<p>as for presidents, Duke did produce Nixon, but I seem to recall that he has his detractors.</p>
<p>As for singular reputations, however, I entirely agree with you. If I had been Matt Damon writing Good Will Hunting and wanted to create a math genius, I'd put him at MIT. If I were being a bit more alternative/obscure, I might use Cal Tech or Princeton's grad school, but I wouldn't use Duke even if Duke recruits math students who compete with the best at MCP.</p>
<p>If I were writing about a preppie future president, I'd use HYP.</p>
<p>If I were writing about a future software billionaire, I'd use Stanford.</p>
<p>Perhaps for a Wall Streeter, I'd use Penn/Wharton.</p>
<p>And Duke might get the rural southerner genius but would more likely get the well-rounded, preppie basketball fan (see Tom Wolfe's latest book for that stereotype).</p>
<p>These stereotypes are, however, more untrue than true.</p>
<p>I think you would be hard pressed to find any groups more homogeneous than if you plunked all of the the engineering students at all of those schools into one big room. I don't think you could separate them by anything besides their tshirts and pride of place (though you could test out some of the math/science/engineering folks by assuming that if they scored below 780 on their math SAT, they didn't go to Caltech). I'd say a similar thing about English majors, future politicians, premeds, and drama freaks. The biggest fights are not between groups that are vastly different. They are, instead, between groups that are very similar. The narcissism of small differences is one of my favorite topics and fuels my repetitive responses.</p>
<p>Duke is an up-and-coming institition. Considering HYP have been around for 300 years, it's not surprising they have their share of fame. </p>
<p>That said, I honestly don't see this huge barrier between the student bodies at CHYMPS (I mean, honestly) and Duke/Penn. I have to admit, I wasn't too impressed when I first got here. Girls sunbathing on the first day? Drunken parties on the second? Then I got to meet people. You would be amazed at some of the things students have done here- and yes, many of them turned down CHYMPS. Duke performs well in competitions like the Putnam, and it's grad/law/med school placement is 6th in the nation- above MIT and similar schools. 'Nuf said. :)
<a href="http://www.classroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.classroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf</a></p>
<p>First, that link is a ranking of feeders into elite business, medical, and law schools. Not graduate school. Because the majority of MIT students are engineering majors, business, medical, and law school aren't default options for us. </p>
<p>To some degree, this is a pointless argument because no one's going to concede any ground. I'll stick with my initial point: I'm just not as impressed by the average Duke student as I am by the average HYPMSC student.</p>
<p>warblers - Engineers often do not need graduate degrees to advance in their field. That alone should offer some insight into why tech schools don't fare as well in the WSJ ranking.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Haha, I'll bite: I think Duke and Penn are overrated because I don't automatically respect the intelligence of Duke and Penn students.</p>
<p>I have automatic respect for the intelligence of anybody who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT (duh), Caltech, Stanford, and perhaps a few others.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So someone admitted to Duke or Penn by virtue of their own merits is not automatically worthy of the same respect as someone admitted to HYPSM(C) because of say, athletics, or legacy status? Interesting.</p>
<p>
[quote]
As a corollary, I'd much rather be up against a Duke or Penn student for a spot in the grad program of my choice than I would anyone from the above list
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Assuming everything else about the students is equal I'd agree, but a blanket statement like that is overestimating the difference between those two tiers of universities. A Duke or Penn student with publications stands a much better chance of being admitted to a top PhD program than a Harvard or Princeton student with less research experience. Once you are above a certain level in terms of prestige, where you went to school matters much less than what you did while you were there.</p>
<p>I'll definitely agree to the engineering argument. I'll concede to the fact that people aren't as impressed by Duke as they are by CHYMPS. However, I was merely attempting to stress the quality, not prestige, of schools like Duke and Penn. </p>
<p>When you actually pause to consider the fact that there are over 4000 schools in the US, the difference between the top 10 (or 20) schools on the undergraduate level is virtually negligible no matter how you cut the cake. Engineering at MIT is an exception, however, for obvious reasons. :)</p>
