Ivy Rigor

Parents Forum
401

<p>

</p>

<p>I think you’re quite mistaken about this. Yes, Harvard has the prestige and the money to buy just about anyone it wants. But schools like Michigan, Wisconsin, UC Berkeley and UCLA compete successfully with schools like Northwestern and Brown and Columbia for faculty all the time. Average faculty salaries are a little higher at the privates, but the top publics will often match offers to retain their academic stars. And depending on the field, being on the UC Berkeley faculty is often perceived as being more prestigious than being on the faculty at Brown or Northwestern. To be honest, I’m having difficulty thinking of a single academic discipline in which people in the field would say Brown has a stronger faculty than UC Berkeley. </p>

<p>Every serious academic wants to be on a good faculty. Most will tell you it’s because being surrounded by the best in the field makes their own work that much better, but a lot of it, frankly, is prestige, and this is often more important to academics than money, or at least closely rivaling money in importance. For that reason, the top people in a given field will often move if they’re getting a bump up in money and a bump up in prestige; or sometimes if they’re getting a bump up in money and staying at the same level in prestige; or sometimes if they’re getting a bump up in prestige and staying even in money. But it’s much harder to get them to take a bump down in prestige, even for more money, unless it’s a ton of money or they have personal reasons to want to be in the new location. So I guarantee you that UC Berkeley isn’t losing many chemists to Brown or physicists to Northwestern, because in those fields UC Berkeley is perceived to be at the pinnacle, at a level of prestige a Brown or a Northwestern can only dream of.</p>

<p>And when it comes to money and institutional support for faculty research, the real research powerhouses are mostly top publics. Seven of the top 10 and 15 of the top 20 U.S. research universities in research spending are public universities. There’s not a single Ivy in the top 10; the only private universities to crack that group ate Johns Hopkins, Duke, and MIT. Michigan spends over $1 billion a year on research; that’s slightly more than Harvard and Yale combined, and about 6 times as much as Brown. Wisconsin is just a hair’s breadth behind Michigan. Granted, a lot of this is medical research, but even if you take out the medical research Michigan and Wisconsin still rank #5 and #4 in research spending, well ahead of any Ivy.</p>

<p>Endowment? According to NACUBO, the University of Texas is #3 (after Harvard and Yale but ahead of Princeton), Michigan is #7 (ahead of all but 3 Ivies), and Texas A&M is #10 (ahead of schools like Penn, Chicago, Duke, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins). Wisconsin’s endowment is smaller at #34.</p>

402

<p>

</p>

<p>Well, you can’t change the game. The fact that the student really-really-really-really-super-really wants to be a classicist doesn’t “entitle” her to a spot in the top classics programs. She may deserve one, and she might do great things with it if admitted, but she’s not “entitled” to it. That’s where the disconnect is for me. There seems to be this belief that certain students are “entitled” to slots at certain elite universities, and unfairly get kicked out by the less deserving URM / legacy / athlete / blah blah. </p>

<p>Look, who’s more entitled to a Harvard education? The aspiring Classics student who, if admitted, would just kick butt and take names, or the aspiring leader from the barrio whose test scores and GPA may not be as good, but, like the kid in JHS’ example, has really overcome tremendous hurdles to be able to perform at the level he is performing at and if he got a chance, he’ll become a tremendous community leader? They can’t take both, there is one bed. So sometimes it’s the Classics kid, sometimes it’s the kid from the barrio. Institutionally, they are going to balance those things, recognizing that they can’t make it perfect for everybody unless they admit 10,000 kids. What are you going to do about it? Of course if you don’t like the game, don’t play. What other choice is there? You guys are complaining that it’s not perfect but you’re not proposing any way of making a system perfect when there’s just a natural limitation of the size of the system.</p>

<p>It’s kind of like guys wanting to date Scarlett Johanssen or girls wanting to date George Clooney. A lot of applicants, but finally at the end of the day not too many slots :slight_smile: Who’s more “deserving”? It’s a pointless question. The system can’t ever be anything even remotely approaching perfect when you’ve got 10,000 deserving kids competing for 2,000 slots. What is so hard about saying that the adcoms are trying the best they can to balance a bunch of competing interests, and that all of those interests have some level of merit?</p>

