovative research that builds upon foundational principles they are learning about. But most college professors do research of some type, including liberal arts professors and those at your regional public universities. Even a lot of community college professors have small research agendas or scholarship.
Anyway, there are other things to assess in academic quality - the rigor of the classes, the amount of critical thinking and writing required across the curriculum, number of classes with smaller numbers ( < 30, especially in upper-level classes - you want some discussion seminars), quality of undergrad teaching (harder to assess), those types of things.
Presumably you are attending college to get an education so the quality of that education should be your number one concern with the affordability of the school being a close second. If you are looking for research opportunities that are meaningful and are worried about research programs that ignore or take advantage of UG students maybe look at some LACs. I attended a small LAC that had a strong focus on research. With only UG students and a small student body, professors worked as peers with students and published with their UG assistants.
That being said, be honest with yourself. If academics aren’t going to be your number one concern than look to other factors first.
According to a 2012 UCLA survey, a good academic reputation was chosen by more students than any other assessed factor as “very important” in their decision to attend a particular college.
http://www.heri.ucla.edu/pr-display.php?prQry=111
(see p. 41 of the full report)
But how do HS students evaluate academic reputation (let alone absolute academic quality)?
How could they do it, if they made practical use of the best available information?
The US News “peer assessment” does purport to measure undergraduate academic quality based on a survey of 800+ college presidents, provosts, and deans of admission. Some of the other metrics that go into the USNWR, Forbes, or other rankings could be considered (individually or collectively) indicators of academic quality.
It’s impossible to say exactly what each of the USNWR “peers” really is assessing, or how qualified (and unbiased) they are to assess academic quality of schools other than the few where they’ve actually studied or worked. It may be significant that many of these measurements (including the peer assessment) do point to pretty much the same set of top schools. Yet, some underlying factors (such as institutional wealth or admission selectivity) may be confounding how well any of these measurements represent true academic quality.
I do think that available metrics/rankings can help build an initial application list of colleges that are close enough in academic quality that any small overall differences won’t matter as much as within-school differences among courses and instructors (or as much as the effort you put into any college once you get there.)
This poll is as objective as voting for Homecoming Queen.
Transformative academic quality would appear to be significantly desirable: “How the instructional and learning environment of liberal arts colleges [vs. research and regional universities] enhance cognitive development,” Pascarella, Wong, Trolian and Blaich.
As some have pointed out, academic quality can influence a school’s reputation with employers, but it isn’t always a perfect correlation. For example, Caltech has a significantly more rigorous program than Stanford, but while both are target schools, Stanford is probably moreso.
Academic quality should be the first factor, in how a list of reach-match-safety schools is generated. But then affordability quickly becomes important. And too many parents out there have such unrealistic expectations of fin aid. Also, specific fit: do you want rah-rah sports or a left-leaning campus (or both?) This also impacts size of school, LAC vs university. Location/climate are often overemphasized, which rules out great schools: Whitman, Kalamazoo, Hendrix, etc.
I fully agree with juillet in post #4, that there seems to be a cut-off. Not a specific ‘rank’ (say #101 or below on US News) but degrees from many lesser known colleges and directionals with low SAT ranges and first-year retention rates below maybe 60% will limit employment chances. And I agree with PrimeMeridian about the subjectivity in US News ‘peer assessment.’ Any movements in the polls come at a glacial pace.
(P.S. I am new and have not yet figured out how to do the ‘@user’ in blue ink as response, if anyone can help).
@PetulaClark : Start with “@,” then continue typing until you are prompted with the username you are seeking.
Acsdemic rigor may not be uniform within a school.
UNC Chapel Hill is well regarded academically overall, yet it ran a scam African American studies department for 17 years to give recruited athletes fake high grades to enable them to maintain elegibility. The scam was such a poorly kept secret that so many non-athletes took the courses to boost their GPA, that they inadvertently graduated with a minor in African-American studies.
@merc81 Thanks!
@PrimeMeridian I am a grad of UNC Chapel Hill and live in NC and D17 graduates from high school next year and she is not even going to apply there. Granted, her reasons are a preference for an OOS LAC and getting accepted would anyhow be iffy. But with such a scandal about the farce of basketball-football programs, I’m fine with her disinterest (though it is a great deal!) I’m surprised at all the love that UNC and UVA and Michigan get from students all over the USA. With so much less ado about equally fine universities like Wisconsin and Georgia Tech and Illinois. Must be the worship of the US News roster.