<p>“but most of the top schools do have good career services.” - That could be true. I think of the Ivies more as places to develop contacts and groundwork for grad school. But that’s probaby because we didn’t do in-depth research on any Ivies…DS was more interested in engineering-centric choices.</p>
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Interesting.
Of course the teacher matters, but your data doesn’t tell us much about what matters.</p>
<p>I don’t think a successful thesis defense makes a person magically more qualified to teach lower-division undergrad courses. That person is probably the same they were before becoming Dr. Xyz.</p>
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<p>Correlation != causation.
Ivy league grads have higher academic qualifications on average than state school grades when they enter college, so they will probably have higher “cognitive complexity” later on, regardless of where they went. </p>
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<p>I can’t argue with this.</p>
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<p>Most Ivy League schools don’t have an undergraduate business major. Wharton is great preparation for business, but the other ones don’t prepare you to be a CEO, unless you are talking about general liberal arts education as preparation for being a CEO.</p>
<p>I’m a student, but I’d like the parents’ opinion on this…</p>
<p>1) What makes one college better than the other? How is Amherst, for example, better than Williams?
2) Why are Wellesley, UW, and Smith on IvyPlus? Why not Washington Lee, UCLA, and Bowdoin (or whatever combination you prefer)?</p>
<p>Why are Wellesley, UW, and Smith on IvyPlus?
oh for gods sake.
Ivy Plus is a dating service!! thats all!!!
Do you really think you can use a business whose sole purpose is to make $$ “matching up” students on dates to gauge the quality of a college???</p>
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<p>Talk about wanting to be Mrs. Degree and then getting matched with a University of Washington man! :O</p>
<p>The colleges my kids are attending are THE best and the Toppest tier colleges…the toppest ? Which tier is that ? Tippy top ? Below Tippy Top ?</p>
<p>^ the most tippiest.</p>
<p>The Toppermost of the Poppermost, of course.</p>
<p>Backstory: The Poppermost name originates from the early Beatles’ inspirational call and response, John: “Where are we going, fellas?” Paul, George, Ringo: “To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!”</p>
<p>Amherst and Williams are both on that list. UNC-Chapel Hill makes Katie Baker’s list but not The Ivy Plus one. There’s a lot of overlap between those two “social prestige”. The exclusion of Notre Dame and Michigan on both is surprising.</p>
<p>Good grief, why are you reading anything into who is included and who is excluded? It’s a bunch of yentas who just decided they were going to have a social club, and added the names that came to mind off the top of their heads, while acknowledging that there are other fine schools that just might not have been top of mind (hence Wellesley but not Barnard, or whatever.) It’s not MEANINGFUL and people who read anything into the selections other than these were the top-of-mind schools thought of by people starting a dating service are seriously not right in the head.</p>
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<p>Me too. That’s why I don’t engage in them.</p>
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<p>Excellent definition!</p>
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<p>Careful! You’re treading dangerously close to CC apostasy!</p>
<p>I wish I had had a warning about that post. I almost spit on computer.</p>
<p>And let this evening’s spitting begin…</p>
<p>I think its more likely we will see a “shoot and run” approach.</p>
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<p>So do you believe the motivation and ability of surrounding students has no impact on the education your own kid receives?</p>
<p>Consider a class of 15 students discussing Leviathan. Or, consider working with 50 other students to develop a proposal for the DOE’s collegiate Solar Decathalon project. If you were going to spend 15 hours/week for a year working with 50 other students on such a task, do you think you wouldn’t care how well they’d done in high school?</p>
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<p>That’s what the data shows. </p>
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<p>You can believe it or not. Or post conflicting data of equivalent academic cachet. Or take up the cudgel and join in the taking of potshots at the poster of such disturbing news.</p>
<p>Annasdad Maybe Im reading your posting wrong but isn’t the significant phrase “ at least as measured by standardized tests”. In other words if you are a good test taker you will remain a good test taker no matter where you attend college and if you are a bad test taker going to an elite college will not improve your ability to take standardize test?</p>
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<p>Gee, I’m really advancing here. In four days, from a narcissist, to a hypocrite, to a danger. If I’d advanced this fast when I was in the Navy, I’d have made admiral in no time.</p>
<p>But you’re wrong. I’m not dangerous. It’s the evidence I cite that is dangerous. And it’s not dangerous for people who are trying to make a rational decision about where to send their child to college. Its dangerous for the mythmakers who perpetuate the fiction that a student cannot get just as good an education at a school like Rutgers as they can at a school like Cornell in the face of copious evidence to the contrary, and in the absence of any evidence in support.</p>
