<p>The only difference is the professors the student gets to have contact with. There is no difference between Introductory Physics at Harvard and at Arizona State. It’s the same material for both schools.</p>
<p>My experience was similar to Greybeard’s description on page 1. I also attended a HYPSM, then one ranked in the top 20, then an MBA school at the time ranked #12 I believe.</p>
<p>It’s all about self management. Exogenous forces (including peer quality, school ranking) are minor influences compared to the way you manage your own time and energies… wherever you find yourself. This may be less so comparing say a #79 large public with a school in the Top 20, but even there it’s all about personal initiative and discipline. Unfortunately I would have less conviction when comparing a junior college and a highly ranked 4-year college… there are significant differences there.</p>
<p>If you are talking about USNWR ranking, I’ve something that may surprise you: Back in 1990, Penn was ranked 20th, while Michigan was ranked 17th. And, back in 1985, Michigan was ranked 7th.</p>
<p>Everybody knows USNWR is not reliable. Some colleges invest on the criteria that USNWR thinks important, so they can make significant improvement on the ranking.</p>
<p>If you’re trying to make an elite cartel in which Penn exists while Michigan doesn’t on the basis of USNWR, that’s pretty pitty. As someone above mentioned, you may have an inferiority complex.</p>
<p>Thank GOD for football. It gives us something less annoying and mundane to compare schools with that excludes elitist chumps that get offended if you don’t bow down to an Ivy League school just because you go to a state flagship university.</p>
<p>The pretension and condescension in this thread is positively palpable.</p>
<p>
Says the DMouth admit.</p>
<p>I’m trying to think of a word that means condescension that starts with the letter “p.”</p>
<p>OP are you talking about academics or other factors too? You can’t compare the education you get in one class at ANY college to a class at ANY other college in the same subject at the same level. Different profs have different techniques which can greatly affect both the material they teach and what the students get out of it. We didn’t need this. It’s obvious all the schools are different.</p>
<p>of course a Penn student has to go out of his way to make it a point that Penn is not the same as other top 50 schools…it’s better! :)</p>
<p>Hooray for ivy syndrome!</p>
<p>bxkxrxxx, that is stupid, academics are comparable, the same material is being taught at Harvard as at Tulane…and some of the time professors at a school such as Harvard/MIT may be too caught up in their research to teach the students, but the same is true at a large public school. In terms of what you learn and how professors teach material, I think it’s the same at most places.</p>
<p>People seem to get quantitative rankings mixed up with qualitative rankings. </p>
<p>The reason having $2 billion is ranked above having $200,000 is that with quantitative rankings, a higher ranking allows you to do everything at that level (eg, buy something for $2 billion) AND everything ranked BELOW that (eg, if you have $2 billion, you can not only buy something that costs $2 billion, you can buy something that costs $1 billion, $200 million, $167 million, etc). You can also buy TWO things that cost $1 billion.</p>
<p>That’s simply not the same as with QUALITATIVE rankings…Eva Mendes might be ranked #1 hottest female by FHM or Maxim, but that’s NOT a quantitative ranking…just because she’s #1, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything quantitative about anybody ranked below her. She might have 100 “quality points” but that doesn’t mean she’s with worth 2 women who have only 50 quality points.</p>
<p>The reason college rankings are so confusing to those who know nothing about logic or statistics is that they take a lot of QUANTITATIVE stats like % of classes below 20 students, alumni-giving %, etc, throw them in the blender, and people infer that the results are QUALITATIVE…ie, the school ranked #5 is BETTER (qualitative term) than the one ranked #20.</p>
<p>It’s the eagerness to make the leap from quantitative data to qualitative conclusions that shows just how immature the minds of so many people on college confidential really are.</p>
<p>
Princeton?</p>
<p>^^^^^^lol.</p>
<p>“mini, can you paste the link to that COFHE study?”</p>
<p>COFHE rules are that it is never made public (and they’ve done another one this year). But if you google COFHE Harvard Boston Globe, or search the Harvard Crimson, you’ll find the details that have been published.</p>
<p>Here’s part of the article from the Globe (there is more in the Crimson):</p>
<p>Student satisfaction at Harvard College ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private colleges, according to an analysis of survey results that finds that Harvard students are disenchanted with the faculty and social life on campus.</p>
<p>An internal Harvard memo, obtained by the Globe, provides numerical data that appear to substantiate some long-held stereotypes of Harvard: that undergraduate students often feel neglected by professors, and that they don’t have as much fun as peers on many other campuses.</p>
<p>The group of 31 colleges, known as the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, or COFHE, includes all eight Ivy League schools, other top research universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and small colleges like Amherst and Wellesley.</p>
<p>''Harvard students are less satisfied with their undergraduate educations than the students at almost all of the other COFHE schools," according to the memo, dated Oct. 2004 and marked ''confidential." ''Harvard student satisfaction compares even less favorably to satisfaction at our closest peer institutions."</p>
<p>The 21-page memo, from staff researchers at Harvard to academic deans, documents student dissatisfaction with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising, and student life factors such as sense of community and social life on campus.</p>
<p>The raw data used in the memo come from surveys of graduating seniors in 2002, but are the most recent comparison available and are still consulted by Harvard administrators. On a five-point scale, Harvard students’ overall satisfaction comes out to 3.95, compared to an average of 4.16 for the other 30 COFHE schools. Although the difference appears small, Harvard officials say they take the ''satisfaction gap" very seriously.</p>
<p>Only four schools scored lower than Harvard, but the schools were not named. (COFHE data are supposed to be confidential.) The memo also notes that Harvard’s ''satisfaction gap" has existed since at least 1994.</p>
<p>''Harvard College should be known not only as an institution in which students can sit in lecture halls to learn from faculty who make original contributions to knowledge, but also as a place where they may encounter, and challenge, these scholars directly in seminar and small class settings," the report said.</p>
<p>But right now, students can go through four years on campus with limited contact with professors. They often take large lecture classes, divided into sections headed by graduate student ''teaching fellows." Small classes are frequently taught by temporary instructors instead of regular, tenure-track professors. And in many cases, advisers are not professors, either, but graduate students, administrators, or full-time advisers.</p>
<p>''I’ve definitely had great professors, but most of the time you have to chase them down and show initiative if you want to get to know them," said Kathy Lee, a junior majoring in psychology. ''I’ve had a lot of trouble getting to know enough faculty to get the recommendations I need for medical school."</p>
<p>On the five-point scale, Harvard students gave an average score of 2.92 on faculty availability, compared to an average 3.39 for the other COFHE schools. Harvard students gave a 3.16 for quality of instruction, compared to a 3.31 for the other schools, and a 2.54 for quality of advising in their major, compared to 2.86 for the other schools.</p>
<p>Students gave Harvard a 2.62 for social life on campus, compared to a 2.89 for the other schools, and a 2.53 for sense of community, compared to 2.8.</p>
<p>@Schmaltz: I was going to post something like that, but you did it far better than I ever could. Nice post.</p>
<p>What are the suicide rates of these to 50 schools?</p>
<p>I’d bet my house Harvard is number 1.</p>
<p>^^a few years back, Harvard and MIT were number one. lol</p>
<p>@ modestmelody, that princeton joke was hilarious!</p>
<p>
Good statistic to whip out when some brain dead elitist is berrating you about how they’re going/went/are in Harvard.</p>
<p>Hey, 26th ain’t bad.</p>