While there are certain special opportunities that may be given to only a small number of excellent performing students, that does not mean that the other students will not also have special opportunities. Most opportunities during college are not closely tied to class rank. There are also plenty of special opportunities at less prestigious schools, in addition to prestigious ones.
For example, I had the opportunity to be one of the first employees at what is now a well known tech company whose name all on this forum would instantly recognize and whose founders are billionaires. I did not take this opportunity because at the time they were a small and little known startup. I got the impression that they were desperate to get people to join them. They were certainly not limiting hiring to just students with a high rank in class. The opportunity occurred because the company was formed by a group of students in the college and limited initial recruiting to the college they attended. Had I attended college elsewhere, I wouldn’t have this opportunity, but I might have a similar type of opportunity at a different well known start up.
Early in college, I was interested in both engineering and medicine. For the latter, I was especially interested in biopsychology and behavioral neuroscience. I had the opportunity to do research in this field. This opportunity occurred because I contacted someone at the med school doing research in the field who was looking for assistance. They did not ask about my rank in class. I started out doing basic things like patient interviews and moved on to more complex things as I my performance was observed.
I had a part-time off-campus tech job while a student, which I think was a key experience for my first full time job after graduating. I learned about this job based on a flier I saw on campus. I contacted the company, dropped off my resume, did a short interview, and they hired me. I did not get the impression that the opportunity was limited to persons with high class rank. They seemed to focus on other criteria and be impressed by other things we discussed in interviews. At the time, I did not have a car, which limited part time job to companies within a short bike ride from campus. Having tech companies located so close to campus that are used to hiring part time students from the college and have fliers on campus led to a special opportunity.
I could list many other examples, as I expect could most college students on this forum. The point is there are many types of opportunities that do not closely depend on class rank or the college being prestigious. These opportunities may require initiative from the student, rather than expecting someone to hand the opportunity on a platter to the top of the class.
How does a student know if they will be in bottom quartile or not? If you mean bottom quartiles test scores, that’s a 790 math at MIT. I wouldn’t assume a student scoring a 790 instead of 800 is going to have a bad experience at MIT. Similarly I would not assume 730 EBRW means bad experience at MIT.
Sorry, but there are schools - even top schools - that are legendary for this kind of thing. Blame the kids if you want but it’s the schools with 40,000, not those with 4000 where it’s a significant problem.
I can tell you that my Dad went to MIT (BS/MS) and my uncle went to the most random undergrad on the planet (PhD Stanford). To this day my dad maintains that the MIT network was better, but their undergraduate educations were the same.
I don’t know if this would be true today, but most posters here who are themselves alumni of said institutions, and not parents of alums say that they question paying a lot more for what advantages there might be.
Maybe. But an awful lot of alumni of those schools are very eager to have their children admitted as well-see any of the recent acceptance threads for legacy denials/deferrals.
It may not be worth going into debt for, but there is a large group of alumni eager to get their kids in to all the usual suspects and willing and able to pay for it.
There’s nothing wrong per se about any of the highly rejective schools. They all have strengths. They all have weakness. We’ve built up a mythology around them that leads some to believe they are essentially a golden ticket. I have many Ivy grads in my friend and professional circles. They all do regular jobs. The three Fortune 500 CEOs that I’m friends with all went to random state schools. At the end of the day we are the products of our efforts not our diplomas.
No, I don’t mean by test scores at a school like MIT. Students themselves would know roughly where they stand relative to others in a class. The use of the term “quartile” was meant to be a rough indicator, not to have any statistical “precision”.
Not everyone is going to have the same experience at any college, elite institution or not. Some students would benefit from being in a highly challenging place and thrive, and some wouldn’t. Some would take advantage of extra opportunities offered by certain colleges, and some wouldn’t. It all depends largely on the student.
There really isn’t a list of “certain colleges” that meet this description. There’s one…Caltech. Maybe MIT too, but even they don’t meet Caltech’s notorious pace.
As for opportunities, that’s highly variable too. Some schools have better infrastructure for clubs and incubators and are doing very cools stuff. They’re not necessarily the blue bloods.
Many of the other well respected names go at the same pace and teach the same material as anyone else. Some, even extremely well respected ones, water it down. Many schools, Purdue as one example, teach an engineering track of Calculus, eschewing full proofs math, deemed good enough for the purposes of engineering.
To my eye, the proof is in the work students produce for their senior projects and do in their clubs. It can be surprising what pedestrian projects come out of big name schools and what great innovation comes from “lesser” schools.
Yes, in college I knew before Christmas of freshman year who was going to be a top student and who would struggle for the rest of their degree course. It was pretty tough if you found yourself in the latter group, especially because in math the top students were able to work far less hard (if they wanted to), because they could do problem sets in a fraction of the time.
