Again, evidence? The world is filled with talented and well adjusted kids who were rejected from Princeton and ended up getting a fine education at Rutgers, Duke, BU, Lehigh, Binghamton, Smith, UNC, Drexel, etc. I won’t list the hundred or so places that “Princeton rejects” end up at, but if there was a documented trend of kids getting rejected from Princeton and ending up institutionalized or incarcerated because their lives were so broken from the application process- I’d love to read about it.
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Please tell me about the “mental health effect” that happens to students & parents when they apply to Princeton. Are they disappointed for a day? Is there a rash of murder-suicides?
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Not my argument - was just sharing my interpretation what the person might have referred to.
(… also, mental health can be affected in ways that don’t lead to murder-suicides – that is just an outdated stereotype, feeding stigma!)
As luck would have it, I am a Hampshire College graduate who also took classes at the much higher ranked Amherst College and Smith College.
The 5 College Consortium allows for easy and free cross-registration, it was basically just pick 'em and show up, I didn’t even need permission from my own school.
So I actually can directly compare attending a lower ranked/less selective school and simultaneously doing coursework at a much more highly ranked/selective school.
My high school grades were mediocre and my SATs were not good (late bloomer), I would have needed a genie wish + someone in my family donating a building to get admitted to Amherst RD. But there I was in class!
Final Grades: B+ at Smith, and an A at Amherst for those classes. The work was rigorous and challenging, but not much more so than I was used to. I was able to keep up without a problem. These were straightforward History classes, not basket weaving or Rocks for Jocks.
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I can also add my personal experience that the rigor of the CTCL schools is underappeciated. My undergrad degree is from a CTCL LAC. The rigor was pretty intense–tons of reading/writing for every class and needing to be prepared to participate in class discussions.
I did a semester away from campus and was amazed when people complained about the workload. I generally could do all the reading for the week on Sunday afternoons.
Grad school was sort of the same, it felt no harder than undergrad I took one high level undergrad course from the school and was amazed at how easy it was. Simply by reading and showing up, i could get the A. I didn’t have to show mastery by talking in class or doing presentations.
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I know Salisbury reasonably well, have known people who attended, and people who work there. To me, it is a prime example of how schools with high acceptance rates can have excellent quality. They will never have the cultural cachet of the elites, but their students can end up in the same place, in the long run.
I also know people at UM-CP, UM-BC, Towson, etc. My distinct impression is that Salisbury’s small class size and faculty that truly focus upon undergraduate teaching (no TA’s) results in a high-touch environment that allows students to maximize their talents in many majors.
The majority of the Fulbrights come from the arts and sciences students, but the nursing students have the highest pass rate of the Maryland schools on their certification exam, and the education students have an impressive track rate of being state teachers of the year. The school’s ethics bowl team regularly makes it to the national competition after competing in a region that includes all of the Ivy’s and NESCACs. (their most recent trip in 2021 or 22 resulted in a 12th place finish nationally).
n=1: One student I knew went from Salisbury to Columbia for grad school, and remarked upon how easy grad school was, and how she had already done many of the assigned texts as an undergrad (as compared to her peers from more elite schools, who had not) .
My impression is that many schools with high admit rates have a broader range of students than many of the elite schools: some that are super bright and with strong work ethics that could have succeeded anywhere; some that are driven and hard-working dynamos but poor test takers; some that are overwhelmed by working 40 hours a week while in college; some that should not be in college because they don’t know why they’re there, and probably won’t graduate; some that were abysmally prepared by a failing k-12 school system.
I am sure that teaching in such an environment is far more challenging than teaching in an elite school; trying to challenge the best students, while motivating the uninspired, and backfilling the unprepared. But it seems like schools like Salisbury are doing it.
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Close family member has an Ivy BA and a PhD from a HYPSM school. Subsequently taught at Yale, Columbia, and now tenured at a NJ State school (with an extremely high acceptance rate).
Took them 3 years at the NJ school of continually dumbing down (their words) both the material taught and the difficulty of tests before finding a level at which the entire class didn’t fail the tests. The kids are not remotely comparable. This is intro and 2nd level psychology btw so talking about multiple choice tests here by and large.
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Why did they leave Yale and Columbia, were they not on the tenure track at those schools?
Correct. Those were the jobs most readily available at the time without having to relocate. They live sorta kinda in between NYC and NH.
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It is always interesting to hear anecdotes about the level of teaching someone feels they are doing at the college level and wonder how much of the how-to of teaching they actually learned (as opposed to presenting information) before going into a classroom.
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A couple of thoughts.
