<p>“I do, however, make differences when it comes to the issue of TAs, where I do believe substantial differences do exist.”</p>
<p>Care to explain Xiggi? Schools like Harvard, MIT and Stanford employ TAs at the same rate as schools like Cal and Michigan.</p>
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<p>Easy … On the one hand, prior qualifications and preparation to serve as an educator. On the other hand, dedication to education. </p>
<p>The same differences you see in the student body at the UG level do not magically disappear at the graduate level.</p>
<p>So you are saying that TAs at Harvard, MIT and Stanford are used, but they are better.</p>
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Schools like Harvard and Columbia enroll thousands more graduate students than Berkeley… I thought smaller was better…I’m confused… :p</p>
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<p>If better means better prepared and better placed at an appropriate level, that is exactly what I am saying. There is world of difference between a TA who is his or her last years of a PhD and a TA that just debarked from a foreign country to pursue a Master’s degree. </p>
<p>And, if you want to figure out WHY I am saying that, just spend some time on the graduate forums (here and elsewhere) where students share their admissions stories, especially when they discuss the demands placed upon foreign students seeking master’s degrees. Then check how they express themselves in English and what they write about HAVING to teach … dumba$$ american UGs.</p>
<p>I don’t recall any of my GSIs going for a master’s degree. All were PhD candidates and happened to speak perfect English…I think I had one foreign TA in Physics…he was from Canada.</p>
<p>How’s that for some anecdotal info, xiggi?</p>
<p>I don’t doubt you, UCB. </p>
<p>Now, do you know if UCB asks any of its Master’s students to teach sections or labs or whatever in exchange of financial aid and stipends? Are Master’s students usually have a work schedule at UCB?</p>
<p>Are all graduate assistants at UCB PhD candidates?</p>
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<p>So basically you are claiming that graduate school rankings permeate and contribute towards the strength of an undergraduate education. This is very doubtful.</p>
<p>By the way I was asking for a link on undergraduate departments. I don’t see why graduate education could be used in anyway as an indicator for how good a college is, which the UMich grads and Berkeley grads are trying to push down our throats
I think this skews up rankings to favor schools which focus on graduate education than undergraduate. Of course public school students would cite this because it favors them. However, if you think the kids at Dartmouth without a top 20 chemistry department are getting less education than public schools with large research facilities then you must have a great sense of humor.</p>
<p>Another point is that UMich is not seen as a top 20 schools. All this pseudoanalysis by public school graduates just silly.</p>
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<p>How exactly do you determine how strong an academic department is? </p>
<p>How does having a stars in research and academia translate to good teaching skills? When did the ability to perform nobel winning research correlate with ability to pass less complex materials to a less advanced crowd?</p>
<p>I don’t know the answer to your questions, xiggi.</p>
<p>I don’t agree with a lot of how sefago started this out, and I find the whole argument hilarious and pointless. But as far as graduate schools and their strength being a criteria or even a factor in the undergraduate education, well then I guess we should start telling people, especially science majors, that they should cross all LAC’s off their list. Yes, having that kind of research available is a factor to be considered when deciding if you want to attend a research university or an LAC. But for an undergrad to think they will get a very different experience doing research in a Nobel laureate’s lab vs. a lab at a more “ordinary” university is very very very doubtful. In fact it is far more likely they will get attention from the prof at an Emory or a Wake Forest or Tulane than at Harvard or Berkeley. At that stage all but the tiniest handful of students are just trying to get a feel for what real research is like, it isn’t like they are going to spend 5 years or more pursuing research in that lab. Few students go to grad school where they went undergrad any longer, it is discouraged. It used to be more common, but not so much now.</p>
<p>Oh please- UMich graduates and Berkeley graduates claiming there schools are equivalent to schools whose students could academically smash a large segment of the students at this large public schools is at best laughable. </p>
<p>One of the things I hate the most is self-promotion. Anyone could come, and claim there school is better based on a metric suitable for them. </p>
<p>OSU is no different IMO than UMich. You have the same opportunity to thrive. All these rank obsessed people should not feel uncomfortable lol, when their schools are compared to OSU, when they have no qualms comparing their schools to Ivies.</p>
<p>Deal with it UMich graduates</p>
<p>sefago, I’m not sure I follow the argument you’ve been making.</p>
<p>Are you claiming that we could fire all the faculty at any university, replace them with random taxicab drivers, and see no difference in the quality of education?</p>
<p>Are you claiming that better faculty only make a difference for superior students?</p>
<p>Or something else?</p>
<p>First, I am not making an argument. I am just curious why people are using graduate school ranking data or the PA as a reason for why an undergrad is a “top 15.” Any butthead could tell that those schools with high PAs are research-intensive universities.</p>
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<p>Can the taxicab drivers teach general chemistry adequately? Then I doubt there will be a difference in quality between a taxicab driver teaching general chemistry as opposed to a nobel laureate doing so. </p>
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<p>No, I am still confused about how faculty has to do with quality of undergraduate education. No one has answered my question adequately. Except show me how many members of a specific faculty are members of NAS.</p>
<p>Its pretty simple- how does superstar faculty (employed for research) have to do with quality of undergrad?</p>
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Well there’s (Theirs? They’res? LOL) a vote for whatever school sefago attended. Yeesh. And claiming the average taxicab driver could teach general chemistry…well I am going to assume he was joking. Because if he wasn’t I guess everything he said can be ignored.</p>
