<p>To Amused - yeah, that's exactly my point. If we are only talking about the very smartest of the poor, and there are very few such people around, and if the public-schools are really out to help the poor, then those public schools should have absolutely no problem in matching the aid packages that those top private schools are offering to those students. After all, we're only talking about a small number of students that are going to be help, so why is it really so hard for the public schools to provide this match? The fact that they don't want to do this tells me that public schools aren't really out to help the poor, because if they were, they'd be matching. </p>
<p>Alexandre, let me put it to you this way. You say that Businessweek is the most respected. Yet according to that ranking, Harvard is only ranked 5th. In particular, Chicago is ranked 2nd. Honestly, give me your gut feeling, do you really think that Harvard is 3 places behind Chicago? I think you would agree with me that more people would turn down Chicago for HBS than vice versa, but why would people do that, if Chicago really is better? And in fact, in the history of the Businessweek rankings, Harvard has never ranked #1, not in a single year of those rankings. It is those sorts of things that seriously calls the Businessweek rankings into question. Whatever you might say about the other rankings by USNews, I think that it has the business-school rankings more or less correct. </p>
<p>Not that I'm trying to tout HBS, but I think it's hard to make a case that HBS isn't top-ranked B-school in not just this year, but in practically every year. Not when HBS tends to poach far more students from other B-schools than get poached from it. Not when HBS graduates make more money, on average, than other B-school grads make. Not when HBS consistently outyields every other B-school. Name any business-school in the country, and on an apples-to-apples comparison (i.e., if location and financial aid/cost are held equal), and if an applicant is admitted to both HBS and that other B-school, that applicant is probably going to choose HBS. Not guaranteed of course, but the odds are in the favor of HBS. Yes, we can all come up with some rare people who got into HBS but chose to go elsewhere, but I'm fairly certain that when you factor out things like scholarships or location, and we are just talking apples-to-apples, those people are in the minority. Alexandre, I think you would have to concede that this is probably the case. But that of course begs the question of why is that, if HBS is really only the #5 B-school in the country, as Businessweek claims? I think this calls into question the very validity of the Businessweek ranking system.</p>
<p>You also say that Harvard has lots of money and can therefore afford to have large professional programs. I'm afraid that doesn't really answer the question. Harvard is indeed significantly richer than Michigan is, yet Michigan has about double the total students (undergrad and grad) than Harvard does (graduate and grad). Nor is Michigan the only public school that does this. Almost all major flagship public universities have more total students than does Harvard, and yet none of them have even close to the kind of money that Harvard does. Certain other big state universities enroll even more students than does Michigan despite having less money than Michigan does. Hence, money doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with how many total students a school chooses to enroll. </p>
<p>And to continue the discussion of graduate schools, particularly professional schools, I have to question whether it really has anything to do with 'need'. Take doctors, for example. When was the last time you looked around and said to yourself "This world really has too many doctors"? Just in the US, there are millions of people, particularly in the rural countryside, whose access to doctors is intermittent at best. And what about all the billions of people in the world who may never see a doctor in their whole lifetime? Even within the state of Michigan, I would argue that there are plenty of people whose access to doctors is inadequate at best. </p>
<p>Hence, I would seriously question the notion that state medical schools like UM Medical do not "need" to get larger. Tell that to all the rejected medical school applicants at UM and other state medical schools in Michigan - many of which, I'm sure you would agree, would make for perfectly serviceable and adequate doctors, yet they can't get into med-school. Obviously not all of these rejectees would have made for serviceable doctors, but many of them would have. I think every med-school adcom officer tells the story of having to reject many highly qualified applicants every year for simple lack of seats. Tell all the people in Michigan or throughout the world who can't get access to proper medical care that these medical schools have no need to get larger. </p>
<p>You know and I know that these state universities could easily expand med-school seats if they wanted to, they just choose not to. For example, what is the largest med-school in the state of Michigan? Is it UM? Nope - it's Wayne State Medical. Yet we both know that Michigan has far far more money than does Wayne State. So why is it that Wayne State, with far less money, runs a larger med-school than UM does? Or let me put it to you this way. Michigan, if it wanted to, could easily shift some of its money from its undergrad program to its medical school. Just think about it from a cost and benefit standpoint. Does the state of Michigan benefit more from producing one more doctor, or one more Communication Studies student? </p>
<p>I know, I know, you're going to say that the reality is that med-schools, including state med-schools, are basically having to erect barriers to entry with the real purpose of keeping physician salaries high. Yet is that the way it should be? Med-schools don't exist (or at least, in my opinion, aren't supposed to exist) for the benefit of existing doctors. They are supposed to exist for the benefit of the consumers of medical services - namely, patients themselves. At the end of the day, it's supposed to be about curing people, not about keeping doctor salaries high by artificially restricting the number of doctors out there. Yet that's precisely what med-schools do by rejecting boatloads of qualified students who would make perfectly serviceable doctors. </p>
<p>When it comes to state med-schools, it's perfectly fine to set standards such that the truly unqualified don't get in. It may also be understandable if you experience a 'flash-flood' of lots of highly qualified applicants in 1 year, and you simply cannot accomodate all of them. Fine. But it's quite another to have this 'flash-flood' be happening every single year, where every year, you have to turn down highly qualified applicants who you know would be able to graduate if they were admitted, and then refuse to increase the number of seats to accomodate this "permanent flash flood". This tells me that state medical schools aren't really interested in producing enough doctors to cure the world, but are more interested in keeping the number of doctors low enough to keep salaries high.</p>