Superstar faculty a waste for undergrads?

College Search & Selection
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<p>It seems that most (but certainly not ALL) of the academic superstars (Nobel Prize winners, top researchers, etc.) teach at universities that have very prominent grad schools...often with more grad students than undergrads. Included would be universities such as Harvard, Berkeley, CalTech, NYU, Columbia, Chicago, Michigan, Penn, and MIT. These are universities that are often named as places where undergrads don't get as much attention as they might at schools with less-prominent faculties where the undergrads play a more prominent role than grad students and research. </p>

<p>There also seems to be little dispute that undergrads can get as good an education at the top liberal arts colleges (Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, Carlton, Davidson, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Wellesley, Smith, etc.) than they can at the schools with the academic superstars (Harvard, Berkeley, et al).</p>

<p>My question is this: if the top LACs seem to prove that (at the undergrad level) academic superstars aren't necessary to get a first-rate education, why do people assume that the "lesser" excellent medium-smallish universities (Rochester, Notre Dame, Tulane, Tufts, William and Mary, SMU, Wake Forest) can't give as good an education as well? Their smallish grad populations relative to their undergrad populations seem to ensure that undergrads will not get lost in the shuffle, making the undergrad experience at them more similar to LACs than research-oriented universities.</p>

<p>It boils down to this: the professors at the likes of Tufts, Notre Dame, Tulane, William and Mary are apparently not as cutting-edge and prominent as those at the big research universities, but aren't they every bit as good as those at the top liberal arts colleges?</p>

<p>Also relevant here is the question of just how necessary is it to be cutting edge when teaching undergrads...you don't need a 12" drill bit to drill a 6" hole....</p>

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<p>i had a world renowned researcher grade my research paper once, it was life changing. </p>

<p>if it was just the knowledge or material itself, you could get any grad student to teach it, i had high school teachers who had PhDs who is more than qualified to teach in college courses.</p>

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<p>Are you saying that the experience gained from being a “super star” research professor makes an education at the top research Us much better than at the top LACs, kb10? Not trying to be hostile or put words in your mouth, just wondering.</p>

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<p>it’s whatever floats your boat. some people like the relative anonymity of a large lecture hall; they describe it almost like, “learning by osmosis”, at the feet (as it were) of a well-known person. Other people prefer the mentoring aspect of working closely with a gifted teacher at a small LAC.</p>

<p>What I find unappealing about so-called, “second-tier” research universities is that you very often wind up with neither; the names of the professors are not necessarily jaw-dropping and if by definition they’re chasing HYPSM in the rankings, they won’t always be choosing faculty for their teaching ability either.</p>

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<p>Current research doesn’t concern the content that’s learned in most classes which is why an excellent researcher won’t necessarily make a good teacher. However, the one difference is when you take “special topics” classes toward your senior year (or graduate school). At that point, you can get in on some excellent classes taught by the big shots who are teaching what they actually like doing.</p>

<p>However, to be frank, most big shots don’t teach many classes. Here at Tech, many of the best researchers are able to “buy out” their required teaching time so that they are able to devote 100% of their time to instructing their grad students and doing research, so it’s likely that an undergrad will never know these people exist without some digging. It’s the same way at other prominent research universities as well.</p>

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<p>At Harvard, many world famous Professors (Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, etc) teach undergraduate seminars and Freshman Seminars. It is usually a very rewarding experience for the students.</p>

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<p>I’m glad nobody bashed me for my rather crude simplification of the breadth of prominent colleges in to 3 main types: research universities, liberal arts colleges, and medium-small univeristies which focus on undergrads.</p>

<p>JohnWesley raises a good point, that at the medium/small undergrad-focused universities one can get the WORST of both worlds (faculty that are neither great researchers nor great teachers). My own limited experience was that it was sort of the BEST of both worlds (good researchers who had the time to focus on undergrads). Anybody else have an opinion?</p>

