According to iPEDs, UC Merced graduates 69% of its Pell grantees while LSU is only at 56%. Their overall graduate rates are similar. I don’t know why this is.
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Since the original post that inspired this thread was the difference in studying Physics at LSU vs MIT I had a look at the undergrad Physics curriculum at LSU and while all the fundamental core Physics requirements are covered, the major is a little light in the required Math. Now that doesn’t preclude a student from taking additional Math courses, but without proper academic advising (and I have no knowledge regarding the quality of the advising at LSU) or the initiative of students to research what a basic Physics curriculum should cover, a student could graduate from the program missing some basic foundational knowledge. I also have to wonder why the senior Math courses that most Physics programs would consider integral to the degree are not part of the requisite courses at LSU. The other detraction from LSU’s program is the range of upper year Physics electives is fairly thin. So absolutely an MIT Physics student following the basic degree requirements will complete a more rigorous course of study than a student at LSU.
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In my area, starting at a CC likely means you cannot handle certain majors. That’s just reality, not a “running down”. I’ve got friends who teach at the local CC, and the most popular courses by far are tagged as remedial. There’s no shame in remedial, but don’t pretend that a HS graduate who is taking Trig and Pre-Algebra is ready for an engineering major at the “flagship U”.
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Because LSU graduates only ~10 Physics majors a year. It’s an extremely small department. Other than a small LAC, I would generally not recommend going to a college which graduates so few in your major.
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What about the community college student taking calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, etc. there and doing well?
Small LACs with that few students in a major may not have enough instructional resources and student demand to offer a full set of courses in the major – especially if the department also needs to provide service courses for others (e.g. physics courses for pre-meds).
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I would say there is a bit of a gap between “mediocre” and “elite” for a school to fall into.
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Fairbanks and the U of Alaska system as a whole have a unique educational mission, indeed. And they are good at what they do to that end.
No, it’s not the right place for the majority of students. But it’s the perfect place for some. And it’s a solid and affordable option for others, especially Alaskans.
There are some phenomenal professors there. Plenty who are internationally recognized in their fields.
Some people might be surprised that Fairbanks has niche programs that draw people from all over the world. For certain disciplines, I would definitely tell my kid to give it a chance.
This is true of several state flagships, especially rural ones. Not everyone is looking for the same thing. The needs of the students in these communities and the missions of the universities can be pretty unique. I’m glad they are there, doing their things.
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UC Merced has devoted a lot of resources towards supporting first-generation and low-income students. They and Riverside are getting very very good at this. I have helped mentor a young man who immigrated here before middle school but struggled enough in his public HS not to get an initial admit at a UC or CSU for his chosen STEM field. He went to community college, reapplied as a transfer and ended up at UCR where the coursework is hard/rigorous but the supports are also there to help him succeed. He’s taking advantage of all of it, including help to get good and relevant internships that dovetail with what he is studying. I highly recommend UCR and UC Merced for students like this. They will get good support and attention.
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Could you elaborate on the good part? At Fairbanks, I see that a 3rd of freshmen don’t return after the 1st year. Less than half graduate in 8 years. The graduation rate for full-time Pell students is 16%, less than half.
When you compare them to other schools, no it won’t look very good. Their mission to serve primarily the citizens of Alaska is ridiculously difficult. It is hard to comprehend the reality of what life in Alaska is like, unless a person has lived there. I would be interested to see those graduation numbers broken down by demographics, and my prediction is that there would be a correlation with income, race, and home town/village. But I don’t know.
@dfbdfb can probably explain it better (if they even want to).
That is for the for the general group of students. For certain niche fields I can say they are particularly strong. I’d send my current senior there only for certain majors. If I lived there, it might be a great choice for my second kid, who is not a stellar student, and I’d want him to consider it for many more majors. It’s a whole complicated thing, Alaskans going to school out of state. I’m glad the UA schools are there. The state would be in dire straits without them.
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You can do so on IPEDS which is where I got them from.
Which majors?
I’d agree with that.
On what planet is multivariate calculus considered remedial? I specified that I was talking about HS grads who are taking remedial courses.
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I agree that even a mediocre college is better than no college, but when the state is graduating 16% of its Pell grantees, that college is not working. The taxpayers of Alaska deserve better.
Like to add that U Maine is a Carnegie R1 research university. College of Engineering is accredited by ABET. Nursing school is competitive and the university in itself is pretty solid and serves to educate a swath of good students not only from Maine but New England. Plus campus is beautiful with great athletic facilities for a state system. Let’s not call them mediocre.
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No one here is disparaging its beauty or athletic prowess. It is notably less succesful than its peers in graduating students, particularly poor ones.