403

<p>bclintonk: Thank you very much! Your post really opened my eyes. I am positive I’m quite mistaken about most things.</p>

404

<p>

</p>

<p>Yes, because at a social mixer, the kinds of people who would go “oh, you went to Wisconsin? What a loser you must be!” are the kinds of people whose opinions you should really value and pay attention to - and if you don’t measure up in their eyes, you should just stay home. @@ Enough already, cobrat.</p>

405

<p>

Now you’ve got me wondering what that would be :)</p>

406

<p>

</p>

<p>No, the best Classics departments are at schools that have elected to invest in maintaining an excellent Classics department. Top 25 departments according to NRC include UC Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, Michigan, UCLA, University of Cincinnati, Ohio State, University of Texas-Austin, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Iowa, and University of Washington. All 8 Ivies are also in the top 25 along with Stanford, Duke, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins, and Chicago, but it’s not the case that these elite privates are all ranked ahead of the publics; in fact, the first 5 publics I listed are all ranked ahead of Yale, Brown, Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins, and Chicago. Eight publics rank ahead of Chicago. </p>

<p>My point is not to knock these fine private universities, only to suggest that it’s possible to get an outstanding undergraduate education in classics in any of the schools making this top 25 list, public or private, and many other schools besides. My daughter is a classics major at a top 10 LAC and she is getting an outstanding education in the field, one that would easily qualify her for a very top graduate program if she were to elect to go that route. Given the generally dismal academic job prospects in the field, she is wisely cool to that idea at the moment, but it’s a well-trodden path from top LACs to top Ph.D. programs; in fact, most of the schools with the highest percentage of alums to earn Ph.D.s are LACs, and that’s true in almost every field.</p>

407

<p>The U Iowa fully funds all of its PhD students in classics for 6 years. I believe that it is ‘roughly’, a top 20 program. Current PhD students come from…</p>

<p>Berea
Augustana
CWRU
Creighton
UC Davis
U Illinois
Truman State
Concordia
Wake Forest
Campbell
UNC
Dickinson</p>

408

<p>I dont know what the rules are at UCB but I would think most faculty members in Engineering (EEE) and computer science make a lot more money because of the location. They end up doing a lot of consulting, getting startup shares etc. being in the silicon valley.</p>

409

<p>""…the dreaded “Smyth’s course,” required for physics majors… Now you’ve got me wondering what that would be""</p>

<p>It was supposed to be the E&M course taught by Smythe at Caltech.</p>

410

<p>"“Once I know a person’s major, informal testing shows that I am batting over 800 or better. Pretty good by social science standards, no?”"</p>

<p>You are too systematic to be mere mortal. :slight_smile: I go by my instinctive feel that, the concerned thinking pattern couldn’t have survived the baptize of Baby Rudin.</p>

411

<p>NRC ranks Stanford’s classics program #1, but if it’s not that, it’s certainly in the top handful. Here’s where its current Classics grad students did their undergrad:</p>

<p>Ivies: Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton
Non-Ivy private research universities: Stanford, Chicago, Tufts, WUSTL
LACs: Middlebury, Reed, Wesleyan, Grinnell, Washington & Lee, Carleton
Public Universities: New Mexico, Michigan
Foreign Universities: Bologna (Italy), Wilfrid Laurier (Canada), Athens (Greece), Oxford (UK), Freiburg (Germany), Dalhousie (Canada), McMaster (Canada)</p>

<p>LACs are certainly well represented, and it’s clearly possible to get into a top grad program from a public university, whether it’s one with a distinguished Classics faculty in its own right (Michigan) or one not known for being particularly strong in the field (New Mexico).</p>

412

<p>One of the paradoxes here is reconciling the following two statements:</p>

<p>1.) One can go on to achieve anything “even” from just a reasonably good state school for undergrad, whether that be the Nobel Prize, starting up a successful company, or becoming president of the United States.</p>

<p>2.) It is important that the most academically talented people get into the universities with the best classes, resources, and professional connections, so that they may go on to realize their full potential.</p>

