Public Flagships and Renowned Private Colleges

Parents Forum
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I know this isn’t the point your comment is making, but it made me think of something else (I’m not addressing you personally in the rest of my comment):

I don’t really consider “mediocre” a pejorative. I just don’t care about some stuff that other people do. For example, I’m a “normal” weight, but I wouldn’t care if someone called me fat, because I don’t assign value to body size. The list of things many care about but I don’t care about is long. That list includes the elite status of my affiliated schools.

I was an NMF and I went to my well-regarded state flagship (but almost attended a school I’ve never seen mentioned here). I did my PhD at a different state school people here would definitely call mediocre. I went there to study with a specific group of people who were strong in my field of interest. I did my postdoc at yet another mediocre state school. Those were all deliberate choices, and I had offers from profs at much “better” schools that I declined (Stanford, UF, Madison, Yale, UW, etc.). I was a prof at a middling SLAC and then moved to an underwhelming R1. I’m currently at yet another R1 that isn’t a darling around here. I personally know outstanding scholars at even the podunkiest schools, and I just don’t care where they work. Once you get to the level where you can properly assess scholarship, you realize that.

I’m not saying that every student will get a great education at every school, or that I’d readily send my kids to any major at any school. I am saying I wouldn’t dismiss a school just because it’s mediocre. There are good reasons I didn’t go work for the profs at Stanford and Yale and instead went to the not-at-all elite places that I did. I don’t regret it one bit and I STILL wouldn’t send my trainees to work for those folks.

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MT- we agree on a lot of things.

My hope is that my advice- however much controversy it often generates (yes, Blossom gets nasty PM’s) helps kids who care about rigor get the best possible education given their constraints. Often they are financial. Sometimes they are logistical (the kid with the driver’s license realizes that being 2500 miles away with younger siblings while a parent is having chemo/radiation is not the right decision for the family so it’s off to local college). Sometimes it’s lack of social capital/understanding of how things work. Or any combination of multiple things. I’ve tried to advise kids that writing a senior thesis (whatever it’s called) using primary sources is a way to make “average U” a much more rigorous experience, or that taking a two semester statistics sequence with programming is MUCH more impressive to a prospective employer than taking “topics in market research” which doesn’t go much beyond “this is a regression”.

I get called an elitist a lot. But helping the kid who ends up at Southern CT State College for reasons beyond his or her control is part of why I’m still on CC after several hundred years (jk). But it baffles me how many people are resistant to the notion that some educational experiences are going to be more rigorous (for lack of a better term) than others. That’s not elitism, in the same way that conceding that a US Marine who is in an intense training program is likely stronger, faster, with more endurance than the Zumba instructor at your local YMCA. I’m not dissing my Zumba teacher (he is very strong and fit), but even I can look at what the Marine has to accomplish and concede- “yup, more rigorous”.

For people who aren’t interested in academic rigor- have at it. I have nothing to contribute to discussions on sorority life, how long it takes to get to a ski slope in Vermont from Burlington or Middlebury, whether Oberlin is too woke or whether studying genetics at Liberty is a bad idea (actually I have an opinion about Liberty but not today).

But why is the notion that some universities have fewer resources, fewer talented students, and are easier to excel at the third rail of CC??? Especially when a lot of posters (looking at some of our resident financial aid experts, our Questbridge experts, the ROTC parents, etc.) are willing to help a kid who wants MORE resources, not less figure out some affordable alternatives?

Kids from low income or first gen families have a lot of obstacles getting a college education. But it seems like heresy on CC to help kid who can get into- and succeed- at a “fill in the blanks college” vs. steering those kids to “hey, here’s a cheap college you can afford while living at home”. If it has to be cheap and local- then it is what it is. But many of the posters here can help those kids rise to the top at “cheap and local” instead of arguing that cheap and local is just as good as U Chicago or whomever is the bete noire of the anti-elitists that week.

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The just made me laugh!

Catching up on the posts and couldn’t believe that was the word per google for opposite of elite. Then to see it used…too funny! Literally laughed out loud! :rofl:

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Closing temporarily for administrative review

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The quoted thread was started by a troII whose sole purpose was to cause discord and debate. The spinoff has also succeeded in causing discord and debate, enhanced by the thread title, which I have now changed

I’m reopening the thread on slow mode with ground rules that are based on Terms of Service:

  • Don’t disparage individual colleges. It may not be your choice, but it’s clearly the choice of many

  • Similarly, don’t disparage other users

  • If you’re arguing the same point over and over, step away

  • Refrain from minutiae. We won’t come to consensus in the definition of “is” for example

This is the final moderator’s note on the thread. The next intervention will be the thread 's closure without comment

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I believe the heat on this thread comes from the negative connotations that “mediocre” carries. While it may be taken to mean “average”, to me it suggests a thing that is deliberately not realizing its full potential. It carries a whiff of laziness, carelessness, and other marks of shame.

While some schools might deserve being tagged as mediocre (particularly if they are doing things like emphasizing sports and cutting back on academics - not naming any names), the examples given above of schools doing their best to meet that particular mission are not mediocre.

Perhaps a better way to label might be “mainstream” universities. “Elite” does not necessarily equate to “excellent” either. It primarily refers to the level of rejectivity of the institution. Elite tends to carry more positive connotations than negative, although that may be changing.

If we started a thread on why one would attend a “hoity-toity” school rather than a “mainstream” school, wouldn’t that tilt the conversation in a particular direction?

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I think you are right that many are upset by the connotations of the term mediocre. And that we desribe as “mainstream” universities which may have 25% graduation rates.

