Well, it might be, but it looks that the parents of UChicago students are SO SURE, that everybody else is wrong. But no, there is no problem with them, and no pretentiousness at all! 
Oh, well…
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Yes, often when folks are so convinced of something, reality turns out that it’s not exactly what they were thinking…behavioral psychology. I would agree in that respect…
For the the vast majority of undergraduates, the resources aren’t really “unparalleled” at top research institutions. Take research opportunities, for example. Who do you suppose has a better chance of conducting hands-on research . . . an undergraduate at a top public “research institution” or a student at a top LAC? Which type of school is better situated to fund such research?
Williams, Amherst, Pomona and Swarthmore all have endowments of over $2 million dollars per student. That’s about 30 times higher than the endowment per student at University of Washington, and over 3 times higher than the endowment per student at the University of Chicago. And at the LAC’s the students aren’t competing for limited “resources” with the graduate students.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that LAC’s mostly churn out ‘impractical’ degrees like English and Philosophy. If so, you are mistaken. At some of the top LAC’s almost all the degrees are awarded in STEM, and at others STEM majors are the majority.
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Phew, for a moment I was almost worried that my son’s life is ruined because UChicago is not a fit for him. Thank you for informing me that it is fine. I’ll sleep well tonight.
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Or if the kid accurately judged Chicago as pretentious, clearly not a fit. The kid did their job.
If a ranking system fixes the percentages in order to get the same names on the list as on other lists, that would be a methodological flaw. However, are you merely asserting that this is indeed what the ranking companies are doing, or do you have some sort of statement from them or explanation or other evidence to back that up?
As to whether “best” has meaning to students, there are of course many who do wish to attend the “best” universities. You are correct that most don’t or can’t consider that criterion, which is why an assessment of “best” is “best” understood from the perspective of society overall. Presumably, universities contribute to the greater good through their research and the “best” ones do more along those lines than others. Now, one might disagree with ranking agencies assuming that role of figuring this stuff out. Do you have a better means of doing so?
I refer you to post 35. Asking to users to stop bickering (which problematically they opted to ignore) should not have been construed as everyone else should join the dogpile. I’m putting the thread on slow mode until morning.
For the record, saying your kid found any college pretentious is fine, but that really should have been limited to one post.
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Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about LACs so I might be completely wrong.
Research is usually done with grants funding, although better endowment might allow for better labs, etc. The question is whether faculty interested in research would end up in institutions that don’t have graduate programs. It is true that grads and undergrads somewhat compete for the same research spots, but IMO the grants winning pipelines (and the professors doing cutting edge research) are more likely to be in universities.
It probably is completely different for fields further from STEM.
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I’ll use some examples from USNWR. In 2000 USNWR updated it’s statistical calculations to use standard statistical normalization. This led to Caltech having sharp jump from #9 to #1 and the expected HYP no longer being on top. Readers took notice and many complained. In the following year, USNWR a new “logarithmic adjuster” in the category where Caltech excelled most over HYP, which led to HYP being ranked #1 to #3 again, as many readers expect. There was also talk of a forced change in the USNWR rankings leadership team during these events.
If you look at the USNWR ranking system and consider what the rankings are supposed to do, in many cases, it is clear that the rankings criteria are not being selected for the implied goal of of the metric. Instead they tend to avoid changes that will remove familiar names from the top.
For example, a few years ago, USNWR added social mobility criteria to their ranking. That’s an admirable addition that fits with public sentiment of what should be included in college rankings, but social mobility is not an area where HYPSM type colleges tend to be best . However, HYPSM do fine in the USNWR version of “social mobility”, which emphasizes the graduation rate of kids who receive Pell grants. You don’t need to actually have a lot of social mobility to rank well in USNWR social mobility nor do you have to admit a lot of low income kids. You only need to be selective/wealthy enough to graduate the what may be few low income kids that you do admit.
Peer reviewed research publications of what colleges are best at social mobility place HYPSM… very differently (see http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf , which is easier to digest as NYT tables at Chetty College Mobility - The New York Times ).
I am far from the only person to make such claims. For example, the Washington Monthly article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/us-news-college-rankings-are-denounced-but-not-ignored/2011/09/02/gIQAn6BzzJ_story.html states:
“Sources within U.S. News claim that, after looking deeply into the methodology of the rankings, Graham found that U.S. News had essentially put its thumb on the scale to make sure that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton continued to come out on top,”
USNWR is a business that gets the majority of its website traffic from rankings and likely the majority of its overall revenue. It’s not a peer reviewed journal trying to figure out what is truly the “best college.” Not having familiar names on top hurts their profitability. It also hurts their profitability if the rankings rarely change, so readers don’t have a good reason to check back each year. So instead there are small tweaks in weightings from year to year, and typically small changes in rankings.
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We are being told here by some of the usual suspects that we Chicago lovers are rankings-obsessed and pretentious. The kernel of truth in this is that the U of C does have a culture that privileges a different sort of mindset and different values. This was described amusingly some years ago in a light-hearted book called “Snobbery” by an old U of C grad, Jospeph Epstein. In one chapter he catalogued all the different sorts of snobbery in the American collegiate scene - those based on money, family, beauty, athleticism, social savoir faire and the like - and remembered that in his day at Chicago none of these meant much. What mattered was intellectual attainment. Chicago students were just as snobbish as those in the ivies or anywhere else. It was just about different things. That gets up the nose of many Americans.
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Note that Forbes, for example, tends to like LACs, even at full price:
As might be relevant to this topic, UChicago also appears in the article.