<p>To beat the dead horse further, world rankings that have little to do with US News (or undergraduate education) follow the trend of US News in placing HYPMC at the top, but Duke is now number 11. Given the thousands of private colleges around the globe, I remain unconvinced that there is a perceivable difference between the kids who attend any of these top 30 schools.</p>
<p>Good students in HYPSMC are the best period. The differences aren't huge. However, I do think that the lower tail of the legacies, athletes and wild card admits at HYPS would not survive at MIT or Caltech at all.</p>
<p>The average isn't what separates the student bodies of these schools, it's the tails.</p>
<p>As for faculty, general rankings don't matter. For research, it's what individual research groups do that really counts. We academics keep track of famous profs who go someplace to retire and are hired just to have their names on the masthead.</p>
<p>I'm not so sure I agree. Many Tulane students would not be admitted to the highly selective colleges, yet most of them are keeping up with their peers and doing quite well at their temporary (sometimes very prestigious) colleges. Very interesting, I think. </p>
<p>Anyway, the THES ranking is obviously untrustworthy. Duke's quality increased 41 slots in one year?</p>
<p>cleareyes
I like your analogies. Paul Newman, in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, was from Caltech.</p>
<p>I am not sure how you're disagreeing with me warblersrule86? As I said, I don't think the differences are huge. And I don't think the curricula at the top schools are inherently demanding (you can make it so of course) EXCEPT for Caltech and MIT. So I would expect that the excellent students at Tulane would keep up if accepted at Princeton or Stanford. Their minimum requirements are not very tight and the administrators are well aware that they suffer from grade inflation. Therefore I would expect that the above average student from even a decent state school could do ok at an elite college (the distribution of performance, however, might be a little lower).</p>
<p>In contrast, the two Tech schools have very rigorous minimal requirements regardless of major and there is much less room for "getting by."</p>
<p>
Ah. I thought you meant (the context was confusing) that the differences between students at CHYMPS were not huge, not CHYMPS and other schools. Thanks for clarifying.</p>
<p>It is so interesting to hear how people see themselves and their world. </p>
<p>Yes, it would be tough for the average English major at a liberal arts college to succeed in engineering classes at Caltech or MIT (or in an engineering classes at Princeton or Duke or Stanford). Do people on this thread really think, however, that the average MIT or Caltech student would succeed in classes well outside their own sphere of interest and accomplishment? Yeah, yeah, some people at the tech schools can wreak havoc on any curve, but most would flounder. Admittedly, the failure rate would be different (few people would fail an English class), but the rate of great success would be similar.</p>
<p>More importantly, I think you will be surprised as the years go by that lifelong academic success is unlikely to be defined by math SAT scores, a passion for physics, or an Intel science project. These wouldn't be a bad way to predict potential researchers, and all of the mid-size non-tech colleges seek out the stars in those areas in order to make up a chunk of a diverse class, but there are lots of ways to star in a society (even if you want to define 'star' in a purely academic way), and it can't be measured in the simplistic, linear way that several of you insist upon (others hold the opposite, that there isn't much difference among any of the top 80 schools, aside from caltech and mit). Anyway, the quickie stereotype (Hitchcok california math genius=caltech; matt damon east coast math genius=mit; love story preppy=harvard) is fine for the movies but simply doesn't hold up in the world. It's what you do with the schools that counts for more than the acceptance policy of the schools (echoing several of you), all of which reminds me of what Erica Jong once said about Harvard: if you're a genius, it's great. If you're not--and very few people are geniuses--then it's an albatross around your neck. And I'd guess it's an albatross because many people believe that their school of matriculation and their ensuing hard work will lead inevitably to success, and that's a recipe for disappointment.</p>
<p>
[quote]