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Would love to know which flagships have an under 25% graduation rate.

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Not allowed to name individual colleges on this thread anymore, but if you search earlier posts you will find it.

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That’s not what I said as you full well know

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I did and the lowest I could find was 34% through the government department of education’s stats. While certainly would give me pause, another poster explained some of the challenges in that state. Other schools mentioned elsewhere were not flagships, which is what this thread is about. Other flagships mentioned were above 50% so not close to the 25% in your statement. (As a note, if we are talking about flagships, it’s important to look at that specific campus’ graduation rate and not the system as a whole. Satellite campuses, IMO, are not representative of the main campus flagship.).

There are plenty of schools that have abysmal graduation rates, mostly for profit schools, but that isn’t the focus of this thread.

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I can pm you, as I fear naming it would constitute the forbidden “dispargement of individual colleges”.

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Personally I would question whether any college( public or private) with a 6 year graduation rate of less than 50% can be considered mainstream, but clearly some do so consider.

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I’ve been reading along but hadn’t had time to post as I was celebrating my grandmother’s 100th birthday with extended family the past several days. Thus, I’m going to take a little bit of license as the OP to make a comment before moving on (or the mods edit it out).

First, on the definition of mediocre, which has now been edited out of the subject heading by the mods.

  • From Merriam-Webster: of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance : ordinary, so-so
  • From Cambridge Dictionary: 1) not very good, 2) just acceptable but not good; not good enough, 3) ordinary and not very good
    From dictionary.com:
  • of only ordinary or moderate quality; neither good nor bad; barely adequate: The car gets only mediocre mileage, but it’s fun to drive.
  • not satisfactory; poor; inferior: Mediocre construction makes that building dangerous.

Personally, my own definition is pretty close to the one found by Cambridge Dictionary. The word “mediocre” definitely has a negative connotation to it. In my mind, there would not be a binary of elite : mediocre, but rather a continuum ranging from something like:

  • exceptional,

  • excellent,

  • very good,

  • good,

  • ok (at best, this is as high as mediocre would be),

  • poor, (the other location for mediocre)

  • terrible.

Most of the Top X schools would probably be classified as exceptional or excellent in that continuum when considered on the whole (though of course, there may be a department or similar that could fall into a different category). Prior to hearing some of the comments in the thread I linked to in the first post, I would generally consider state flagships to be somewhere between the good and excellent categories. So with my rough continuum from above, hearing a flagship called mediocre was at least one to two rungs below what I would consider lower-end flagships, and why I asked my original question.

I do think there are differences in quality between institutions, and rigor can definitely be one of them. I do not think, however, that a rigorous education is limited to a Top X school. Additionally, not all students want to have the most rigorous education available. Thus, I think it’s helpful to know measures to determine rigor and how rigorous a particular institution is (whether the prospective student wants to aim for or avoid rigor), and there is a thread where that’s been discussed recently.

For me, some of the factors that I would use to assess a school would be:

  • How do its graduation rates compare to the expected graduation rates based upon the composition of its student body?
  • Does it have the appropriate accreditations, particularly if the accreditation shows a level of rigor (ABET, NAAB for architecture, etc)?
  • What is the passage rate on licensing exams (teaching, nursing, CPA, etc)?
  • How do the college graduates’ earnings (who received federal loans) compare? This is particularly helpful when a school does not have a large percentage of engineering/health science majors, especially at the 10-year mark? (Meeting a particularly minimum floor of earnings can be a sign that a school has a certain level of respect among employers.)

In starting this thread, I was not seeking a comparison between a state flagship and renowned private colleges. I think most can agree that the price tags and extremely competitive admissions of most renowned privates will create a very different environment from most flagships. Thus, my interest is seeing what “barely adequate” or “just acceptable but not good” means and whether people think that any flagships actually fall into that categorization (names need not be given, as we do not want to disparage a particular institution, but people may give metrics that would show that a school would fall into that description).

Graduation rates and resources for students and faculty appear to be some of the criteria people are using. For some, admissions rates and/or the stats of incoming students for the “peer” environment. Are there other criteria that people are looking at? And do the criteria listed above show whether a school is “just acceptable?”

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Perhaps it is relative as well? The bottom 10 or 20% of flagships are clearly underperforming compared to their peers using some of the criteria above. Do they get to still qualify as ok? How far below average still qualifies?

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What is the “expected” graduation rate for a given student body? How do we estimate it? If some of the students aren’t expected to graduate, doesn’t that mean the college has a low bar for admission? Does it even make sense to talk about or compare graduation rate at a particular college without knowing the minimum graduation requirements at that college?

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Perhaps the moderators should change the “new” title because it is calling for a comparison of publics and prestigious privates. Maybe it should be something like “What to consider when comparing public flagships,” or “What makes certain public flagships more desirable than others”.

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Comparing state flagships has the same problem as comparing elite institutions. There is a pretty close connection between financial size and the “rankings” of schools. Those privates that have long had the most resources have the most resources to attract faculty, build facilities, and market to students and alumni, retaining their status at the top. But that obscures the fact that individual pockets of excellence may lie outside the top schools. The top program in a particular field is not always at a top 10 school.

The prestige of state flagships is tied to the size of the state, and therefore the budget that can concentrated on a flagship. None of the state schools that are typically considered in the top group are in small states (by population, not acreage). And a large state can more easily skim the cream of students and concentrate them at a big flagship, while still having many “mediocre” institutions on the side. Does that mean that the experience of a typical student at a smaller state flagship is necessarily worse? No, only that it is less “prestigious”.

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