<p>It's been a while since I've posted on CC. =)</p>
<p>I thought that thread title would catch more attention than this one The Importance of the Quality of Undergraduate Education. My friend and I were discussing the quality of education between Stanford (or any private, research-focused university) and UWash. This is what he said about it. Tell me what you guys think.</p>
<p>"A Stanford education - what does it mean? I contend that many people apply to Stanford primarily for the ability to say that they have a Stanford education on their resume. My problem with that, really, is that there are people here at Stanford who pay tens of thousands of dollars for tuition, and they are willing to invest that much money so that they can basically say in job interviews, parties, applications, etc, "Hey, I went to Stanford - I must be rich and smart and therefore will automagically have a greater chance of landing a good job position than if I went to a lowly state school!" Since our society places such a high value on education, seeing the name "Stanford University" is likely looked upon more favorably than an education at, say, University of Washington in general. And this is regardless of how well they performed academically. I have seen many people who utterly blow at organic chemistry and yet want to go to med school (hell, two have already asked me to write a letter of recommendation for them). And they will likely have a better chance of getting in because they come from Stanford rather than a state school. And I have a problem with that.</p>
<p>This is not to say that Stanford isn't a good school. It is. Other people (myself included) apply to Stanford because it is famous for providing a good, well-rounded education. I desperately wanted to go to Stanford as an undergraduate, but I don't have obscenely rich parents and am a white middle-class student so I couldn't afford to attend, much to my disappointment. I went to the University of Washington instead because it is also a good school. </p>
<p>One big problem I have with Stanford is that the chemistry department here provides, in my opinion, a terrible undergraduate education program. For instance, it is obvious that offering freshman chemistry in one quarter with no lab and throwing the students into organic chemistry as soon as possible serves to mercilessly weed out the weak students from the program as early as possible. In addition, the attitudes of many of the faculty members here towards undergraduates (and towards education in general) is pretty snarky and elitist, which can only be detrimental towards a student's success in the chemistry department. Furthermore, there are very few opportunities for the undergraduate to really take advantage of (as opposed to biology, which is why William is now a biology major rather than a chemistry one), and most of those opportunities are generally limited to summer research. Last, there are some serious deficiencies in the curriculum here - the lecture courses are decent, I think, but the laboratory courses are extremely poorly thought out, planned, and weak. The organic chemistry labs meet only once a week for four hours, and there isn't an inorganic chemistry lab at all (I don't know how students can call themselves chemistry graduates when they don't even know how to run a vacuum line!). The capacity for the chemistry department to even run a laboratory course is quite limited as all of the horribly outdated experiments are carried out on a lab table rather than in a hood, and there are less than 20 undergraduate labs, which is a pretty sorry state for a chemistry department at such a prestigious school. In general, I am very disappointed in the chemistry undergraduate education program here - I can probably say that the education I got at UW was better than the one the chem majors get here. As for the graduate program - it caters very nicely to the researchers here, but it caters quite poorly to those who are more interested in becoming teachers of chemistry because all of the TA opportunities are only offered in the first year. So how can Stanford possibly proudly support its chemistry department when it is in such a dismal state? </p>
<p>Another issue I have with Stanford is the specter of grade inflation. There is grade inflation everywhere, but the Stanford course curriculum has pretty much no oversight over consistency of grade assignments. For instance, most courses here at Stanford average out to a B, but there is one notable exception: Professor Trost's 131 course curves to a C average (which is what all courses should curve to anyway, in my opinion). So, my question is why Stanford curves to a higher average than a state school. William has an argument for this, but it doesn't make sense to me so I can't repeat it. My argument is this - the standards of schools everywhere should be consistent, and the reputation of Stanford as a school should speak for itself - a B at Stanford is likely much more difficult to earn than a B at a state school, for instance, if the averages are consistent. But there is no way to gauge a student's potential if the average at a Stanford chemistry course is a B whereas the average at the same course at UW is 2.6-2.8 (C, C+). If the student got a B at Stanford, that makes the student seem a lot smarter than if the same student got a B at UW - but, since a B is the average at Stanford, the student could very well have earned a C, it being the average at UW, for the same amount of work.</p>
<p>So, because of those three issues I pointed out, I have an issue with people who automatically think that a Stanford alumnus should be looked on more favorably than an alumnus from a less well-known (or even non-Ivy League) school. I agree with William, though, that Stanford has many excellent departments and deserves the reputation that it has. I think that a Stanford education is mostly worth the money that students spend for it (except if you're a chemistry major) because it offers a much broader range of disciplines to choose from and has a small class size for humanities courses, which is great. There are many, many opportunities here to take advantage of as a Stanford student, and I wish I had those opportunities as an UW student. I have seen some great professors here (mostly outside the department, but there are a couple of good apples in here) in my time here, and I have an excellent research advisor, which seems to be a rarity these days. But not everything about Stanford is as good as people claim."</p>