<p>But the evidence Im citing is not the real danger. The real danger is the myth, and the mythmakers who blindly accept it, promulgate it, and attack anyone who suggests otherwise. (Parallels to certain religious zealots occur to me here.) They are dangerous because buying into the myth conveys a message to the 93 percent of the bright, motivated students who are turned down by Harvard that their lives have been negatively impacted by the rejection because they cannot obtain an equivalent quality education elsewhere. They are dangerous because they motivate students and otherwise rational and intelligent parents to borrow huge sums of money to go to expensive colleges, in the belief that doing so will pay off, big-time.</p>
<p>So yes, the evidence is dangerous to the mythmakers and thats why Im going to continue to cite it whenever the myth raises its ugly head here, and all the snide comments and rude remarks from the usual suspects is not going to change that.</p>
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<p>A so-called top tier college may or may not be worth the investment; it depends on why youre sending your kid to college and on a set of assumptions about the non-educational impact of the college decision.</p>
<p>Thats because there is no evidence at all that a more prestigious, more highly selective, wealthier college has any effect at all on the quality of the education a student can achieve there.</p>
<p>There is, however, evidence of an economic advantage from attending very top schools, at least at the level of selectivity of a Cornell. From Pascarella and Terenzini [p. 473], although there are some clear exceptions, the weight of the evidence suggests that measures of institutional quality, and particularly student body selectivity, have statistically significant, positive impacts on subsequent earnings.</p>
<p>But the question is: is that impact enough to make a full-pay at Cornell a worthwhile investment over the cost of attendance at Rutgers with the large scholarship your son was offered?</p>
<p>On the off-chance that someone lurking may be interested, Ive done a simple analysis.</p>
<p>Pascarella and Terenzini report [loc. cit.] that based on their review of three decades of academic research, net of other influences attending a college with a 100-point higher average [M+CR] SAT score (or ACT equivalent) is associated with about 2 to 4 percent higher earnings in later life, with some caveats. So lets ignore the caveats (which would call the positive impact of attending a higher-selectivity college into question) and make some assumptions:</p>
<p>(1) That the premium for an individual is at the top of the range, 4% per 100 SAT points
(2) That the graduating engineers salary will average out to $80,000 a year over a 40-year career which may or not be pretty close, depending on the engineering discipline
(3) The discount (basically the inflation) rate over the 40-year span will average 3 percent</p>
<p>Now lets look at Rutgers vs. Cornell. According to data on CCs College Search, the difference in Math + Critical Reading Score is 210 points (1190 vs. 1400).</p>
<p>Putting that into a present value model, it shows that the present economic value of a Cornell degree over a Rutgers degree is about $155,000. (Obviously, Im simplifying by assuming that the dollar amount of the salary premium will be the same in each year; anyone with the time and interest to post a more advanced analysis is of course welcome to do so.)</p>
<p>So if youre paying more than about $39,000 a year more at Cornell than youd have paid at Rutgers, you just made a lousy investment. If youre paying less than that, and if you accept the above assumptions and ignore the caveats, then its a good investment.</p>
<p>But even in the latter case, I would suggest that the advantage is a lot less than a lot of people have been led to think it will be.</p>
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<p>Clearly, the limitation of any attempt to assess educational quality is limited by the available assessment instruments, and I think it’s valid to question the conclusions based on standardized tests.</p>
<p>However, the standardized tests that Pascarella and Terenzini are talking about are those used to assess students’ readiness for graduate and professional schools. I’m not qualified to argue either side of the question on the validity of those tests for those purposes, orr any other. Apparently the researchers, whose qualifications for making those kinds of judgments far exceed mine, felt they have some validity.</p>
<p>In additions, the results shown by those standardized tests align very closely with those reported in Arum and Roksa, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” which are based on the Collegiate Learning Assessment. (The study is not included in Pascarella and Terenzini because it postdates their 2005 work). The CLA is a “standardized test,” of a sort, but it’s not a fill-in-the-bubble type. It requires a student to analyze a problem and posit a solution, and is intended to assess a student’s critical thinking ability. That study showed that while there is a small difference in gains in critical thinking ability that depends on the institution attended, that difference is far less than that caused by what students do once they get to college. Arum and Roksa decline to address what it is about an institution that causes the small institution-dependent difference, because their sample size is too small; so it would be going beyond the evidence to cite the in support of the position that more prestigious, more selective, or richer schools provide better educations.</p>