Undergrad. Major Rankings Questions

<p>See, Rabban, you keep asking questions without answering any of your own. </p>

<p>I agree, I would have chosen Harvard over ANY other school, because Harvard is Harvard. I would go to Harvard for the brand-name, just like, frankly, most people who go to Harvard are probably going there just for the brand-name.</p>

<p>But that's irrelevant. My point is simple - you cannot simply dismiss the LAC's as being bad. I never said that all LAC"s were better than ALL research universities. Rather, there are different criteria for different people. Some research universities are preferable to certain LAC's, and vice versa, for certain people. You cannot make any CATEGORICAL statements that the major universities are better for EVERYBODY. </p>

<p>Not to keep banging on Berkeley, but Berkeley in particular has quite a few problems with its undergraduate program, which have been enumerated countless times on the Berkeley section of CC. I can definitely see how certain LAC's can offer a better experience to some undergraduates than Berkeley can.</p>

<p>Dorian, I don;t understand the Dartmouth/ Columbia thing. I transferred from Columbia to Dartmouth and my objective opinion is that the Dartmouth experience was much better overall.</p>

<p>Rabban, Swarthmore isn't at Harvard's level nor is Mudd at MIT's level. You have to compare relative schools. Amherst/ Williams/ Swat are equal to Penn/ Dartmouth/ Brown/ Columbia/ Duke in my book. Personally Swat isn't the right "fit" but I would choose Amherst over Columbia in a heartbeat. Berkeley isn't even in the same category as these schools.</p>

<p>slipper, the only reason I compared Dartmouth to Columbia is because Rabban listed Columbia as a "world class" school, but not Dartmouth.</p>

<p>Today from CNN...</p>

<p>SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- Kelly Jabbusch likes teaching, and she's good at it. She knows not to talk too much, and how to see a problem through the eyes of a novice. She has received an award from the University of Washington, and served as lead teaching assistant for the math department.</p>

<p>"I find great joy in teaching," Jabbusch said. "I would hope employers ask about it."</p>

<p>Often in the academic world, they don't -- though that may be changing.</p>

<p>Universities are supposed to produce the next generation of college professors -- that is, people who will both conduct research and teach. But star researchers bring in money and prestige. It is an open secret that, for many top academic jobs, research potential is the first thing hiring committees look for.</p>

<p>"At research institutions, that's what the currency is," said Jim Masterson, president of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students.</p>

<p>Now, however, some universities are taking their teacher-training missions more seriously. Partly, it's to provide better teaching for their own undergraduates, who with rising tuition are less hesitant to complain about incompetent TAs. And partly it's to help their graduate students when they go into a job market that seems moderately more interested in teaching skills than in the past.</p>

<p>Several universities, including Washington, Colorado and Michigan, have built up significant centers staffed with experts to train and mentor teaching assistants.</p>

<p>Washington, Ohio State, Temple and Delaware are among the schools organizing major training conferences for new TAs each year, while Howard University is leading an effort to improve classroom preparation for future faculty members at historically black colleges. Membership in the POD (Professional and Organizational Development) Network, a group of university employees who work on developing teaching skills, has grown from 100 in 1974 to about 1,500.</p>

<p>"Major research universities really did lose their publics because of lack of attention to undergraduate education for a while," said Jody Nyquist, a former Washington administrator who oversaw a major national research project called Preparing Future Faculty.</p>

<p>Community colleges have long focused on teaching, but Nyquist said graduate students now are reporting more questions about teaching in job interviews from four-year schools. Laura Border, who oversees a graduate teaching program at Colorado, said two recent graduates there were offered higher base salaries for faculty jobs because they had specialized classroom training.</p>

<p>Still, change is slow. As Donald Wulff, who heads up Washington's Center for Instructional Development and Research, put it: "To get tenure you have to be a great researcher and I think a medium-quality teacher." In the past, he said, being a great researcher and a poor teacher sufficed.</p>

<p>One challenge is that current faculty members were hired largely to do research, so that's the mold in which they build the next generation. "We're cloning ourselves," Wulff said.</p>

<p>Some factors that have boosted the emphasis on teaching have also detracted from it at the same time. Rising costs have focused more attention on teaching quality, but have also deprived some graduate students of opportunities to get in the classroom. Pricey private universities "have told graduate students they cannot afford to have Ph.Ds come and practice on their students," Nyquist said.</p>