<p>Also, can anybody shed light on what sort of path IN GENERAL the top liberal arts colleges’ professors take? I know they typically get their doctorates from the same top research universities that the top research university profs go to. How do they end up at LAC’s? Do they typically try for tenure-track positions at top research universities and fail? Do they also try for the small/medium size undergrad focused universities and fail? Or do they sometimes start out WANTING to teach at an LAC? I know there are no hard-and-fast answers to these questions. I’m just trying to nail down what IN GENERAL the difference between the faculty at, say, U of Rochester and Middlebury might be, in addition to the general ones JohnWesley pointed out.</p>

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<p>Seminars (unless the term is being used in a form unfamiliar to me) are just collections of guest speakers: their primary motivation is letting students know what’s out there, not actually teaching. Prominent people love talking about what they do, so you’re not going to see a Nobel Prize winner teaching Physics I unless you had Feynman.</p>

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<p>“How do they end up at LAC’s? Do they typically try for tenure-track positions at top research universities and fail? Do they also try for the small/medium size undergrad focused universities and fail? Or do they sometimes start out WANTING to teach at an LAC?”</p>

<p>I don’t think there’s any way to generalize. My experience with newly minted liberal arts PhDs (in physics, English, art history, psychology) is that they apply nationwide and rarely have many choices. Geography often plays a major role in their preferences if they do have alternatives.</p>

<p>gthopeful, the freshman seminars at Harvard are indeed courses, capped at 12 students. And Harvard had a Nobel laureate (Dudley Herschbach) teaching intro chemistry when I was there.</p>

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<p>It goes both ways I think… I had graduate students for lower level classes that were very engaging and extremely competent at what they were teaching.
I have also had PhD’s who were outstanding and definitely motivating.
For core classes it may be a waste, and a great opportunity for the right person who does not have a doctorate yet… but after your core is done you should be with nothing but PhD’s, and hopefully excellent researchers and writers as well.</p>

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<p>Yes, I was referring to courses. Freshman seminars of 5-12 students and undergraduate seminars of 1-15 students.</p>

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<p>"The University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, and Yale University—operate graduate programs that are larger than their undergraduate programs.</p>

<p>Chicago and Hopkins began as graduate-oriented universities. For the others, graduate
programs on this scale have required conscious administrative decisions, the hiring of a
research faculty capable of obtaining high levels of external support, and generous
donations in aid of graduate education from alumni and others.</p>

<p>The niche in which these decisions and capacities converge is evidently small.</p>

<p>Many eminent private institutions, including Brown University, the California Institute of
Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Dartmouth University, Georgetown University, and
Princeton University, have made conscious choices to compete in a more limited way as
research institutions. Presumably this is due to the expense of fielding a large, broadly
competitive research faculty on the foundation of a small, selective undergraduate student
body."</p>

<p><a href=“eScholarship”>eScholarship;

<p>— Graduate oriented schools like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Chicago, MIT embodies what Clark Kerr called the “federal grant university,” as it often tops the nation in federal research and development expenditures. It takes a great deal of leadership and vast amount of resources to become a “research university” because of the resources spent on superstar faculty (which can cost upwards of $300,000 dollars a year for upkeep). Typically, “research universities” tend to rely on federal grants to fuel their research efforts, and since most of the time these federal grants are “peer reviewed”, it is highly competitive to even win and get grant money these days so Superstar faculties help attract and win grants to where it is needed most :)</p>

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<p>In my experience at Tulane as an undergrad, the worst professors were often the professors with the most notable research. My father, who has been in academic medicine for a few decades, has mentioned that the same holds true there as well. I think there’s a general consensus that the odds of finding someone with great teaching ability AND an insatiable appetite for research are very low. That is not to say that great teachers don’t typically have fantastic credentials from fantastic schools, they just have their focus on education and not research. It’s the same reason there’s a DH rule in baseball. Nobody’s perfect.</p>

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<p>I believe that most “academic superstars” at top research universities teach at least one undergraduate class per year. Many top professors also play an active role in supervising undergraduate research (at least in some schools like MIT for example). </p>

<p>On the other hand, although it is true that top LACs produce a large number of future PhD’s, I personally dispute that a LAC education is “as good as” the one you could get at a top research university. Any careful analysis would show that the breadth and depth of classes offered at LAC’s (especially for upper division students) is way below what is offered at research universities. Many LAC departments typically have a very small faculty body, representing a very narrow range of areas of expertise. </p>

