<p>Im going to be applying to colleges this year, and for a long time now, Stanford has been one of my top 3 choices. I'm currently planning on applying SCEA, and will major in science or engineering, prbly engineering. However, I just read a review from studentsreview.com that has really shocked me.</p>
<p>"I went to Stanford as an Undergraduate in the late 1990's, majoring in one of the engineering departments... </p>
<p>And it wasn't worth it. I view my diploma as a receipt, but nothing more. It's not as marketable as some propagandists would like you to believe. In fact, during this past summer's graduation ceremony, a number of students actually spelled out the word "Unemployed!" with pillows laid down on the football field, visible for all to see. </p>
<p>Let me give you another example. For those of you who don't know, Donald Knuth is known in the academic community as the "Father of Computer Science," and has been at Stanford since the late 1960's. He's well known for writing the "Bible" of computer science, "The Art of Computer Programming". </p>
<p>Yet even though I took over half-a-dozen core courses in Computer Science at Stanford, I never ONCE heard the name Donald Knuth, I never SAW the guy in person (or even in a photograph until I looked on his website many years after I graduated), and I have never read his books. "The Art of Computer Programming" books were never part of the curriculum. </p>
<p>But that's typical of Stanford: Pay a bunch of professors a lot of money to do very little teaching. In fact, professors generally have to teach only one-quarter (10 weeks total) of classes a year, and that's not even a full ten week period, because the lectures last all of 3 hours TOTAL in the week, and usually a couple of office hours placed at the most inconvenient times. This means that students are paying professors to devote 20% of a typical 40-hour work week to undergraduate matters, with the remaining 80% left to their own discretion. And for many professors, this schedule is in effect for only about 20% of the year (10 weeks out of 52 weeks in a year); the remaining 80% of the year is left to their discretion, such as doing research, consulting to other companies, doing lectures at other campuses, or running their own companies. (A rare handful of professors do teach for two quarters.) To add insult to injury, I had professors who skipped out on their office hours. </p>
<p>A Stanford professor named Tom Campbell (Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago, PhD Harvard) actually served for five full terms in the House of Representatives of the United States Congress while simultaneously receiving his salary from Stanford. He spent so little time on the Stanford campus that some people started to get seriously upset. Critics charged that he was exploiting Stanford's flexibility, while advocates argued that he was increasing the visibility of Stanford and thus enhancing its reputation. After twenty years at Stanford, Campbell recently became the Dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley! Thanks Tom! </p>
<p>Most professors don't grade papers, and leave it to the Teaching Assistants. This is like writing code without a computer in front of you, and never bothering to run the program on ANY computer. How do you know if your program works? How do the professors know if their teaching is any good? How many of Stanford's Nobel Prize winning faculty attended Stanford as an undergraduate? I don't think a single one. </p>
<p>Most of the techie-Teaching Assistants didn't go to Stanford either. I had guys from Purdue, UCLA, Dartmouth, Amherst, U. of Maryland, U. of Texas, and of course, the ubiquitous University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Several profs got their undergrad degrees from Berkeley. </p>
<p>The professors always view themselves as RESEARCHERS first, and teachers a distant third or fourth -- if at all. If you look at the Stanford's "Courses and Degrees", which is a catalog that lists the courses being offered for a particular school year, you will see that many classes are taught by "Staff". No, "Staff" is not the name of a professor, but a euphemism for "somebody who might be associated somehow to our department, such as a graduate student, and who may or may not have ever taught a class before, and who may or may not have any training in how to teach." Many of my classes were taught by Staff. I recently found out that the Staff instructor for an important core class, spanning two-quarters (20 weeks), had not even earned a Master's degree at the time he was teaching! He was a graduate student who only had a Bachelor's degree. He had practically zero teaching experience, and it showed. The poor quality of that class wasn't just my imagination, as that class has since been discontinued and is no longer offered, and that guy doesn't teach anymore anywhere in the world. But such vindication is small consolation. It was a waste of money and time that can never be recovered. Other core classes have even been taught by currently-matriculated UNDER-graduates. It amazes me that Stanford gets away with it, especially when most HIGH SCHOOLS require that their teachers have a master's degree and have passed state licensing exams. </p>
<p>In fact, some classes are so bad that Stanford undergraduates actually take courses at the nearby De Anza Community College and Foothill Community College. That's right: Community Colleges. Don't laugh -- if you read the book on the history of the Apple Macintosh, "Insanely Great", you'll find that the hardware engineer attended one of those community colleges (I don't remember which). And in my Freshman year, I knew a political science major who transferred from a California junior college into Stanford. As an out-of-stater, I was shocked, although I have learned that California's junior colleges have a higher standard than the rest of the nation. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder: Why am I paying so much money? </p>
<p>"Sophomore Slump" occurs after the euphoria of Frosh year. You enter as a sophomore and realize "the honeymoon is over", i.e. that your professors aren't necessarily gifted in communicating their knowledge (one time literally a guy "taught" numerical analysis on computers by reading from a textbook!), and that the classes are bloated with too many students (I never had less than 50 in a class, so forget the 7:1 student teacher ratio published in US News and World Report's annual college survey). </p>
<p>Years after I graduated, ex-president Gerhard Casper -- being a great guy who experienced similar problems during his undergraduate years in Germany -- tried to rectify the problem by creating Freshmen and Sophomore Seminars, to encourage faculty-student interaction and small class sizes. But the number of open slots for students is extremely limited, and most professors don't participate. Thus the vast majority of undergraduates miss out with one-on-one faculty contact, even though 100% of the student body pays the full $30,000/year tuition. And some of the seminars are of questionable quality. Nobel Prize winning physicist, Doug Osheroff (BS Caltech, PhD Cornell) taught a freshman seminar in...amateur photography. What a joke! Talk about taking advantage of the system. </p>
<p>And don't get me started on the undergraduate "advising system", which is also a joke! Currently 78% of the faculty do NOT participate in advising undergrads. Many of the remaining advisers are upperclassmen trying to pad their resumes, or graduate students who are alumni of other universities and who are also trying to pad their resumes . You will not get good advice from these people, because they do not really have a track record to demonstrate the validity of their advice. It is the "blind leading the blind." My own experience was a nightmare. Once I had declared my major, I chose a particular faculty member to be my adviser; he was the only guy in my field of interest. When I went to get my study list signed by him, he flatly refused, saying "I don't advise undergraduates." I was furious, but what could I do? I ended up signing the remainder of my study lists on my own. </p>
<p>How do Stanford's engineering students fare when pitted against other students in competition? Not well. "NATCAR" is a contest for California electrical engineering students, in which radio controlled cars race around a track. Look at the results and search for the Stanford name: <a href="http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/natcar/Race_Results.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/natcar/Race_Results.html</a>.
As you can see, Stanford placed 10th in 2001, but is otherwise a no-show. In at least one of the years, the Stanford team tried-- but failed -- to get a car running. It looks like they have now simply abandoned the idea of entering. </p>
<p>Stanford's marketing department has used deceptive tactics to imply that Stanford has produced successful people. Look beneath the superficialities, and you'll find that the overwhelming majority did not attend Stanford as an undergraduate, and sometimes, not even as a graduate student. All of the following people have been used in Stanford marketing literature and press releases:</p>