Just a reminder that googling mediocre shows it to primarily mean of only ordinary quality, commonplace, everyday, average, neither good nor bad.
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Poor students in Maine are more likely to come from under-resourced, poor and rural school systems than a poor kid from CT, RI or MA.
I am not a sociologist so I am not qualified to comment on the why…but I’ve seen enough poor kids from places like New Haven CT (urban), Boston MA (urban) to suspect there are substantial differences in the “readiness for college” of urban vs. rural HS kids. For one thing, many of the urban and poor public school systems in New England have been targets of Education Reform going back decades, and many have had robust magnet school programs going back over 100 years. (Girls Latin in Boston- a public exam-entrance HS founded in 1878-- which educated many daughters of low income immigrants).
So I’m inclined to suspect that if you compared low income first Gen U Mass/ low income first Gen U Maine students, you’d find higher academic achievement/potential in MA vs. Maine. Not because urban kids are inherently smarter than rural kids. But because urban HS’s- even those serving a low income community- are more “academic” in the urban communities.
My suspicion. And after a year or three semesters-- regardless of the financial challenges- a kid in Maine might be ready to throw in the towel on college work. Yielding low grad rates for the Pell population.
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But no one “pretend[ed] that a HS graduate who is taking Trig and Pre-Algebra is ready for an engineering major at the ‘flagship U.’” Those taking multivariate calculus at CC may be.
27.5% of kids at Maine transfer to another institution.
You rang?
Yeah, first of all and before talking about Alaska, I want to agree with everyone who’s saying that positing that elite and mediocre are binary opposites is not just wrong, but actually kind of horrifying. If that really is your take on things, you need to get a better grip on reality.
And that ties in to Alaska’s higher education sector. The various University of Alaska System universities (maybe especially Fairbanks, but really all of them) are absolute proof of the idiocy—and I use that word carefully here, and with a very extreme meaning—of considering colleges as entire colleges and not looking at individual programs.
So to take the field I’m most familiar with (linguistics), the University of Alaska Fairbanks has a world-class program in the documentation and preservation of indigenous languages—and it’s one of the few places where undergrads can get a solid grounding in it, not just grad students. And while Fairbanks might never show up in the top 100 of anybody’s USNWR-type rankings, it’s certainly better for that particular specialization (which is a pretty important one up here, I’ll note) than anything you’d get at HYPSM, and their linguistics program more generally has a solid argument for being stronger than at least the HYP part of that group.
But yeah, overall the IPEDS-type stats for the various Universities of Alaska aren’t great. There are some reasons for that—for starters, we have a transient population, and that amplifies my most hated IPEDS data issue: students who get a degree after transferring away from a college count as a nongraduate while those who complete a degree after transferring in do not count as a graduate—but yeah, a lot of our outputs aren’t great (though there are efforts to fix that). Or, for another mentioned by others but not tracked in IPEDS: rurality. Yeah, students who come from small villages that aren’t even on the road system—for whom even Juneau’s 30,000 people makes for a crazily crowded huge city—might have a tricky transition to make when they go to college. We haven’t been doing wonderfully with that part of our student base, but there are better supports in place for them here than even just ten years ago.
But the primary focus of the system here is, very simply, to provide an opportunity for postsecondary education—which is why all of the universities up here are either open-access or so nearly so that they might as well be. And honestly, I’d like to see what Michigan’s and Virginia’s 6-year graduations rates would be if they were open-access for a couple years, you know?
So it really comes down to mission. Some colleges have as their mission the education of a narrow slice of the population, and if that’s what they do and they focus on it so that they can do it well, good for them. Others have as their mission a much broader reach, and if that’s what they do and they focus on it so that they can do it well, good for them. But trying to order colleges with such different missions into a single numerical or even tiered ranking? That is—again using this word carefully—idiocy.
Would I have sent my kids to one of the Universities of Alaska? If it weren’t for the fairly deadly combination of being interested in fields that aren’t offered by any college up here and/or severe seasonal depression, sure! (In fact, there’s a reasonable enough chance my C25 may still go to one of them, don’t know yet.) Why? Because the difference between an “elite” and a “mediocre” college is less than anybody on CC likes to admit—and for a lot of very excellent students, the “mediocre” option is going to give them better opportunities.
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My nephew was a top student (was accepted to Brown, Cornell, NYU) and chose UF. He wasn’t rich but had Bright Futures and a few other scholarships.
He’ll be 30 this week and is still working on a BA.
My kids were poor but didn’t have the option of taking their time to get through college. Some of their scholarships were for 8 semesters only. One changed majors a few times but only needed one summer class to get through in 8 semesters (her semester abroad was limited to 12 credits).
She was at one of the ‘mediocre’ flagships. It served her just fine.
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