<p>To be perfectly honest, I’m not really interested in your “point”. I simply want to know the names of the two public universities where you found the quality of the undergrad education to be comparable to the low standards (your opinion) set by Swarthmore. That’s all. I would like to be able to recommend these two, presumably high value, institutions. I suspect you are reluctant to name them because readers would conclude that you are simply blowing hot air comparing them to Swarthmore.</p>
<p>I understand perfectly well the semantic game you are playing about the TA’s not “teaching” courses. You are also playing a semantics game about professors, too. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that there aren’t excellent professors at every school in the country, including the most underfunded community college. Heck, there are even great professors at a place like Berkeley with 1000+ seat introductory classes.</p>
<p>interesteddad - i don’t think any of us would mind knowing the answer so long as you will stipulate before hand that this isn’t going to turn into another one of those Swarthmore’s is bigger diatribe’s whereby every marker is in favor of someplace with no public mission except to spend less than 5% of the yearly proceeds of its own money on as few people as possible.</p>
<p>Is that because you’re prejudicial when it comes to Swarthmore and are unwilling to accept information counter to your opinion?</p>
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<p>I don’t see any need to upset them like that.</p>
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<p>What semantic game am I playing? TAs were in no way involved in any of the courses I had. Professors taught them; professors were there at every class, teaching the class, giving lectures, answering questions, heading discussions, handing out exams, and doing everything it is professors do when they teach classes. And then, after the classes, they were generally in their offices, available for students to come by and ask questions, just like the professors at Swarthmore. I don’t know what it is you’re getting at, but I think it’s another example of your presumption making it impossible to accept the reality that someone else has actually experienced. </p>
<p>But, I see you’re making steps here. You’re willing to acknowledge that there are great professors at public universities. Are you willing to take the next step and acknowledge that I had a better teaching experience from a professor at a public university than I did from any professor at Swarthmore, and that, in my opinion, the best professor I had at Swarthmore was a visiting professor from Princeton? After that, you can maybe wrap your head around the idea that I thought just as highly of my professors at public universities as I did of my professors at Swarthmore. I realize these are the subjective judgments of my own experiences, but I’m pretty sure the College Confidential forum about Swarthmore is exactly the right place for a Swarthmore alum to be giving his opinions about his Swarthmore experiences.</p>
<p>Sorry, bud. I’m not going to accept presumption and constant straw man arguments from you and then answer your bolded demands. If anyone is actually interested in knowing because he is interested in matriculating to a non-prestigious public university, I will give him whatever information he wants in a private message. Your request for the names is clearly disingenuous.</p>
<p>As far as this argument is concerned, it may as well be just about any public university because, as I’ve said, they’re not prestigious or even particularly big, and they are in completely different university systems in different parts of the country. There is no reason to think they are exceptional at all, or that I somehow wound up at the nation’s two most anomalously good and underrated universities, but the point is that I had very good academic experiences in the courses I took there, and I would rate the quality of teaching I received as being on par with that which I received at Swarthmore. To me, this confirms the belief I have that the educational experience at Swarthmore is overhyped.</p>
<p>Just as I thought. You claim that two run-of-the-mill public universities offer an undergraduate educational program fully comparable to Swarthmore’s, but then won’t name them. Worth about as much as an “unnamed source” in a newspaper. I knew that you would never back it up. </p>
<p>Now, you want us to believe that any old public university, perhaps even just a regional campus, matches Swarthmore’s undergrad academic experience. I think the readers are quite capable of judging for themselves.</p>
If I said, “University of Wisconsin at Madison” and “University of California at Riverside,” for example, how would this constitute backing anything up? I’m just reporting an opinion based on experience either way. Either way, I am the source, and your insistence of ignoring everything I’ve said and harping on the identities of the university in question is the height of fallacious argument. Is this what they teach at Williams? Oh yeah… we’ve been down this road before (about 20 times). I guess it is.</p>