@tarator, I am referring specifically to undergraduate research opportunities, and most undergraduates at large public research universities have very little access to grant-funded research opportunities. While research is obviously prioritized at these institutions, research opportunities for undergraduates are just not a priority. (This isn’t to say that such opportunities, never exist, it is just that they aren’t commonplace.)
Contrary to popular belief, professors at top LACs actively engaged in research, receive funding and grants from outside sources, publish, attend conferences, etc. The research demands placed on them are necessarily less intense because they are also expected to be excellent teachers, but they are generally required to not only research, but also to provide opportunities for undergraduates to research along side them. Undergraduate research opportunities are prioritized, and the funding comes not only from outside grants but also from the colleges themselves. Oftentimes, undergraduates engaged in research at a much deeper level in terms of how the projects are designed and conducted.
In short, undergraduate research opportunities are part of the educational mission of top LACs. The emphasis on research opportunities for undergraduates may be one of the reasons why the top LACs send such a high percentage of their students to Ph.D. programs. (There are also research universities that try to prioritize research opportunities for undergrads, but these tend to be the expensive private universities with deep endowments.)
As for the discussion of UChicago in particular, @marlowe1 does a great job of making my point for me. According to Epstein (the author of the book he cites), “'the essence of snobbery, I should say, is arranging to make yourself feel superior at the expense of other people.” Epstein also argues that intellectual snobbery is ultimately based on feelings of inferiority. I agree on both counts. Imagine the level of insecurity that would drive one to endlessly obsess over random internet rankings in order to justify feelings of intellectual superiority. Imagine believing that your school excels in “intellectual attainment” over schools like Yale, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, and a host of other schools. I’m not sure whether it’s funny or sad, but it certainly drives the point home.
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Your examples of the issues with USNWR’s undergraduate ranking of national universities underscores why focusing on a university’s research and graduate program quality might be a better objective measure of ‘best.’ Those who recall the discussions re: UChicago rankings from a few years ago will remember that grad school programs were included as a relevant metric. As a contributor to the greater good, a university is a lot more than its undergraduate program.
Is there a better way to understand “social mobility” other than looking at the graduation rate of the Pell grant kids? Per the NCES data, looks like HYPSM admit about 20% of the class as Pell recipients and graduate them at about the same rates as everyone else. A college that admits a higher percentage of Pell wouldn’t necessarily be “better” if those kids don’t graduate or lag their higher income peers. What methodological improvements do you suggest so that the metric better captures a more genuine representation of social mobility for colleges and universities?
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The Chetty Study “Overall Social Mobility” considers both access and outcomes (not just graduation rate). The top 10 for overall social mobility among “elite” colleges.
- UCLA
- RPI
- U of Miami
- USC
- Cooper Union
- Rose-Hulman
- Occidental
- NYU
- Caltech
- Harvey Mudd
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@mtmind must have a pretty low opinion of my own intellect if she believed I thought “snobbery” was an epithet of praise and that I therefore stood in need of her correction of that misconception. Epstein’s point was that there are many forms of snobbery and that the Chicago form, which seems to be the inverse of that of ivy schools, is a form in its own right. If she has in fact read his little book she should be aware that he treats the entire subject with a light touch, something I would very much recommend to her.
To be fair, many who visit our forum solemnly administer the lash when any of us Chicagoans becoming too saucy for their liking. But these imputations they always make of denigration of other schools is entirely in their own minds. If one must look for insecurities, surely that is the place. Call it the Big Poppy syndrome or a local manifestation of American anti-intellectualism. But that still doesn’t quite describe it, and it misses a large component of Chicago culture, which, as has often been noticed, consists in mock self-disparagement - the place where fun goes to die and all that. You could say that Chicago kids are snobs of suffering. Does that sound sufficiently humble?
If I am forced to be solemn for a moment myself it is to ask the question why a smart person like MT doesn’t quite get that or, if she gets it, is upset by it. I myself rejoice willingly in all schools being what they are. I would be happy to hear her describe and praise her own great good place. There’s room in my world for lots of different takes on the educational experience. All of these overlap and influence each other in the gaudy tapestry of American educational life. I want to read attentive accounts of each of them by those who love them and know something about them, not these dreary takedowns and accusations of “insecurity.” That’s just warmed-over puritanism. Epstein wasn’t going in for it. He was neither praising nor attacking his alma mater when he noticed that, as with the ivies and many another kind of school, it has its own form of snobbery.
Noticing and describing are the soul of education. So is wit. This dour moralizing is, well, less so, especially when the subject itself is education.
H.L. Mencken once described a puritan as a person obsessed by the thought that somewhere someone else is happy. Mencken was once much read.
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Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
Slow mode extended.
Hahahaha. After reading this essay, I think a word other than pretentious describes the UChicago crowd better.
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This thread reminded me of another Mencken quote…
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong”.
Of this I am a absolutely and unabashedly certain😀
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Mencken may have hated moral certainties - after all, he was a devotee of Nietzsche - but, like his great mentor, he never hesitated to say what he liked and didn’t like about any aspect of life. Expressiveness and vitality are the big thing. They are the great enemies of censoriousness and timidity.
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My son actually loved the essay prompts for U Chicago and wanted to apply just to write the essays. I wasn’t going to pay for an app for a school he has no intention of going to. He thought that the students on seemed stressed and too much emphasis on “where fun goes to die” , he wanted a school where there are smart academic kids but with a nice balance between academics and fun.
He did find a disconnect between what the AOs are saying and what the students and parents online present about the school.
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