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It doesn’t necessary follows that high GPA = Less Rigor, which the person quoted at the start of the thread implies. Sure, if someone defines final grade in a class as rigor, it does. But I doubt most students would. You could have a really rigorous class (tons of work, really challenges you, advances your abilities), or even rigorous college, that still generally gives out generous grades. The lowest of the Ivy’s has an average GPA of ~3.49. By comparison, when I was at UCLA years ago the average was around 3.0. Does that mean my UCLA education was harder than U of Chicago now? I strongly suspect not. Harvard is known simultaneously for both rigorous coursework and the grade inflation.
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There’s far too many variables to compare people in different schools or phases of education. Your cohort at college is going to be very different than HS in many cases. The student’s maturity. Arbitrary professors or TAs. Etc. Both of my older kids went to highly selective SLAC, yet both ended with college GPA’s at or better than their unweighted HS GPA (and with multiple majors). Same happened to me back in the say. I was middle to below average of the PAC in the G&T program at my below average public HS, but summa cum laude at UCLA. Some of that was cohort, some of it was me becoming a more serious student. It was not that UCLA was easier or less rigorous than my HS.
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As others have noted, its very major dependent but also course tract. Ive been browsing Reddits from students at my S23’s upcoming college and it sounds like some of the classes in his major are taught by professors who teach the course at such an advanced level that it is designed to scare away anyone who is not exceptionally gifted in the subject.
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It’s common for professors to overestimate the preparedness and capability of the students that they are teaching, especially in the first few years.
People who get PhDs and then become professors were often superstar students. They can be disappointed when they teach a bunch of people who aren’t like they were when they were undergrads. This is SO common when inexperienced faculty candidates have to give teaching demos when they do interviews. The typical candidate pitches their demo material WAY too high and gets internal chuckles from the other profs watching. Most of them adjust to the appropriate approach within the first couple years of teaching, but it can be a painful process for everyone. Some of them never adjust, and there is mutual disharmony between them and the students. Some profs are just bad at teaching, and it really irks their colleagues when students say “oh he’s just so brilliant that we can’t possibly understand him”. No, he just sucks at teaching and he’s too lazy to improve. The other profs are equally or more brilliant and they put a ton of effort into pedagogy. UGH.
I was at or near the top of my classes in a challenging major at a huge state flagship – typical for a prof. Some of them were notorious for being hard. I found the courses to be plenty challenging, but not overwhelming. I sailed through my PhD program. Again, challenging but I was up to the challenge.
I TA’d a few classes as an undergrad, and that showed me the full range and distribution of student performance. Crucially, I TA’d the same exact classes I had taken with the same exact profs. Turns out it’s much harder to effectively teach it than to ace it as a student.
When I taught at a non-selective SLAC, I had all kinds of students. I absolutely had stellar students in each class. I’m sure there were less than there would’ve been at more selective schools. It’s hard to say if the rigor was lower than my VERY rigorous undergrad program, because the requirements of bio majors are quite variable between institutions. I’d say that individual classes had the same rigor.
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Would it be an even bigger shock when their first teaching assignment (as either a graduate student TA or a new faculty member) is “[subject] for non-majors”?
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Absolutely. When I get complaints about how much reading and writing I assign, it’s invariably from non-majors who aren’t used to that kind of work.
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Oh for sure. Someone who is obsessed enough with their subject to get a PhD and then want to teach it? How could anyone not be as enthralled by the central dogma as I was when I first learned it?! It kept me up at night!
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I double checked. My family taught for 9 years total at Yale and Columbia. So, plenty of time to level-set and understand the student body. The transition to the NJ State school was extremely jarring and not at all the result of their preparedness as a teacher.
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I’ve never studied nor taught at an elite institution, so I can’t offer insights about that. It may be a whole other world, as your relative’s experience seems to indicate. I can say that the work from scientific researchers at elite institutions is no better than that from non-elite places in my experience. Perhaps the basic sciences have less variation in rigor between institutions?
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I am reliably told that the difference in quality among faculty at elite versus non-elite schools is quite small, but the difference among the student body can be vast.
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With the academic market as it is (too many PhDs, too few tenure track positions), you’ll find elite college grads teaching at all kinds of schools. A good friend (Stanford PhD in a STEM field) is a tenured professor at smallish private college that attracts primarily “B” students.
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That’s been my experience as well (though I’ve not been at elite places). I almost mentioned that in my post. There are brilliant faculty at every school. Some are amazing teachers, some aren’t. One thing spouse and I have noticed as research scientists is that quality of work doesn’t correlate strongly with academic pedigree. That, along with our experience knowing amazing professors at even middling institutions, helped us not get hung up on certain things when helping our kid with his college search.
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