<p>The problem with your argument is that not everyone WANTS to be a big shot i-banker or politician. Telling people to go to Columbia over Duke because of this may be disingenuous, particularly if someone doesn't like Columbia's campus or "feel." That same person may be better off in the smaller "Brown/Dartmouth-like" school, or on the West Coast (I know, I know, what do us Californians know about prestige?)</p>
<p>Honestly, I would have not enjoyed four years at Cornell. Too cold. I gladly gave up prestige for an enjoyable experience. Does that mean that my i-banking career is over? God, I hope so.</p>
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Does that mean that my i-banking career is over? God, I hope so.
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<p>:) Very funny.</p>
<p>Agree about the "feel" of Columbia. We visited the campus a few years ago. I loved it (then again, I'm old); my daughter (who was the one actually looking at schools) hated both the look and feel of it-- from the get-go.</p>
<p>Brown and Cornell are both great schools...it sounds like you are insinuating its an insult to Duke to be compared to them.</p>
<p>And saying Columbia is as strong as Wharton while stronger than the rest of the Ivies is comical. Columbia is the same as Brown Dartmouth Penn CAS and Duke - for really important things like IB recruitment to professional school placement to Peer Assesment score to selectivity and POWERHOUSE!?! research.</p>
<p>Btw, Columbia also screwed me over with financial aid so I've always had a little grudge against it...then I got into Duke/Dartmouth and all was well.</p>
<p>I went to a so-called research powerhouse. I'm at another one now for grad. </p>
<p>I couldn't have cared less in undergrad. I still don't care much in grad. Honestly, the average student will never step foot in any of the labs where the great research goes on. What difference does it make to me if someone at UCLA is inventing the personal jetpack/AIDS vaccine/universal translator if I can't get my last class to graduate?</p>
<p>All the Nobelists in the world couldn't make me want to spend four years of my life feeling miserable.</p>
<p>haha, yeah, I go to Duke and there's lots of POWERHOUSE research going on, but I don't see any of it in front of me and it makes no difference to me.</p>
<p>I'd rather have a cool professor who doesn't give much HW than one who's great at research.</p>
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haha, yeah, I go to Duke and there's lots of POWERHOUSE research going on, but I don't see any of it in front of me and it makes no difference to me.</p>
<p>I'd rather have a cool professor who doesn't give much HW than one who's great at research.
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<p>What most people fail to realize is that research actually improves undergraduate education in the long run. A professor who is also a top researcher in his/her field may not necessarily be the best "teacher" in the world, but is likely to have a much deeper understanding of the subjects he/she teaches than the "professional lecturer" in the typical LAC who has not published a paper in 20 years and follows closely an outdated textbook . A deeper understanding of the subject on the other hand generally means an opportunity for the student to see the "big picture", i.e. the broader connection between the material that is being covered in a particular class and other subjects or application areas. </p>
<p>Moreover, research universities tend to offer a much broader selection of upper-level courses with many advanced graduate courses either open to undergrads or eventually making their way down to the undergraduate curriculum. College courses, more than anything else, require constant upgrades to keep up with new knowledge. Research universities, being at the forefront of new knowledge creation, are far better equipped than LACs to keep up with change and new trends, especially in areas like science and engineering.</p>
<p>I think I've got a pretty good grasp of what makes for a good educational experience, having been on the giving and receiving end (so to speak.) Most material at the undergrad level is, at most, rudimentary. It doesn't matter how great of a researcher someone is when you're taking your class on calculus. Calculus is calculus is calculus. Even upper division classes are going to only scratch the surface of the outer limits.</p>
<p>If your argument is true, then why do LAC grads do overwhelmingly well at getting into top grad schools? This is true for the sciences as well.</p>
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College courses, more than anything else, require constant upgrades to keep up with new knowledge.
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<p>I don't see how this is really true when it comes to fundamentals.</p>
I think I've got a pretty good grasp of what makes for a good educational experience, having been on the giving and receiving end (so to speak.) Most material at the undergrad level is, at most, rudimentary. It doesn't matter how great of a researcher someone is when you're taking your class on calculus. Calculus is calculus is calculus.