<p>Moreover, leaving the “academic superstars” aside, even the junior faculty members (i.e. young assistant/associate professors) at top research universities tend on average to be technically more qualified than LAC instructors, especially older ones who are no longer active in research. That is somewhat predictable as young ambitious new PhD’s who want to build a career in research would normally hesitate to get a job at an institution that does not have a graduate school and would rather stay a few more years as post-docs before securing a tenure-track position. That is particularly true in natural sciences and engineering fields; a LAC job may be more attractive though for arts/humanities graduates. </p>

<p>Overall, I tend to think that the relatively high rate of success of LAC graduates in graduate/professional school and the business/corporate world has to do more with the quality of the student body in the highly selective top colleges and their well-established social/job network than with the quality of the education LAC students receive properly.
I am willing to admit though that some LAC instructors, although technically less qualified than research professors, may excel at teaching properly as, contrary to “academic superstars”, they tend to be “professional teachers” after all. College education however is very different from a High School education and having the “best teacher” for a certain subject, even a lower-division freshman class, is not always better than interacting with someone who might not teach so well, but can give you some further insight on the “bigger picture” which the professional teacher lacks. </p>

<p>Of course, many US students probably disagree (as an international, I admit I have an anti-LAC bias).</p>

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<p>I am not familiar with GaTech, but, as I said, at most top 10 or top 20 engineering schools (MIT, Caltech, Illinois, Michigan, CMU, Cornell, UCLA, Princeton, an so on) “super star professors” (IEEE fellows, winners of major professional society awards, etc.) routinely teach undergraduate classes, at least once a year. That is an experience you won’t get at Harvey Mudd College for example.</p>

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<p>One might consider what those superstar faculty tend to attract: Other scholars who will teach or give lectures or symposia; money, which will help support undergrad programs; prestige, etc. You might never get the opportunity to take a class taught by the superstar (even if they teach undergrads–and some do–that doesn’t mean you’ll get in, or it will fit with your schedule) but will still benefit from their affiliation.</p>

<p>It’s hard to measure, of course–but for the reasons above, I’d really balk at calling it “a waste.”</p>

<p>Wherever any of you end up, there will be lots of opportunities for you to benefit from your college’s best assets, whether that’s a collection of rare books or some superstar faculty. Don’t pass those up. Exhibits, lectures, perfomances–take advantage of them!!</p>

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<p>I found the Abstract for the Phead128 link very interesting.</p>

<p>“Many leaders of public research universities worry about falling behind private research
universities at a time when private university finances have improved dramatically and state
support for higher education has declined. In this paper, I provide grounds for a more
optimistic view of the competitive position of public research universities. I develop two
”business models” for higher education: the public research university model is based on
high volume of enrollments and low cost per student, while the private university model is
based on low volume and high cost. I show that the private model, at its best, generates a
high proportion of future leaders, stronger educational reputations, and leads to the
accumulation of more institutional wealth. However, the public model remains viable and
successful, principally because it typically generates larger faculties. The total societal
contribution of public research universities, as measured by human capital development and
research publication, is greater than that of private universities.”</p>

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<p>Ditto for the University of Chicago. Winners of the university’s highest recognition for excellent undergraduate teaching (the student-nominated Quantrell Award) have included the novelist Norman MacLean (A River Runs Through It), philosopher Richard McKeon, Physicist James Cronin (Nobel Prize 1980), Economist Steven Levitt (John Bates Clark Medalist, 2003), and mathematician L</p>

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<p>“Any careful analysis would show that the breadth and depth of classes offered at LAC’s (especially for upper division students) is way below what is offered at research universities.”</p>

<p>This may be true, but seems mostly irrelevant; LAC students are not heading the PhD stats by taking throw-away classes (assuming the students are taking roughly the same number of total and major classes). The personal mentorship of every LAC student is probably most responsible, especially teaching how to research. One climate is best for apples, another for oranges; there’s no “better” or “as good as.” Students are different, and schools are different; the best fit should be found for all.</p>

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<p>Keep in mind many schools offer alternatives to classes. For example students can work on their own research mentored by a faculty member in that specialization for credit.</p>