<p>Even for you, this is a ridiculous approach. If I were to do the same, I would simply ask you to tell us all of the public universities where you took undergraduate classes and how the professors in those compared to your experience as a student at Swarthmore. Oh, wait…</p>
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<p>This is another straw man. Please quote where I said these universities match Swarthmore’s undergraduate academic experience. You can’t, because I didn’t. All I said is that the quality of instruction I received at other institutions was just as good as that which I received at Swarthmore. My peers were not as high caliber in the public universities, though, so the total undergraduate academic experience was not as good, as a lot of learning takes place outside the classroom in discussions with peers. </p>
<p>As I’ve said before, I was underwhelmed by my professors at Swarthmore, possibly because my expectations were too high (thanks to people like you incessantly trumpeting their greatness). Taking classes at both Swarthmore and public universities was a massive reality check for me, because I came to understand that there was more variance within an institution in terms of professor quality than there was between the average level of professor quality from one institution to the next. This is a subtle point that I think a lot of high school students don’t appreciate when they’re preparing to go to college.</p>
<p>Indeed, I hope the readers are capable of judging for themselves, because the invalidity of your position in this discussion should be more than a little transparent to anyone even remotely considering Swarthmore.</p>
<p>No, there is grade inflation at Swarthmore, just like there is almost everywhere. My point is that law schools in America used to make an adjustment to a Swarthmore graduate’s GPA that would effectively raise it so as to compensate for the academic rigor and difficulty of Swarthmore. So, perhaps a 3.7 at Swarthmore was considered as good as a 4.0 at Purdue, or something. This practice of GPA adjustments by law school admissions personnel, however, is no longer in place. Students from many other elite schools would have their GPA adjusted upwards, and students from some notoriously non-rigorous schools would have their GPAs adjusted downwards. Obviously, this sort of practice is questionable, and that’s ostensibly why it was ultimately stopped.</p>
<p>I don’t think that A.E. is saying that Swarthmore is worse academically than the universities where he took classes. He’s just saying that there are very good professors at places where you wouldn’t expect, some even better than those at Swarthmore, where you would expect.</p>
<p>I agree with A.E. that it is misleading to generalize by saying that at Swarthmore, all the professors care about you and have all the best teachers, whereas in the big universities, the professors care mostly about research and are mostly bad. For example, when I was taking multivariable calculus, I also watched free online lectures from MIT, and the MIT professor, supposedly not caring about students, was better than my Swarthmore professor was. The MIT professor, Denis Auroux, simply had the gift of good rhetoric, while Professor Hunter, although certainly devoted to teaching, wasn’t a very good teacher. </p>
<p>Another example: Harvard has been denounced as a school where teaching is subordinated to research. That’s what Professor Ward of the psychology department told me when I visited. He got an undergraduate degree from Harvard and said, no, Harvard isn’t that great for undergrad–I know from experience. That may be true, but it hasn’t stopped my friend RH – a bright girl who wants to become a scientist, who took the most advanced maths and physics courses and took online classes at Stanford after she finished the ones at the high school, who got into Stanford and MIT and lots of other top colleges, and who expects excellence in academics – from saying that Harvard was “everything I was looking for in a college.”</p>
<p>My examples, like A.E.'s experiences, are not suggesting that Harvard or MIT has better academics than Swarthmore does. But I think a lot of people are told than academics sucks in the big universities. </p>
<p>By the way, such notions are only further aggravated when students and professors say, “Only at Swarthmore can so and so happen,” or “Only at Swarthmore will you be able to have dinner with your professors.” Nonsense!</p>
<p>I don’t know about AE’s expectations, but I’ve always expected to find excellent professors at every college and university in the country. I’ve never made the claim that Swarthmore is the only school with good professors or the only school without some duds. I think, as a point of fact, that Swarthmore has its share of excellent professors, but that has little to do with why I state that there is no better undergrad academic experience in the country than Swarthmore offers and that few schools can even come close. There are many, many factors involved, not the least of which is the degree of engagement on in a shared learning community by the faculty, the administration, and the students.</p>