<p>The scarcity of academic jobs has prompted universities like Washington to acknowledge many graduates will end up primarily teaching, in community colleges, and train them accordingly. But the scarcity also puts more pressure on graduate students to "publish or perish," and focus on research.</p>

<p>Also, universities face pressure to shorten the time it takes graduate students to finish their degrees. Teacher training and TA jobs lengthen that path.</p>

<p>Another obstacle is that individual departments have final say over how graduate students are trained, so teaching centers like that at Washington inevitably play only a supporting role.</p>

<p>A survey of 4,000 doctoral students at 27 universities released in 2001 found only about half of the graduate programs require students to serve as teaching assistants. But opportunities vary widely between fields. For instance, more than three-quarters of English graduate students had access to a term-long TA training course, but barely one-quarter in chemistry and molecular biology.</p>

<p>"I was sort of tapped on the shoulder and asked, 'Do you want to teach a statistics class?"' said Masterson, the graduate student association president and a University of Cincinnati doctoral candidate. "The philosophy is, if you have a master's in the subject, you know it well enough to teach it."</p>

<p>But he warned: "How do you handle a racial comment that targets another student? How do you manage classroom tension? You don't get that."</p>

<p>Those topics and others_ are on the agenda at a conference starting Monday at Washington that will be attended by hundreds of new TAs. After it is over, TAs will have continued access to training courses, mentoring and confidential advice.</p>

<p>Kim Lucy, a graduate student in art history, said she had a sense from her own undergraduate days at Washington what makes a good TA, but attending a training conference helped.</p>

<p>"It's always scary standing up in front of 50 people for the first time, but I felt pretty comfortable," she said. Still, Lucy isn't sure she will go on to pursue a doctorate. She isn't convinced there's a place for someone like her who just wants to teach.</p>

<p>"It's unfortunate to know you have to go through all that other stuff to get to do something you love," she said.</p>

<p>Okay, Sakky. I see your points. But no matter, my WCU list remains intact for now.</p>

<p>They are:</p>

<p>*WCU : Harvard-Berkeley-MIT-Stanford-Yale-Princeton-Columbia-Caltech *</p>

<p>Hey, Rabban, don't get me wrong. If you like those schools, then that's your business. </p>

<p>My point is simply that not everybody would agree with your list. </p>

<p>According to the Hoxby study, the 10 most preferred schools are:</p>

<p>Harvard, Caltech, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Amherst, Dartmouth. </p>

<p>In particular, I would again highlight Berkeley. The truth is, while I wouldn't go so far as to say that Berkeley is a 'bad' undergrad program, it does have a number of problems. Like I've always said, Berkeley is a great place to go...for graduate school. However, other schools may be able to offer you a better undergraduate education.</p>

<p>The point is, yes, those are all world class "universities"</p>

<p>But world class colleges (WCC) for undergrads are: Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, HYPSM, Caltech, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Duke, etc.</p>

<p>
[quote]
Berkeley in particular has quite a few problems with its undergraduate program, which have been enumerated countless times on the Berkeley section of CC. I can definitely see how certain LAC's can offer a better experience to some undergraduates than Berkeley can.

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</p>

<p>from Wiki:</p>

<p>
[quote]
While the UC campuses are operated fairly efficiently, the system does have a reputation among its students and alumni for mediocre customer service. The most common symptoms are the long lines which students often must stand in to get even the simplest administrative tasks accomplished, the long wait times before phone calls are answered, and the overcomplicated paperwork that is often required. In August 1990, UC Berkeley attempted to ease the tedium of standing in line by setting up televisions which showed comedians making jokes about standing in line.</p>

<p>During the 1990s, some campuses (like UCLA) aggressively streamlined many internal procedures with Web applications. Others (like UC Berkeley) were slower to adapt — as of 2006, Berkeley students still enroll in classes via the aging Tele-BEARS system, which is a Web interface on top of an older touch-tone telephone system (this despite the fact that UC Berkeley is one of the universities prominent in the development of many Internet technologies).