<p>I would argue that both of these statements can be true simultaneously.</p>

413

<p>I wrote: 382

</p>

<p>bclintonk: I was just following up Blossom’s post, not ranking Classics depts myself. I personally would consider top 25 to be pretty damn competitive. You may notice I suggested parenthetically that the top program just might be public? It is my impression that MOST state schools don’t have Classics depts that will adequately prepare students for grad school. It is also my impression that the state schools you mention may not be reasonable options for some students because of restrictions on number of out of state admittees or lack of FA support available. I may be quite wrong about all that, too. I like that you bring up LACs. Whether a research university is really the best place for a future Classicist might be an interesting discussion. I prefer LACs to research universities for most students. The only reason it ever makes sense to me for a humanities student to go to a research university is for access to the graduate school. or perhaps a particular professor.</p>

<p>Mainly I’m still posting because I don’t like pizzagirl’s harsh attitude towards students who don’t get into their first choice schools. Yes, they probably have lots of excellent options. Yes they have to play the game to have a chance of “winning”. Usually when you give it your best shot and still lose, the coaches don’t scream at you and insult you ? I don’t know much about sports. Maybe they do? Maybe that is just part of the game.</p>

414

<p>certainly I can’t speak for blossom, but I didn’t think her post was really about “classics”
I thought she was just picking a humanities major applying to so-called “best” programs to contrast with science majors applying to so-called “best” programs- which there was a long discussion about a while back. </p>

<p>Anyone applying to “best” programs is NOT going down a USNWR list. “Best” programs can be subjective.</p>

415

<p>I subscribe to collegealum314’s view.</p>

<p>There are some arguments that a student who does not win the “elite” school lottery for undergraduate work can always go to a top school as a grad student. In fact, I think it is generally easier for the student whose greatest strength is academic to get into a top-ranked grad program than to get into a top-ranked undergrad program.</p>

<p>I have one or two reservations about this: I think that students’ thinking and large-scale views of their subject areas are more malleable when they are undergrads than they are subsequently, even when they are working closely with a Ph.D. research mentor. Their selection of grad schools and of research topics will be influenced in many ways by their undergraduate experiences. In my experience/observation, this can actually have far-reaching influences on a career and the course of discoveries.</p>

<p>It matters whether one looks at “top” university admissions as largely benefiting the student who is admitted, or whether one thinks of the whole pattern of university admissions in terms of developing the next generation of researchers. There is public benefit in matching the undergraduate students to the research faculty, at least in some of the sciences, in my opinion. </p>

<p>This does not mean that I think that the “top” schools are admitting “idiots” nor that I think that the top-school experience is “wasted” on weaker students. I freely admit the difficulty of identifying the people who are likely to become eminent in research later on, or even recognizing creativity and depth when the pre-college playing field is so uneven.</p>

<p>Yet, I think there are some admissions patterns that are definitely sub-optimal. (That’s all I have really been arguing over time on CC.) MIT admissions during the Marilee Jones era are a case in point.</p>

<p>It isn’t likely to be useful for me to re-hash the arguments I made previously about this. In my analysis, I ultimately pulled Ivy admissions completely out of consideration, and wrote only about MIT, which has a somewhat different institutional mission, since it is after all an “Institute of Technology.” I posited the case of a math student who would logically need to start in a graduate-level math class as a freshman at some of the large, public research universities, but who could find undergraduate classes and undergraduate peers at some of the very top places. (I hasten to include Chicago here.) I couldn’t get agreement from some of the posters, even in this extremely rare and narrow case that the student really <em>should</em> be admitted to MIT, assuming that the student is not disqualified by character defects.</p>

<p>I do think that if a university is going to advertise the accomplishments of one of their graduates in their student recruiting materials, they probably <em>should</em> have admitted the student directly, rather than from the waitlist or in transfer.</p>

<p>Oh, to alh: I have found your posts to be very well-stated and extremely interesting. I also appreciate your kind comments on my posts.</p>

416

<p>Don’t mind PG. She’s just partially fulfilling the stereotype of an upper-middle class suburbanite who disdains others for playing the competitive college admissions game without understanding that she has a privileged position both due to her socio-economic status and cultural capital from being in the US for more than 1 generation. </p>