I felt my undergrad degree was the most intellectually challenging period I’ve ever experienced (much tougher than a PhD or anything in my work career). But my kids say they found their college courses easy and were never challenged (except occasionally in sheer volume of work). I think that is more likely due to variation between colleges than between majors.
I don’t think it was true in my case that you could tell the strong engineering students that soon. I struggled in honors physics freshman year. I felt lucky to get through with a C and then a B. I ended up with a high GPA. I wouldn’t want to discourage students if they have a hard time at the beginning of college.
I’d agree that the list of such colleges isn’t long, especially if one defines the criteria more stringently. I’m personally familiar with a few of these colleges, but surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), I’ve noticed the degrees and levels of opportunities they offer differ a great deal among them. Just as each student is unique, each college is unique in some way.
It depends on the class. For example, in some of my large pre-med classes, the professor would show a histogram of the grades following an exam and describe the curve or grading system he used. A student knew exactly how their exam grade compared to others in the class, as well as their overall grade. However, in smaller, upperclassmen engineering courses or classes with grading based on subjective papers, listing exam grades of other students or applying an obvious curve was more rare. Students didn’t know how their classmates did on exams/papers unless they asked them. With no curve and only in-major students taking the class, average grades were often high. Many such classes had few/no students receiving grades below A-.
My experience was rather than relative rank in class compared to classmates, students were far more concerned and stressed about their absolute grade in the class. For example, many students would be fine with getting the lowest grade in the class, if that lowest grade was an A-. Many students would be far more concerned about getting a top quartile grade, if that top quartile grade was a B+.
I also observed that the students who seemed most stressed about grades were often the ones with higher overall GPAs rather than lower ones. For example, the pre-med who has nearly all straight A’s, then gets an A- might find this situation extremely stressful. I knew one pre-med who acted extremely concerned about her A- grades, so much so that she would repeat the class for a replacement grade. When i think about the students I knew with lower grades, most didn’t appear too stressed about them, which relates to why they continued the behavior contributing to lower grades, such as prioritizing drinking/partying over studying.
You can definitely tell right away who the brilliant students are. That’s certainly correlated with grades, but it’s nowhere close to 100%. Other students might have less raw talent but will work for the grades. Both types (the brilliant student happy with a B+ and the diligent student working for the A) will find later career success.
That’s not how our courses worked in the UK. No grades, just four 3 hour end of year exams (on two consecutive days), with hard questions that required leaps of intuition. The top students would get 30+ right across the four papers, good students would get about 13 right, average students 6 and to pass you needed 3 right. Diligence made very little difference (though you needed to study hard for several weeks before the exam to memorize all the techniques you’d covered during the year).
Not dissimilar in arts subjects: my spouse had to handwrite four original 8-10 page essays in each three hour exam.
Graduate outcomes would be in each university’s first destination survey, sometimes found in their career services section of their website. The common data set is only admissions information.
Perhaps I didn’t make it clearer. I wasn’t even talking about grades. Students themselves know how they compare relative to others in the class because they often work with others on assignments, projects, etc. They know who among them would first come up with ideas to solve problems, whom they would go to if they encounter issues in an assignment or project. They also know if they have to spend much more time or put in much more effort than others just to keep up.
Again there is a lot of variation. Some classes involve a good amount of group projects or studying in groups. Other classes are largely individual efforts, without a lot of non-grade feedback about how the student compares to peers in the class.
It sounds like my experiences differ from some in this thread. I attended a HYPSM college known for collaborative assignments. For the most part, classes did not seem extraordinarily difficult or challenging compared to classes I have taken at other colleges. The class pace was often faster, which may have related to the quarter system vs semester system. The norm was for the vast majority of students within classes to understand the material and receive A grades. Classes were rarely structured to focus on or identify a small number of exceptional students. Classes were more commonly structured such that the expectation was for the overwhelming majority of students to learn the material and be successful, without an abnormally large time commitment. It was not a competitive atmosphere, with a large portion of students focused on who is stronger/weaker in the class.
In this type of environment, it was rare for me to have a good sense of how I compared to others in a particular class beyond grade feedback from the professor, which was usually most student get A’s and extremely few get C’s. However, I did have a general sense of my stronger/weaker areas. For example, a weaker area for me was subjective papers and a stronger area was objective, numerical/analytical problem solving. While classes with subjective papers were a generally weaker area for me, I didn’t have a good sense of whether I required more time to keep up than others in the class, and I rarely compared my papers with others in the class or had a sense of who was stronger/weaker when completing a group paper/presentation. There was often one student within the group who took on more of leadership/dominant role and other students who chose to put less time/effort in to the group assignment, but I didn’t associate that varying degree of effort in to the assignment, with students being generally stronger/weaker in the class, so it did not provide a good feedback about where I ranked within the class.
Many students in my neighbourhood attend Oneonta, which is regarded as a good school for B+/A- students. Additionally, it has the Red Dragon as its mascot, which is definitely amazing.