<p>It seems entirely possible that you missed the inside joke…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In consideration of how many Chinese immigrants and citizens of Chinese descent live in California, how important prestige is to Chinese persons, and how some Chinese women feel pressured to conform to an Anglicized notion of beauty, it’s a perfect marketing strategy.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m not sure that logic holds, for the fact is, many students - probably most - do not actually pursue careers that are closely aligned with what they majored in as undergrads. For example, around 40-50% of MIT undergrads who enter the workforce take jobs not in technology or science, but rather in finance and management consulting, career paths that are direct analogues of only the Sloan management major and (less directly) the econ major. </p>
<p>The lack of a direct connection between career and undergrad major is most prominent in the humanities and social sciences, which MIT admittedly has few. So consider Berkeley, a high-prestige school that graduates boatloads of humanities and social science majors. Poli-sci is the 2nd most popular major at Berkeley (after Molecular & Cellular Biology), yet remarkably few poli-sci undergrads actually take jobs that are clearly related to political science. Instead, in addition to the requisite management consultants & investment bankers, we have one who became a store manager for Abercrombie & Fitch, and one who became a Southwest Airlines flight attendant. It’s not at all clear what those jobs have to do with political science. Similarly, remarkably few Berkeley English grads embark upon careers that are related to that major. Rather, the job choices span an eclectic mix that include being a financial advisor at Morgan Stanley, barista at Starbucks, and even working for the Lumber Baron as a lumber puller(!). It’s unclear what any of those jobs has to do with the English major. </p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/PolSci.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/PolSci.stm</a>
<a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/English.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/English.stm</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am well aware that Pizzagirl is a consultant, so I believe I understood the inside joke just fine. I simply called and raised the joke.</p>
<p>sakky, my point is that college should not be a pre-professional experience. I know my view is sacreligious in today’s world, but I continue to encourage both of my college kids to study what they want, regardless of the career consequences. After college, first jobs and graduate programs will help define career goals. I am disheartened by the current trends that seem to require young folks to “grow up” way too young. How can a 17 year-old know that MIT or Cal Tech is the right place? Why not go to Swarthmore or Penn (to pick two random examples), where you will spend your time with fellow travelers who are still trying to “figure it out” at age 18, or 19, or 20?</p>
<p>I am friends with a young MIT engineering graduate who has never had an engineering job. She is an administrator with a not-for-profit. Her choice of MIT has not hurt her, but she chose engineering because “that’s what I initially thought I wanted, and besides everyone seems to do engineering.” Perhaps at Brown (another random example), she would have found peers to support a different major choice?</p>
<p>From CT</p>
<p>Harvard/Yale
Princeton/Stanford/MIT
Columbia
Brown/Dartmouth/Penn
Duke
Cornell/Chicago
Georgetown/Notre Dame/LACs</p>
<p>Everything else</p>
<p>To be honest, my view would put Duke on par with Columbia, but if you asked the average Joe, that would probably be it. And I am being as honest as possible, because to me, again, Duke should be way higher up, but I am a little biased.</p>
<p>hawkette, I’ve probably visited more US campuses than you have, but let’s not talk about that. And, my being Italian does not make me less knowledgeable about some schools in the US particularly those top ones. I have applied and accepted to 3 ivies (Columbia, Penn, Cornell). Have you? I have applied and accepted at Duke, Rice, Mudd and Bowdoin. Have you? </p>
<p>The truth is I don’t need to be an American to actually know that Berkeley is superior to Emory or Vandi or Vandy or whatever it’s named, in the same way that you don’t have to study in England to know more about UK universities than I do. We are not talking about the US education stem here. We’re plainly talking about Berkeley/Michigan vs Emory/Vandy. </p>
<p>
You keep on saying college experience but I don’t think you understand that. Why is college experience at Emory or Vandy better than at Berkeley’s? Berkeley students are diverse and the vast majority of them are proud to have gone to that school. How is the college experience there any less than better than at Vandy or Emory? Have you actually enrolled in any of these schools? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Like I said, what good is a school without prestige? How can a school with no prestige market their students to top employers? How proud would the students be of their alma mater school if their school isn’t prestigious? What is Harvard, for example, without the Harvard prestige? That doesn’t make it Harvard anymore, does it? You have undermined the value of prestige in the school and overvalued student-to-faculty ratio and so on. There were your faults have began. </p>
