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If we can step back and think what’s really happening in college, then we know that in your farm fresh/sophomoric years, you are just learning the basic fundamental stuffs (i.e., how to write, basic math/science, an introductory taste of various liberal arts/majors). But, when you become junior/senior and get knee deep into your major courses and begin to learn the red-meat part of your major, the difference in faculty quality does come into play. </p>
<p>Time to time, during your class, you will get enlightened and inspired by the ideas/thoughts suggested/explained by your world-famous professors and just blown away. At that moment, you know that you are transfigured into a totally different person– this is what college education is all about - not making more money, not getting better jobs, but finding “urself” within. My point is that you will most likely get these wonderful opportunities more often in environments where your professors know their stuffs and constantly get involved in learning/researching (like many world-class university professors) – very unlikely from some small LACish type undergrad-focused professors, who love to recycle a 30 year old lecture note book again and again, who don’t do any high-level research but just take pleasure in teaching the same old stuffs to undergrads
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<p>But, as slipper1234 said, then why is it that those LAC's are able to get so many of their students into (and complete) PhD programs, if the students there are uninspired and haven't 'found themselves'? For example, why is it that in many years, of all of the people who complete PhD's at Caltech, almost as many had completed their undergrad at Harvey Mudd than at UCLA, UCI, UCSB, UCR, and USC combined? For example, of the people who earned PhD's at Caltech in 2005, 2 of them were former Harvey Mudd undergraduates, whereas 2 were UCSB undergrads, 1 was a UCRiverside undergrad, and none came from UCI, UCLA, or USC. Note - you don't count people who got master's degrees from those school, as we are only talking undergrad for, after all, Harvey Mudd doesn't even have a master's degree program. Keep in mind the huge differences in size we are talking about. Clearly more people graduate in technical subjects from those LA-area UC's and from USC than from Mudd. </p>
<p><a href="http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/05/phd.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/05/phd.pdf</a></p>
<p>So if these Mudd students are not being 'inspired' or haven't been able to find themselves because they went to a LAC, then why is Caltech admitting so many of them for graduate school? Is Caltech being dumb? </p>
<p>
[quote]
Time to time, during your class, you will get enlightened and inspired by the ideas/thoughts suggested/explained by your world-famous professors and just blown away. At that moment, you know that you are transfigured into a totally different person– this is what college education is all about - not making more money, not getting better jobs, but finding “urself” within. My point is that you will most likely get these wonderful opportunities more often in environments where your professors know their stuffs and constantly get involved in learning/researching (like many world-class university professors) – very unlikely from some small LACish type undergrad-focused professors, who love to recycle a 30 year old lecture note book again and again, who don’t do any high-level research but just take pleasure in teaching the same old stuffs to undergrads
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<p>But here you are portraying a highly idealized version of the way that education is supposed to work. The reality tends to be far different. The major assumption you are making is that these world-famous professors actually have the skill to teach undergrads. The truth of the matter is, many world-famous researchers are just bad teachers. They don't know how to communicate their thoughts in a way that is comprehensible to the average undergrad. They don't have good presentation skills. I myself, as well as many others, have had to endure classes run by purportedly world-class researchers that were just extremely poorly taught. </p>
<p>The other major aspect is that a lot of researchers are not good teachers because they don't WANT to be good teachers. The truth is, many universities simply do not value good teaching, instead running a publish-or-perish regime. Hence, profs there would rather spend their time conducting research than in teaching, and as a result, many of them will deliberately spend as little effort as possible in teaching, especially in teaching the undergrads. For example, I knew one prof who deliberately slotted his office hours at a time when he knew that his students all had to be in another class, and the purpose of that was clear - he did not really want to have anything to do with his undergrad students. Or think about pop culture. Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) was a former math prof at Berkeley who was noted for his extremely poor teaching skills, but that didn't matter, because you didn't really need to be a good teacher to advance at Berkeley, all you needed were good publications.:</p>
<p>"In the fall of 1967 Kaczynski was hired as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Kaczynski's aloofness and reserve made students rate him poorly. Despite the attempt at persuasion by the department staff, Kaczynski resigned without explanation in 1969. Calvin Moore, vice chairman of the department in 1968, said that given Kaczynski's "impressive" thesis and record of publications, "he could have advanced up the ranks and been a senior member of the faculty today.""</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber#Early_life_and_mathematical_career%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber#Early_life_and_mathematical_career</a></p>
<p>Think about that. If Kaczynski hadn't gone crazy, he probably would have become a full prof at Berkeley, and he would have subjected countless Berkeley students to bad teaching for decades. That's because the Berkeley math department (and in fact, few math departments at the major research universities) doesn't place much value on good teaching. </p>
<p>Or think about "Beautiful Mind" John Nash, how Nash taught at MIT for a while before going crazy, and how he taught his classes in an extremely hostile and rude manner. Again, this is an example of research universities having brilliant profs who just don't give a whit about teaching. </p>
<p>The point is that undergrad quality has to be measured with multiple metrics. Think of it as the area of a rectangle, where one side comprises the 'brilliance' of the profs, and the other side comprises how much the profs actually want to teach undergrads, and how good they are at doing it. The total area of the rectangle is how much undergrad quality you will get. It doesn't matter how brilliant your profs are if they aren't good at teaching undergrads, and don't want to be good at it. Q=A*B, and it doesn't matter if A is infinite if B is zero, as anything times zero is still zero.</p>