<p>coureur said, "I agree that selectivity doesn't always tell something about quality, but I think that LACK of selectivity often does. A school with a very high acceptance rate may have decent teachers, but you've got to ask yourself questions about the quality of the students. If pretty much everyone who applies gets in, if you need little more than a pulse and enough money to cover the application fee to get accepted to a given school, then many of your classmates are going to be people who couldn't get in anywhere else."</p>
<p>Why does the quality of the student body matter?</p>
<p>UCRhas a high acceptance rate, but it is a good school. So what if you are surrounded by boneheads.... You can still take advantage of the opportunities... College is about what YOU aspire to do with your life. One should not worry about the "quality" of the other students...</p>
<p>It matters whether you are surrounded by smart students who are interested in ideas and devoted to learning, as opposed to a bunch of party dudes and slackers. Interactions with your fellow students are a valuable part of your education. The values and ideas of the people you hang around with tend to rub off on you.</p>
<p>Now, you can certainly find smart students at non-selective schools, but you just might have to look a little harder than you would at say MIT.</p>
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<p>You can still take advantage of the opportunities... College is about what YOU aspire to do with your life<<</p>
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<p>You are absolutely right. But if you attend a school where you are one of the few smart kids who thinks this way, your memories of college will not include any passionate, late-night discussions of the questions of the universe. Instead you will have memories of pondering these questions alone at your desk while the other kids are out partying or playing video games or just slacking off.</p>
<p>The value of going to a selective college lies in the fact that prof's will "teach up" to the level of the class. You have to work that much harder to maintain decent grades. The basics are assumed at selective schools. You have to know your stuff and then some.</p>
<p>Doubtful, because selectivity rates don't determine the average level of student. Average SAT/gpa of students attending determines that. I heard somewhere that the avg. SAT is less than 1000.</p>
<p>The problem with selectivity rates is that they are skewed by the applicants' (frequently ill-informed) ideas about where they are likely to be admitted. At many state schools the admissions standards are "transparent" and yet lots of student who will not meet those standards apply anyway. This gives rise to an artificially high level of selectivity at those schools as many students apply and get rejected. As awareness of the standards grows those applications will not be made, and the apparent selectivity will decline. SDSU publicizes the huge number of applications it receives each year, but I think that is just a product of students (and their parents) not taking the time to learn what that school's (easily calculatable) GPA & SAT score "cutoff" was the year before. That's why I find the better objective standard to be the average academic qualifications of the stduents who actually decide to enroll. Students with higher GPAs and test scores have more options; if they elect to attend school A over school B that means the "invisible hand" of the marketplace is speaking. Of course, the "invisible hand" may like beaches better than snow drifts, but I don't know how to correct for that. And also, as DRJ notes, "local preferance" skews the data as well.
Everything else is anecdotal. I like the common data set because it is standardized - but not all colleges report those numbers, not all report them the same way, and I am suspicious about the accuracy of some colleges' numbers. But the data in that set of numbers is the only thing I can "crunch" with anything resembling objectivity.
DRJ - not all CSU's report CDS #'s. Many colleges (including some CSU's) fail to report average GPAs. The CDS is the most widely available and reasonably objective set of data available, but it's not universal or consistent.
My anecdotal data? I know several students who chose Cal Poly SLO after being accepted at "mid-tier" and even "top tier" UCs. I know that many students choose SDSU over UCR, and I know some who have chosen SDSU over UCSB, UCI and UCD. But that's just a handfull of teenagers making decisions.<br>
They are all good schools - successful people and (can say it) losers will graduate from all of them.</p>
<p>many CSUs i would suspect don't report this data kluge for it would expose how weak those units are. anecdotal admittedly, but having taught both at cal poly/elite level CSUs and mid-tier, i have personally observed extraordinarily varying levels of faculty competence, student acumen, university resourcing, and community support that contribute to my hack at a 23-campus ranking above. you will note that rarely does anyone ever discuss bottom tier units, and in fact the vast majority of posts are about the two cal polys and just a few other units. the reason, of course, is because that's where the better students--and more involved parents--choose. and yes, you are correct...more than half of the student bodies at the two cal poly campuses rejected at least one UC admit letter. a few even turn down top tier UCs such as UCLA and UCSD.</p>
<p>my wife taught at a bottom tier CSU. it was simply horrifying. there were shortages of even simple things like paper and long distance phone lines. students were so poor that a few could barely read a college level text. in one case their conduct was so out of hand that she was surrounded by a gang of them in a parking lot and intimidated to "go easy" on grading. in another a dean told her that a certain ethnic group caught cheating were foreign students who brought in critical revenues. she was asked if she could "work with them" to see that they passed a failing course. seeing pale university support, she resigned and moved on to a top tier CSU and marveled at the pedigree of the faculty (from terminal degrees at schools you never heard of to the ivy league), the amount of research support (from table crumbs to fully funded), and most happily, the quality of students.</p>
<p>as i recall giants is a senior at SLO. were he/she to traverse over the hills to classes at stanislaus it clearly would show how different the campuses of the system are. they are as divergent as the best state universities in the nation--your call on who they are--to the worst.</p>
<p>this depends upon what kind of journalism you mean. the best comprehensive programs are san diego state, fullerton, san jose state and san luis opisbo with the first two being largest.</p>
<p>beach has gotten a lot better than when i interviewed there for a job and it was terrible. solid program but still behind san jose, san diego, fullerton, and san luis. probably fifth in the system.</p>
<p>drj, would you recommend one of your top tier CSU schools (excluding SLO and Pomona) over the University of Oregon, Washington, or Arizona for a Cal resident?</p>
<p>bw, that unit was horribly disorganized some years ago but has improved vastly. don't know about the creative writing program there so cannot comment. the best such program i know is at university of iowa. go there if you can!</p>
<p>stark, that's a tough call against such great state universities. for specific programs you might choose a CSU other than the two cal poly campuses. but why not one of them? i also am very impressed with san diego state for most areas.</p>
<p>let me know a discipline and i will reply with what i know.</p>
<p>dstark, for what it's worth, the "Kluge numbers" for U Arizona, U Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State are all about the same as San Diego State - 113, 114 - while U of Washington is more on a par with UCSB, UCD and UCI at 119. I'd say that that is consistent with what I have heard in terms of the respective academic reputations of the schools. The other "top tier" CSU's have lower "Kluge numbers" - on a par with Arizona State at around 107. So it really comes down to other factors - individual department strength, cost, "fit", etc.</p>
<p>Where I live, people don't talk about SDSU as highly as Oregon and Arizona. I'm not sure why because the numbers do seem similar for these schools.</p>
<p>stark,
san diego state stacks up rather favorably against those schools in these areas. its business college is among the best in the CSU and is reasonably close in quality, perhaps just a touch back. you are correct about difficulty in transferring around at SLO but this is less true at cal poly pomona which also is very strong in business and economics. that said, i'd save the money and go either to san diego or pomona both of which are fully accredited with huge colleges of more than 4,000 students. as i recall, kluge is a parent of a SDSU student and i have taught at both cal polys as well as other CSUs.</p>
<p>SDSU was first allowed to be "selective" about 8 years ago. Before that, anyone who met the CSU minimum standards could just sign up and attend. (Of course, I can remember when Cal Poly SLO was the same way.) The minimum admissions standards for the "selective" CSU's have gone up significantly since then. Now it's a lot easier to get into U of A or U of O than SDSU or Cal Poly. It's hard to say where the upward trend in the qualifications of the enrolling students will flatten out.</p>