<p>Anyway, the quote is a silly argument. Yes, the student body at Harvard et. al. is more homogeneously of higher academic caliber if you use stats like GPA and SAT’s than Michigan’s or Berkeley’s. But people go to school to receive an education, and that consists of many inputs. Certainly the caliber of your peers is one of them, but there has to be a much bigger gap than there is between Harvard and Berkeley/Michigan to make a major difference there. Besides, it only takes a few really super bright students in a class to bring challenging points of view out, and certainly there are plenty of those at both those schools. I believe in being “surrounded” by people smarter than yourself as a big part of the academic experience and as a big part of what makes a school academically challenging, but I think sefago overestimates the difference between the schools in this regard. Does it give Harvard an edge? Sure, no one claimed Michigan/Berkeley were of Harvard prestige overall. But to say it is all a matter of one’s peers is to make it far more one-dimensional than it really is.</p>
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<p>This may be true if general chemistry is just a static collection of facts and the process of learning them well is an entirely mechanical process, one that never benefits from shared insights or different ways to frame a concept.</p>
<p>These issues aside, senior faculty do more than teach. Very often they also do more than conduct research. They mentor other faculty members. They set curriculum guidelines. They deliver convocation addresses. They interview prospective new hires.</p>
<p>I accept it as fairly self-evident that smart, creative, energetic faculty members enrich their school communities. Unfortunately there is no easy, infallible way to measure which schools have a high percentage of such people or their impact. But there are indicators and the indicators tend to corroborate each other. Schools with many prize-winning faculty also tend to be schools that pay their professors well. Schools with well-paid, recognized faculty tend also to have big libraries and modern science labs. Is it possible that schools with all these virtues also can be schools that herd their undergraduates into over-crowded, boring lecture classes? Maybe so. That’s why you need to visit a prospective college to see if it lives up to expectations.</p>
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<p>Where did I claim the average taxicab drivers could teach general chemistry? I posed the question:</p>
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<p>If yes, then I don’t think there is intrinsically any gains in being taught the fundamentals of a subject by a Nobel laureate than a taxi cab driver who understands the fundamentals of that specific subject. That’s my point. So all these claims about faculty are just weak arguments used by public school graduates. </p>
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<p>OK, this got boring, but your inference is wrong. I think you jumped to such an inference because its a common argument on CC, that the “caliber of your peers” contributes to your education. I never said this. I said:</p>
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<p>Its pretty simple, and needs the reading skills of a three year old. The students at higher up schools have a stronger academic profile than UMich and Berkeley. I understand it can be inferred that I meant stronger students=better school. I do think so as a matter of OPINION, but I am aware that this is not a FACT, and I am not touting it as such. Being aware of this, I also pointed out that each person has there own metric for judging which school is better. I for one will never see UMich as a top 15 school no matter how much spurious logic is used. </p>
<p>Anyways, I still stand that most of the arguments used here are for the benefits of people who want there schools to be higher and equivalent to Top schools. The caliber of students between these two schools are marginally different if you use data such as SAT’s and GPA. I am sure you can get the same academic experience from both school.</p>
<p>People should stop selecting metrics that fit their purpose, and claim it is objective, while criticizing USNWR at the same time.</p>
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<p>I agree, they do all this, but you have not answered my question yet- how does that contribute to undergraduate education? </p>
<p>Does having a Nobel laureate or being a member of NAS make you more capable of doing this, than an ordinary run of the mill professor? </p>
<p>Do you think these professors come to Berkeley so that they could teach the students or to further their research?</p>
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<p>Yeah I do agree too, but I dont agree with previous allusions that being a member of NAS or having a Nobel would make you more capable of doing this. if someone could provide a concise statement that shows the correlation between having a Nobel and being a great general chemistry teacher, I would shut my yap up</p>
<p>“People should stop selecting metrics that fit their purpose, and claim it is objective, while criticizing USNWR at the same time.”</p>
<p>Sefago, you should start by observing such an attitude yourself. </p>
<p>if you insist on using the USNWR as a criterion, you should accept that Cal and Michigan are #14 and #24 in the nation in terms of student selectivity and that both are tied at #11 in terms of commitment to classroom instruction. Those are actual rankings assigned to Cal and Michigan by the USNWR.</p>
<p>If you add the fact that Cal and Michigan are both among the top 15 in terms of academic excellence (PA, Fiske, NRC, etc…), I don’t see how you can argue that Cal and Michigan are nowhere near the top 15.</p>
<p>Change the criteria a bit, and Cal and Michigan come out at #1 and #18 respectively.
[Washington</a> Monthly](<a href=“http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings/national_university_rank.php]Washington”>http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings/national_university_rank.php)</p>
<p>Granted, these criteria, too, include faculty awards and academy memberships.
So why, as sefago keeps asking, do so many people seem to think these qualifications make a difference to undergraduate education?</p>
<p>To me it’s rather intuitively obvious that a smarter, more accomplished population of teachers will tend to be better teachers than a less smart, less accomplished population of teachers. If they are actually teaching. And assuming that other relevant attributes are held more or less constant. A genius teacher might stutter or speak with a heavy accent, but I assume the population of Nobels and NAS members does not have a much higher incidence of issues like this than the general population.</p>
<p>So the question becomes, are distinctions like NAS, Nobels, MacArthurs, etc. of any value as indicators that the average undergraduate is likely to get a better education? Is it possible that a high number of these distinctions is actually a negative for undergraduates?</p>
<p>If faculty distinctions are not good indicators, what is a better one? Assumption: faculty quality and teaching quality do matter. We may not agree how to measure them well, but I think it’s fair to assume we usually can recognize an exceptionally bad or exceptionally good teacher when we see one, and that exceptionally good is more desirable than exceptionally bad.</p>