<p>Prestige is a product of excellent education. This you failed to understand miserably. For how can a school become prestigious if it has a so-so academic standard? There are a lot of schools across American that have very low ratio of student-to-faculty but can’t send their graduates to top paying jobs because the top employers haven’t heard of them. What good would that be to a paying student then? Prestige matters a lot whether you like it or not. HYPSM and Oxbridge are prestigious that’s why they attract the best students around the world. Mind you, they are not by any means the only excellent schools in the world. I can guarantee you the schools like Peking, Tokyo U, Imperial College, IIT, IIM, NUS to name a few are just as excellent, but they can’t attract the best students because they’re aren’t as prestigious. The same is true in America where the top employers have heard and hired graduates from Berkeley and Michigan but rarely from schools like Emory and Vandy. The payscale.com survey can back up my assertion. Your claims, on the other hand, are purely based in your wild imagination. Your reasons for saying Emory and Vandy are superior to Berkeley and Michigan are trivial at best. Faculty-to-student ratio isn’t that important when it falls in the same bracket. Like I’ve asked you, what’s the difference in a class with 6 students to a class with 7 students? You did not answer that. Having one or two lesser students in a class doesn’t make that class superior in terms of learning. Prestige does, however. Emory and Vandy are prestigious. However, they are not in any way as prestigious as Michigan, more so Berkeley. Wake up and face the real world. Top employers don’t get talents from those schools as much as they do from Michigan and Berkeley.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>To be clear, I’m not saying prestige is everything to a school. All I’m saying is that, prestige is very important to a school, or more so than faculty-to-student ratio is, because, let’s face it, prestige is what the students are paying for, not purely the education itself that the schools provide. It’s prestige (aside from knowledge) that will make the student win those top jobs. And, since when was Emory and Vandy considered a top school by the top employers in NY, West Coast, Chicago and Boston areas? </p>
<p>The problem with hawkette’s assertion is that, there’s a minor difference between Emory/Vandy and Berkeley in terms of faculty-to-student ratio that it makes her argument trivial. Based on her data, there’s just a difference of 2 or 3 persons per class. How would that make Berkeley an inferior school to Emory/Vandy as a whole? She missed the point that a school should be measured by many factors, and I think faculty-to-student ratio is the least factor to consider. And, should she insist that to be included, it must be measured on a bracket. For example, 1:10 to 1:15 is one bracket. 1:20 to 1:30 is another bracket.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you aware that not everyone thinks this way? For my own D, student-faculty ratio was among the very most important deciding factors. She was also quite interested in “the education itself” – something that apparently is not high on your list of important features of a college.</p>
<p>hawkette says to RML: </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I suspect most Americans have never heard of these schools either…</p>
<p>Norfolk, VA</p>
<ol>
<li>HYP</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>MIT
<if i=“” could,=“” would=“” insert=“” uva=“” and=“” william=“” mary=“” here=“”></if></li>
<li>Duke/Notre Dame</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Hopkins</li>
<li>Cornell/Emory</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>CalTech, Penn, Columbia, Chicago, Northwestern, WashU, Rice, Vanderbuilt (Nobody knows who the heck these are. No joke.)</li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m not saying faculty-to-student ratio isn’t important. I just don’t think it’s that important that it would supersede the importance of prestige especially when we are talking about a minor ratio difference. </p>
<p>For example, Pomona has smaller faculty-to-student ratio than Stanford. Would you rather go for Pomona than Stanford because of the lower ratio registered at Pomona?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Her statement was ridiculous. I applied and accepted at some of those schools she mentioned. I doubt if she was accepted at those schools, otoh.</p>
<p>^ You mean, hawkeTTTe?</p>
<p>^ yes. 10 char</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This depends on what kinds of jobs we’re considering.
Investment Banking? Yes, maybe in a field like that, prestige counts for a lot.</p>
<p>Medicine? Academia? Engineering or Architecture? Rocket Science? Different picture.