<p>Oh, and btw, I have two close relatives who have been on the faculty at one of the two universities A.E. just mentioned. The stories they could tell about what it’s like teaching in the highly-bureaucratic environment of a state university. They would laugh at anyone suggesting that the overall undergrad academic experience holds a candle to that of a small high-end liberal arts college with an 8-1 student faculty ratio, every academic support function under the sun, and a million dollar per student endowment. That is not to say they aren’t excellent teachers (both are very highly rated on the professor rating site) or that they don’t teach an occasional highly-motivated student.</p>
<p>There have been/are several Swarthmore parents on this site who are tenured professors and/or administrators at public universities. Ask them about Swarthmore’s undergrad academic experience.</p>
<p>My expectations were, unfortunately, inflated on account of the elite academic hype machine and the susceptibility of youth. Ultimately, you never went to Swarthmore, so you don’t really know what you’re talking about. All you have is second-hand knowledge. Having gone to Swarthmore and experienced its positive and negative qualities (and those of three other undergraduate institutions), it never ceases to befuddle me how you can be so rabid in your idolization of the place. But, whatever. To each his own.</p>
<p>I’m just not that impressed.</p>
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<p>Oh, and btw, I’ve never been to either of those places. I figured you would just use it as yet another window of opportunity to cite endowment per student figures and speak for other people… you know, the same rhetoric you spout in every single thread you get involved in. But, thanks for proving my point that the identity of the universities in question doesn’t matter. You will be there with your “two relatives” and endowment figures regardless of which ones I list. On a related note, some places do a lot more with a lot less. You should maybe look into Moneyball for an interesting discussion of doing more with less.</p>
<p>That said, continuing to drum up its endowment and publish big numbers should be a priority for Swarthmore, because it ultimately helps them draw in high caliber students, which is pretty much the only thing Swarthmore really has going for it that makes it decidedly superior to less-esteemed institutions (well, that and the nice campus). The elite student body is about 90% of the value of going to Swarthmore. And, of course, for any elite institution.</p>
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<p>Right, because parents are such a great source solid, unbiased information about Swarthmore. Thanks for the tip, guy, but I’m OK on Swarthmore knowledge.</p>
<p>Sounds to me that “peer mentoring” of writing is sort of Junior TAs doing a rather important task that would better be done by professors. Or real TAs.</p>
<p>This is true, but it’s also quite standard for an undergraduate writing center. One advantage to university writing centers is that the “peers” or “mentors” or whatever they’re called at any given place are often students in the MFA or English graduate programs as opposed to undergraduate upperclassmen. I don’t think it makes much of a difference, though. I don’t know of any place with a writing center entirely staffed by professors. That would be great and all, but it seems like an unrealistic expectation for any institution. Besides which, there are always office hours for that.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why interesteddad makes such a fuss over the writing center. In my time at Swarthmore, I knew few students who went there without being forced.</p>
<p>My daughter is very interested in Swarthmore, so I called about financial aid/merit scholarships. Funny how a single phone call can make such a big impact. The admissions person was so snotty and unhelpful that in the course of 5 minutes I went from about-to-book-a-flight-to-Pennsylvania to absolutely-no-way would I ever give Swarthmore a dime, much less my child! I know the Class of 2010 is huge, but we parents and our kids deserve to be treated as something more than nuisances.</p>
<p>Sorry to hear that, kroe. Swarthmore is advertising their #1 ranking in the Princeton Review survey of students on how satisfied they are with their financial aid. Essentially all financial aid at Swarthmore is need based – there are no merit scholarships other than a very few Regional McCabe scholarships for eligible students from the Delmarva Peninsula and 3 counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Swarthmore’s 2008-09 Common Data Set shows that 1 incoming first year student was awarded a non-need scholarship. In the entire student body there were 12 students with non-need based scholarships.</p>