<p>The attempted moral high road? You came up with that one all on your own, and the way you say it comes off as pretentious too. Having different priorities has nothing to do with smartness or naivety. What is important to you may not be what’s important to me.</p>
<p>“Anyone serious enough about his/her discipline to try grad school should aim for the programs with good rigor, accomplished and connected faculty, strong research, and good placement records”</p>
<p>Who says that a less prestigious University doesn’t have these attributes? The University of Victoria, for example, is not ranked in terms of its sociology program. Does that mean it’s a bad program? </p>
<p>Look, you seem to have the “rational” mindset (even though we probably have a very different definition of the word “rational”) and if that works for you, then great. I am not competitive at all and all I want is to study something that I love, wherever that may be. I know this type of mindset comes off as naive and even shocks many people (especially when I dare saying that I don’t value money very much - a value that is so worshipped in the U.S.), but I am happy in that mindset and I always have.</p>
<p>“High school teachers teach the same amount of classes. So what’s your point?”
We don’t pay tuition for high school, I expect better than public high school teaching from my collegiate professors…</p>
<p>tbh, if its true that grad students at harvard TA classes, then graduate and adjunct those same classes at some cc in louisiana, then the NET CLASSROOM EDUCATION at both should be equivalent.</p>
<p>If success is a direction correlation to college prestige, I’m screwed.</p>
<p>I never let it bother me much that I’m not going to a ‘notable’ school. I simply don’t come from a family that can afford out of state tuition or a private education, it would take an FA MIRACLE to alleviate that fact. And since I couldn’t get into UNC (which still may have been too expensive), I’ve taken my best option and I actually love Appalachian State for it’s campus and students. </p>
<p>I think there’s enough opportunities at my school. It’s not always a direct link. An App graduate is currently mayor of NC’s 3rd largest city and, based off popularity, may have Congress in his future. I know someone who went to Duke who moved back in with his parents and is a day-laborer. It’s not just the school, that can be important, but what YOU make of it is most important.</p>
<p>@viennese and insomniatic [if one of you isn’t a dummy account, given your perfect agreement always] Do you really believe that the educations at Harvard and “some community college in Louisiana” are equivalent? The nation’s children are not so stupid that they would continue to come to Harvard and its equivalents if any community colleges really were equally good.</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard graduate students are the primary instructors for a handful of introductory courses, none of which I, as a rising Harvard junior, have had to take. Those include–and are limited to–math, language, and Economics 10 (intro). </li>
<li>Unlike at community college, once you’ve passed the introductory courses, there is a full layer of full Harvard professors who teach you. I should not even need to say how far this is not equivalent.
2b. I didn’t have to work very hard to “get past them” because, as a rising junior, I haven’t taken any. I’ve been in <10-person seminars with real Harvard faculty since my first semester here. </li>
<li>Maybe calculus and intro Spanish are similar at Harvard etc. and this hypothetical community college; I don’t think so. Our teachers have smaller workloads, so they can pay more attention to students. Most likely, the amount and depth of material covered here will also be much greater.</li>
<li>This hypothetical community college is extraordinarily hypothetical. Harvard etc. graduate students do not end up at community colleges. Community colleges do not let you research, so to accept a full-time position at one is to accept that you will never again be hired by a first- or second-tier academic institution. (I’m sure some Harvard Ph.D.s teach a course or two at community college if their job at a real university is only most-time, not full-time.) You can get one course offered by someone who used to be teaching at Harvard; a whole community college full of such? Unlikely.</li>
</ol>
<p>I’m sure some community college instructors are valiant, but there are a lot of institutional factors working against most of them. A negligible percentage are actually from Harvard, the key point in your claim of equivalence.</p>
<p>@David Nobody’s trying to say that non-flagship state schools are universally bad, or that you can’t succeed from one! You can certainly do so, and I hope you do. We’re just arguing that you probably have to be more careful and proactive about finding good classes and finding opportunities at Appalachian State than a student at Duke, at which nearly every major’s strong. Your Duke acquaintance should have had it easier than you, so he was either not very good at career-building or was particularly unlucky. The only thing I’m trying to argue against is that “lol, education is equivalent at community college and Yale or Bridgewater State and Princeton.” While you can get a great education and succeed from all four of those, no, they aren’t equivalent.</p>
<p>1) hence why I carefully caps locked NET education, to hint that in no way are the classroom experience, resources, etc at h in any way similar to a cc, but that if a professor taught at both, he very likely taught the same material in the same way, so that if a student wanted to benefit from it, she very well could, to a degree high enough to be comparable to an h student. You should maybe take economics 10, just to broaden your vocabulary, yknow</p>
<p>2) Orly? Did you know that, even if one graduates from Harvard, the chances of getting tenure track even a community college approach zero? Not that I don’t love me some fancy colleges and weekend trips to Boston, but none of that **** is insurance against anything. In that way, an app state undergrad, in his knowledge that he’s got a lot to go through before he’s a worthy member of society, is better prepared for IRL</p>
<p>^^ As far as I know the answer is no (or at least Brown doesn’t). I think it’s more because it would be way too difficult to differentiate between students (I can’t imagine deciding which of my friends would be in an honors college and which wouldn’t) than because just being at Harvard is the pinnacle of education</p>
<p>As a really old guy, I am reading, actually scanning, this thread with some amusement. Success for teenagers can be measured on looks, grades, athletic skills, popularity. Success in the real world requires a re-definition of what intelligence means. Success comes about by working hard and being skilled at your job, cooperating with your colleagues, being people smart as a staffer or a manager, ambition, luck, being nice and helpful, and did I mention luck. Smart is nice, but if it is only classroom smart it’s not going to be all that useful. If you are not serving the interests of your employer who the h— cares if you went to Harvard. Going to Harvard absent real world smarts is a useless attribute.</p>
<p>tsdad, this old mom had the same reaction…and in addition, I’m trying to figure out what the OP is “defeating” his supposed elite opponents in…I just don’t get it.</p>
<p>the more i look at adults around me, the more i become convinced that all this ‘real world smarts’ they talk about is simply an increased awareness of whether they have the looks, grades, athletic skills, and popularity, or they don’t.</p>