If you compare a number of small schools (Swat, Reed, Pomona, Grinnell, Carleton, even Earlham or Beloit) with larger and better known institutions for per capita Ph.D. production, the hippy-dippy little LACs compete quite well. For top med school admissions, Harvard or Yale do very well, as you’d expect. But the LACs tend to perform well too, even though they do not have any advantage that might accrue by applying to ones own med school.</p>
<p>jasmaree and andy_college09 – thanks for keeping the thread on track. :)</p>
<p>RML,
Where do I begin???</p>
<p>After Oxford and Cambridge, the vast majority of Americans would be hard pressed to name any UK colleges, much less have an informed view about which are stronger. </p>
<p>Because of the USA’s place in the world and the broadly held view that American education is the best in the world (especially for grad school), there probably is a higher awareness among non-Americans about the names of American universities (I always find it funny to see Europeans walking around Paris wearing a University of Baltimore t-shirt…LOL). But the depth of this knowledge of persons in Italy or the UK or France or almost any non-US country would almost certainly be decidedly less than anyone living in the USA and working in a senior position in corporate America. Maybe you’re the exception to this, but if so, you’re rare. </p>
<p>Re your comparisons of Emory/Vanderbilt (not sure why you’re picking on them) vs UC Berkeley/U Michigan, I have little doubt that for undergraduate education, Emory/Vanderbilt are stronger places. Probably not for Engineering (Emory hasn’t got an E-school and Vandy is not as highly regarded as UCB or U Michigan), but otherwise, I’d probably counsel students to select Emory or Vandy or several other terrific schools. Why?</p>
<p>There are plenty of reasons, but I try to use a framework that is far, far, far more than student-faculty ratios (please stop misrepresenting what is important to me!). The initial factors that I consider and compare would be the following: </p>
<ol>
<li> Strength of student body (stronger is preferred)</li>
<li> Size of classroom (smaller is preferred)</li>
<li> Quality of instruction (teaching by profs is preferred to teaching by TAs)</li>
<li> Institutional Resources and a willingness to spend them on undergraduates</li>
</ol>
<p>Let’s look at some key data points, several of which are drawn from the most recently released Common Data Sets (2009-10 for Emory, Vanderbilt and U Michigan and 2008-09 for UC Berkeley) and see how these four schools compare. </p>
<p>And let me preface this data by saying that I think a student can have a good experience at any of these colleges.</p>
<p>O B J E C T I V E D A T A </p>
<p><strong><em>STUDENT BODY</em></strong> </p>
<p>UNDERGRADUATE ENROLLMENT<br>
6,980 Emory
26,208 U Michigan
25,151 UC Berkeley
6,794 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>NUMBER OF IS STUDENTS (% OF STUDENTS)<br>
4886 (30%) Emory
18,084 (69%) U Michigan
23,390 (93%) UC Berkeley
1087 (16%) Vanderbilt</p>
<p><strong><em>GRADUATION RATES</em></strong> </p>
<p>-% OF STUDENTS WHO GRADUATE IN 4 YEARS:<br>
84% Emory
70% U Michigan
64% UC Berkeley
84% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>-% OF STUDENTS WHO GRADUATE IN 6 YEARS:<br>
90.0% Emory
88.0% U Michigan
89.6% UC Berkeley
91.0% Vanderbilt</p>
<p><strong><em>STUDENT STRENGTH</em></strong> </p>
<p>-TOTAL SAT/ACT RANGE (Middle 50%)<br>
1300-1480 Emory
1230-1430 U Michigan
1210-1470 UC Berkeley
1350-1520 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>SAT CRITICAL READING RANGE (Middle 50%)<br>
640-730 Emory
590-690 U Michigan
580-710 UC Berkeley
660-750 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>% OF STUDENTS SCORING 700+ ON SAT CRITICAL READING<br>
44% Emory
24% U Michigan
29% UC Berkeley
61% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>SAT MATH RANGE (Middle 50%)<br>
660-750 Emory
640-740 U Michigan
630-760 UC Berkeley
690-770 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>% OF STUDENTS SCORING 700+ ON SAT MATH<br>
58% Emory