<p>Not too different from how those of us in my social circle used to satirize some tony well-off Upper East Sider type parents who tell the working-class immigrants among us “All colleges are the same” when we damned well knew that was BS and that they were just as bad/worse about pushing the same “HYPSMCC or bust” BS attitudes towards their own kids as most of the parents/kids there. </p>

<p>The latter was especially brought home when some of their kids ended up with serious stress-related illnesses as a result which added to their irony of trying to convince the “lower orders” like my friends and I to severely lower their college aspirations.</p>

417

<p>

If you take to the internet with constant complaints that you were robbed, somebody will likely comment on that, and probably negatively. If you express disappointment but without recrimination and finger pointing at what you perceive as an unjust, rigged system, people should be understanding. And I think they generally are.</p>

<p>And IMO, some student poster’s unrelenting complaints about the cr@ppy, second rate flagships they are forced to endure can be a little insulting to students who are thrilled to be admitted to these schools.</p>

418

<p>

</p>

<p>But why would you even set up any expectations that you’d get in when you are talking places with sub<20% acceptance rates? I don’t know why you would EVER treat any school with those kinds of acceptance rates as anything other than a lottery where the most you can do is play your best and it’s out of your hands. The problem I see is when so many students / parents feel entitled to be one of the “chosen.”</p>

<p>Look, you can set it up as - This one school is the pinnacle of everything, it’s 100x times better than any other school and certainly far superior to whoever is 5 points below on USNWR, and then when you’re disappointed, it’s crushing. And make sure you spend plenty of time wallowing in it and being angry if you hear of an admitted kid with even one SAT point lower than yours. And rile yourself up over an athlete or URM or legacy without stopping to consider that they might have been admissions-worthy too. </p>

<p>Or you can set it up as - This is a great place, and it’s great to want to shoot for the stars, so shoot for them, but don’t be disappointed if you don’t get it - merely having an in-the-ballpark app is meritorious enough, and if they don’t admit you, it’s their loss, not yours.</p>

<p>I can tell which one is a more emotionally healthy response.</p>

419

<p>Oh jeez, I go to a meeting (my day job!) and look what happens.</p>

<p>Yes ALH, I was just using Classics as an example because when posters here write about non-Stem majors it’s just hard to visualize. There are non-Stem majors which are somewhat vocationally oriented (urban planning?) and non-Stem majors which are performance oriented (all the arts) and non-Stem majors like Classics which theoretically could be taught well in someone’s kitchen, but in actuality end up being taught well in extremely well endowed places with lots of faculty and resources.</p>

<p>I don’t think anyone would encourage a kid who wanted to major in music performance to attend a college without actual performance opportunities (i.e. just music theory classes)… I was just trying to find a convenient analogy. Sorry if it led to a detour around the world of Classics. (But if someone starts an argument in Latin I will be so pleased.)</p>

<p>Quant Mech raises a great point about malleability. You can’t major in what you don’t know about. So there are small and mighty academic departments (small because the focus is on one particular area but not an entire discipline) and small and weak departments (the faculty are all ready to retire or are already emeritus, there is one lone grad student, no endowed chairs), big and comprehensive (anything at Michigan!), and even big but shallow (I’ve seen some large business schools where this is the case. Lots of accounting faculty since that’s where the demand is, but nobody doing research in behavioral economics or other cutting edge fields.)</p>

<p>Again, to the average 18 year old this is probably irrelevant. Most kids find something to major in after all. But I don’t agree with the contention that prestige is all some marketing ploy and that only a rube would pick a school because it’s prestigious.</p>

<p>Drexel isn’t MIT even though they both offer engineering, and for many kids, Drexel is a fine place. That ain’t the prestige-#$%^’ talking- that’s reality. Spend two days on both campuses and then say with a straight face that MIT is a diploma mill and that some meta study concluded it doesn’t matter where a kid goes to college since the outcomes are all the same.</p>

420

<p>With an opening like that (blossom, #419), I will interrupt my work to say:</p>

<p>Quo usque tandem, Pizzagirl, abutere patientia nostra? (Just kidding–really :slight_smile: )</p>