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</p>

<p>World Class. But is it the 1st World or 3rd World?</p>

<p>Funny, you don't hear about these kinds of administrative nightmares at the LAC-like elites like Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown... btw, what's the point of having "world class" professors if you never have any meaningful access to them?</p>

<p>I and many other undergraduates here access world class professors weekly, but perpetuate whatever stereotypes you want. :)</p>

<p>DRab's Conjecture:</p>

<p>If it's on wikipedia, it must be true.</p>

<p>Wikiality!</p>

<p>over time, perceptions become reality.</p>

<p>is Harvard actually THE BEST college in the world, or is that "perception" becoming reality over time? ...</p>

<p>of course when you're founded 140 years BEFORE America was even founded, you've got one helluva head start...</p>

<p>The situation cannot simply be boiled down to 'access' to world-class profs. Sometimes you don't really WANT access to a world-class prof. For example, without naming names, I had "access" to world-class profs for my lower-division math courses. The problem is that they were just bad teachers (and in one case, actually a hostile teacher). Sure, they were world-class in the sense that they were famous in their field. But if they were bad teachers, so what? How does that help you? It got to the point that many of us, including myself, determined that it was more useful to simply skip lecture and instead just stay at home and read the textbook, as you would learn more by doing that than you would by actually going to lecture. </p>

<p>Heck, it got to the point that I wished my high school math teacher was teaching those courses. Sure, he wasn't a world-famous researcher. But at least he presented lectures that made math interesting and inspiring. Besides, he had a bachelor's degree in math so he could have taught classes in linear algebra and multivariable calculus. He's not a researcher, but at least he has good teaching skills, which my actual math profs sadly did not. I would have happily traded 'access' to these famous math profs for 'access' to my old high school math teacher.</p>

<p>Rabban, I don't really find your arguments to be credible. You keep arguing one point about universities over LACs while you have shown zero actual evidence why grads at Universities are doing better. It seems like you're just recyling information found on the streets.</p>

<p>Also, college (at the undergrad level) is much more than just the teaching. And in every non-academic area the top publics are weak.</p>

<p>Like quality of food? Let's make huge, unsubstantiated claims, Yay!!!</p>

<p>
[quote]
Rabban, I don't really find your arguments to be credible. You keep arguing one point about universities over LACs while you have shown zero actual evidence why grads at Universities are doing better

[/quote]
</p>

<p>well, maybe we should take it easy on the guy (gal?) - i mean apparently he/she hasn't even hit puberty yet, so i think we can all understand if there isn't anything substantial to backup much of these posts. </p>

<p>what "real world" experience about LACs and research unis should we expect from someone who has yet to pop open a college textbook much less a major runaway zit?</p>

<p>
[quote]
Like quality of food? Let's make huge, unsubstantiated claims, Yay!!!

[/quote]
</p>

<p>What about "happiness" levels and "quality of life" rankings by Princeton Review which schools like Stanford, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth all appear consistently?</p>

<p>Those are all "non-academic" things, but would anyone argue that they can be just as meaningful - all things being equal?</p>

<p>
[quote]
Heck, it got to the point that I wished my high school math teacher was teaching those courses. Sure, he wasn't a world-famous researcher. But at least he presented lectures that made math interesting and inspiring. Besides, he had a bachelor's degree in math so he could have taught classes in linear algebra and multivariable calculus. He's not a researcher, but at least he has good teaching skills, which my actual math profs sadly did not. I would have happily traded 'access' to these famous math profs for 'access' to my old high school math teacher.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I agree with your points, but what it boils down to is what companies see as a better degree. You may learn more with high school type professors at some no name college, but practically, companies will like that you suffered through uncaring, brilliant research professors at Berkely.</p>

<p>GatorEng23, schools like Amherst and Brown are not "no name" colleges.</p>

<p>They actually don't care that you went through great professors at Cal. They care about hiring the smartest students from the most elite schools, and those are the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, and perhaps Northwestern. </p>

<p>As for more than academics. Yup. The other things that matter include "elite" reputation, alumni giving, size of school, career services reputation (places like the Ivies have formed relationships with the top firms in the country for years), selectivity (the students around you might be the most important factor in college), etc. All these contribute to why Cal and Michigan, et al, are ranked 20+ in USNEWS.</p>

<p>I assure you that at least in my world (Consulting, Ivy MBA, now a media company exec) the most elite schools are pretty much aligned exactly as USNEWS ranks them (notable exception: Brown underranked and WUStl overranked)</p>