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<p>I'm not a professional mathematician, but I tend to disagree with you. There is a great difference between taking Calculus just as a bunch of rather mechanical techniques to calculate derivatives and integrals (the way the subject is taught in most US colleges unfortunately) and learning Calculus from a top researcher who is also an expert in advanced Analysis and has a much deeper appreciation for example of topology, or what actually makes a function integrable, or when a function is actually the integral of its derivative. In fact, most professional mathematicians that I know frequently comment on how students come from High School with a distorted view of what math actually is and how important the first undergraduate Calculus I course is to correct those distortions and teach students to think properly in a "mathematical way". </p>
<p>Just to give you another example, there is a huge difference between having a course for example in probability and random variables with an unqualified teacher and having the same course with a professor who, because he/she has a broader background in measure theory and analysis, can give students a much better appreciation of what probabilities, random variables and expectations really are.</p>
<p>45 percenter--Thank you for your post. I believe, with many of you, that US News and World Report rankings are taken way too seriously and that there are many excellent schools out there (not just the Ivys or the "top" 10-20 schools). However, I have been somewhat perturbed by Hawkette's many posts, because I find her constant stream of "statistics" and groupings and rankings extremely artificial and I don't find them particularly helpful (and in some cases, such as the Notre Dame and Vanderbilt example that 45 percenter has noted, they are actually quite disingenuous). </p>
<p>I think that we can all agree that many colleges and universities these days have wonderful facilities and professors (certainly the overall quality is so much better than when I went to college) and that prospective college students and parents would be wise to avoid labels and overly precise rankings and focus on programs, location, size and just overall fit. And hawkette, I gather that there are many on the board who find your posts quite helpful, so obviously my views are not universal.</p>
<p>lol Bruno, my point was that the difference in quality of research facilities available at Duke and Columbia is non-existent in terms of what an undergrad would have access to.</p>
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College courses, more than anything else, require constant upgrades to keep up with new knowledge.
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<p>I can actually give you many concrete examples in engineering (which I know better than math). Take for example Digital Signal Processing (DSP). Nowadays it is a basic subject in any EE curriculum, taught perhaps at junior year or even earlier. Thirty years ago, however, the subject didn't even exist. It began as graduate/PhD-level research, then made its way down into graduate courses, and finally into the mainstream undergraduate curriculum. Who were the leaders of that process? Not some obscure LAC professor, but actually the top researchers in the field who were at research universities: people like Oppenheim, McClelland, Parks, Schaffer and others, who wrote the first lecture notes and textbooks in DSP based on their own research experience and papers.</p>
<p>Nowadays , as classical DSP (digital filter design, speech processing, spectral analysis, FFT algorithms etc.) has become standard undergraduate material in places like MIT and Stanford, what is actually "trickling down" from graduate school are the more advanced (but nonetheless already established) topics like statistical signal processing or adaptive filtering. Once again, research universities have/will have the upper-hand. After all, if you wanted to learn adaptive filtering for example as a senior in college, who would you rather learn it from: UCLA's own Ali Sayed (who is one of the world's foremost experts on the topic) or a LAC teache,r who may have taken one class on the subject as a master's or PhD student, but really has never studied it in depth, and will blindly follow Haykin's book (which BTW has lots of typos) ? </p>
<p>I know that answers to questions like the one above are very personal, but I feel very strongly about the need for an indissoluble link between teaching and research in higher learning schools.</p>
<p>"After all, if you wanted to learn adaptive filtering for example as a senior in college, who would you rather learn it from: UCLA's own Ali Sayed (who is one of the world's foremost experts on the topic) or a LAC teache,r who may have taken one class on the subject as a master's or PhD student, but really has never studied it in depth, and will blindly follow Haykin's book (which BTW has lots of typos) ? "</p>
<p>Well, as a college senior, I think you should be conducting your own research, and in my opinion you have a better chance of doing that at an LAC or smaller university where you aren't competing with graduate students for the resources of faculty time and lab space.</p>
Why do LAC grads kick butt at getting into top grad programs if the LACs are somehow deficient?
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<p>I don't know. Many top LACs are very selective in their admissions and recruit exceptionally bright students who might look attractive to graduate schools. There's no way to tell for example whether that same equally bright student would not have done equally well or better if he had started out his undergrad studies at MIT or Caltech instead. </p>
<p>Note that I'm not saying that LACs are necessarily bad. I'm just saying that, in areas that are constantly evolving like engineering, by nature a LAC would be slower to change/modernize. In other words, a LAC in this case would be at best a follower, but never a leader.</p>
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Well, as a college senior, I think you should be conducting your own research, and in my opinion you have a better chance of doing that at an LAC or smaller university where you aren't competing with graduate students for the resources of faculty time and lab space.
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<p>Wrong again. Undergrads do not compete with grad students in research universities. On the contrary, they benefit from being integrated into larger, well-established research groups where they can learn from their more senior peers (grad students) and interact with them as well as with the group leader (i.e. the professor). There are actually tons of opportunities for undergrad research in places like MIT or UCLA and the research one does there is likely to be in a cutting-edge/ frontier area, unlike in a small LAC that has neither the facilities, nor the resources, nor the qualified staff to do that. </p>
<p>Bottom line: if you are really serious about doing research as an undergraduate, you should look first for places where real research is actually done and those places obviously are MIT, Harvard, etc. not your typical LAC.
Anyway, I may be getting ahead of myself, so I'll leave it here.</p>
<p>Well, my experience, although anecdotal, in reviewing applications for medical school and residency admissions, leads me to believe that there are more 1st or 2nd author papers published by undergrads who are in LAC or smaller university settings. I have followed some of these admits for over 20 years and many are now leaders in their fields of study. IMHO, at some point, in the research world you need to start thinking for yourself instead of following other brilliant minds. Obviously, mentorship is needed, but again in my experience, this is sometimes better provided by individuals who are not at the cut-throat, pinnacle of their field.</p>