47% U Michigan
51% UC Berkeley
71% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>ACT RANGE (Middle 50%)<br>
29-33 Emory
27-31 U Michigan
na UC Berkeley
30-34 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>% OF STUDENTS SCORING 30+ ON ACT<br>
83% Emory
46% U Michigan
na UC Berkeley
83% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>-% OF STUDENTS RANKING IN TOP 10% IN HS CLASS<br>
85% Emory
92% U Michigan
98% UC Berkeley
86% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>-% ACCEPTANCE RATE<br>
29.7% Emory
50.0% U Michigan
21.6% UC Berkeley
20.1% Vanderbilt</p>
<p><strong><em>SIZE OF THE CLASSROOM</em></strong> </p>
<p>-% OF CLASSES WITH <20 STUDENTS<br>
64.0% Emory
45.9% U Michigan
60.3% UC Berkeley
64.6% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>% OF CLASSES WITH 20-50 STUDENTS<br>
27.0% Emory
36.3% U Michigan
24.6% UC Berkeley
27.7% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>-% OF CLASSES WITH 50+ STUDENTS<br>
8.9% Emory
17.8% U Michigan
15.1% UC Berkeley
7.6% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>-FACULTY/STUDENT RATIO<br>
7/1 Emory
15/1 U Michigan
15/1 UC Berkeley
8/1 Vanderbilt</p>
<p><strong><em>COST & INSTITUTIONAL RESOURCES & WILLINGNESS TO SPEND ON UNDERGRADS</em></strong> </p>
<p>COST (Tuition & Fees) FOR OOS & IS<br>
$38,036 Emory
$34,230/$11,738 U Michigan
$30,022/$8352 UC Berkeley
$38,579 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>USNWR 2009 FINANCIAL RESOURCES RANK<br>
18th Emory
37th U Michigan
43rd UC Berkeley
15th Vanderbilt</p>
<p>ENDOWMENT SIZE (PER CAPITA undergrad and grad)<br>
$432,417 Emory
$181,883 U Michigan
$86,722 UC Berkeley
$289,010 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>% OF STUDENTS WHO RECEIVE FINANCIAL AID<br>
41% Emory
50% U Michigan
46% UC Berkeley
42% Vanderbilt</p>
<p>% OF FINANCIAL NEED MET & AVERAGE SIZE OF PACKAGE<br>
100%, $29,334 Emory
90%, $8959 U Michigan
88%, $18,628 UC Berkeley
100%, $37,890 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>% OF STUDENTS WHO GRADUATE WITH DEBT & AVERAGE AMOUNT OF DEBT AT GRADUATION<br>
$23,181 Emory
$25,586 U Michigan
$14,291 UC Berkeley
$19,839 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>S U B J E C T I V E D A T A—QUALITY OF INSTRUCTION </p>
<p>USNWR PEER ASSESSMENT SCORE<br>
4 Emory
4.4 U Michigan
4.7 UC Berkeley
4 Vanderbilt</p>
<p>COLLEGE PR.OW…LE R ACADEMICS GRADES<br>
A Emory
B+ U Michigan
A- UC Berkeley
A Vanderbilt</p>
<p>This information is a starting point, but it does provide some important clues on making judgements about student strength, size of classroom, quality of teaching and institutional resources.</p>
<p>Re your statements about pride in going to a school, do you really think that UC Berkeley or U Michigan are the only schools where its students are proud to have gone there? Are you kidding? I think kids (and many alumni) from most colleges feel this way, including many that are waaaaaaaay down the prestige list. </p>
<p>Alumni Giving is a flawed metric for measuring this, but it’s one way that some folks like to look at this (do you have another suggestion?). I won’t even bother comparing UCB/UM to the private universe, but compare to comps like U Virginia and U North Carolina. It’s not very close. </p>
<p>13.1% UC Berkeley
17.3% U Michigan
23.1% U Virginia
22.3% U North Carolina</p>
<p>As far as relative prestige with employers, this will vary as you move around the USA. In the SE, Emory and Vanderbilt will definitely be stronger than either UC Berkeley or U Michigan. The reverse would probably be true in the home regions of the publics. Elsewhere, all are not leading players and would lose to the locals. Is that really news? Not to me, it’s not. </p>
<p>As I previously noted, we value different things, but I think we also differ in how we compare colleges. I have a process that I follow that allows for statistical comparisons across regions and across the country. For you, other than judging a school by prestige as voted on by unknown academics, I’m not sure how you judge that School A should be considered stronger than School B.</p>