es, it would be tough for the average English major at a liberal arts college to succeed in engineering classes at Caltech or MIT (or in an engineering classes at Princeton or Duke or Stanford). Do people on this thread really think, however, that the average MIT or Caltech student would succeed in classes well outside their own sphere of interest and accomplishment? Yeah, yeah, some people at the tech schools can wreak havoc on any curve, but most would flounder. Admittedly, the failure rate would be different (few people would fail an English class), but the rate of great success would be similar.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think your last sentence really hit the nail on the head, and your statements profoundly hinge upon what you mean by 'succeed' and 'flounder'. I and many other people believe that the average MIT engineer would do better in a Harvard humanities class than a Harvard humanities major would do in an MIT engineering class. Obviously neither would achieve truly great success, but the fact is, like you said, it's far far easier to fail an engineering class than to fail an humanities class. The sad truth is that you really can know very little and do very little and still pass a humanities class. You won't get a good grade, but you'll still pass. If you adopt that kind of attitude in an engineering class, you're going to get an F. </p>
<p>Incidentally, this is why humanities majors tend to have a large contingent of lazy students. Don't get me wrong - not all, or even most humanities students are lazy. But I think no-one would dispute that the humanities majors contain a greater proportion of lazier students than do the engineering majors. Every school has a hierarchy of easier and harder majors, yet there are practically no schools where engineering is considered to be an easy major. </p>
<p>Hence, I have to push back on your use of the word 'flounder'. Sure, an MIT engineer who has to take humanities classes might not be a superstar. In fact, he might end up just being an average humanities student, or maybe even below-average. Yet the truth is, an average, or even a below-average humanities grade is usually still a fairly decent grade. Again, contrast that to engineering courses that have absolutely no problem in handing out boatloads of really bad grades. I know of engineering classes where 1/4 of the class got D's or F's. You never see that kind of carnage in humanities classes. Hence, even an 'average' humanities student might actually have a better GPA (and for doing far less work) than an above-average engineering student.</p>
<p>That's so true. One of my professors has an article posted on her office door with the breakdown of grades in each department at Duke. Only about 50% of the chem and engineering students got A's or B's, but 75% of the classics students did, and 85% of the art history and English students did!</p>
<p>Warning: Rant coming</p>
<p>As an academic, one of my pet peeves is the notion that college should be a predictor of success later in life. </p>
<p>But to me this is absurd. College should be about giving you an opportunity to learn the kinds of things school teaches well and then certifying that you have learned those things. That's it.</p>
<p>For me, the argument that Steve Jobs or whomoever, dropped out and made a fortune or became president or what not should not be relevant to the role of college. And yes, maybe rural Joe was rejected by all schools yet still rose to cure cancer. So what, what matters is that given limited knowledge, it made sense for good schools to reject Joe.</p>
<p>This is why I object to the concept of "balance" that is so fashionable today.</p>
<p>There is an obvious illogic to the fact that schools still predominantly select for people who learn well in the classroom but try to paper over that fact by admitting boatloads of people who aren't quite as good and then making it possible for all to get through. School should not define whether or not you are a good person or a success.</p>
<p>After all if you can't do quantum physics, it shouldn't stop you from being a successful sales god or star athlete. But you should NOT get certified as having learned quantum physics.</p>
<p>What has happened is that because good student performances do correlate weakly with success in life, there has been great pressure on schools to dilute their value as scholastic filters to serve broader "social goals."</p>
<p>My preference -- and it is not commonplace -- is that the elite schools should select classes that they think (before the fact, even though they will err) are the ones most likely to do best at their school, however they define the subject matter. </p>
<p>In contrast the best schools fight to make sure that their top 30 or 50 or 70% are chosen purely meritocratically while the other students are selected on the basis of the arbitrary cause or special interest du jour. This does not mean that quality means the same thing. I would not dream of Juilliard and MIT looking for the same things. But I do find it annoying that the Ivies do have similar criteria to MIT for their very best students but then reject people who -- by their own criteria -- would most likely do better than many they reject. I think this is wrong for schools and unfair for students who -- as anyone can see who reads CC -- are constantly trying to game the system.</p>
<p>Anyway, as someone who very nearly went to MIT and still admires the school I'm glad that a few places are still keeping the faith.</p>
<p>: ) Your posts tend to make me happy, Not quite old.</p>