I think this is highly dependent on the major in question. Engineering for example is very egalitarian.
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Older Students teaching younger ones can be very affective depending on how it’s managed.
Sometimes a peer can explain an abstract concept to you in a more assessable way than the teacher can. The best lesson on adding and subtracting negative numbers I ever had was from a 14 year old boy who used poker chips to play a simple made up game with us. I “ got it” ever since.
Most parents love a name drop. In my case my parents wanted me to apply to Harvard over Purdue for engineering because “you should pick the Ivy not the chicken company”, even though Harvard doesn’t stand a chance against Purdue. It’s also all over CC with people always talking about the T-XX instead of the hidden gems.
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Yes, this is true. However, I suspect that engineering is an exception rather than the rule.
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But a solid education can be obtained outside “elite” universities. It is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. No, not every school will be MIT, Stanford or Yale, but there are many good quality colleges that provide a more than solid education and are not super competitive in terms of admission. One of the biggest issues in affluent communities is the perception that there are only 50 or so colleges/universities in this country that are worth attending. That causes a feeding frenzy of sorts and leaves a lot of fantastic students feeling disappointed when those schools don’t work out. Of course, not every college is top notch, but there are far more quality institutions out there than the 50 or so schools that suck up all the air here on CC.
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“barely functional command of English”?
I find your input fascinating,@mathprofdad, as it is contrary to our personal experience and other faculty with whom I have spoken, who find an enormous difference in quantitative ability among students at different tiers of schools. My kids took basic MVC courses at a local community college, a T100, and a T3, and the coursework, and their peers, were in a different universe in each. YMMV.
An important reason for the race for elites in suburbs is their appeal to donut hole families. Only the elites are going to offer any financial aid to those with incomes of $250k, many of which are full pay of about $75k per year, regardless of whether the school is ranked 125 or 25.
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I’m not sure. I certainly don’t see it in healthcare. I would assume biases in things like financial quantitative analysis, but I believe the pockets where prestige bias is real to an industry actually the exception. Certainly individual companies might have pet schools, but that’s probably more about confirmation bias based on previous hires than prestige per se.
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@mathprofdad did mention “by the upper undergraduate level”, so that may just mean students who have become math majors, rather than the pool of students who got through frosh admission.
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That’s right. Basic multivariable calculus is not the upper undergraduate level. One does see a wide variation in preparation among students at the introductory level, but these differences in my experience narrow at the upper levels, such that math majors at different schools look more similar than strong math students and weak math students at the same school. But that’s just my experience, and (largely) the experience of my colleagues – I’ve never cared enough to try to substantiate this view with data.
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Actually, this is completely incorrect.
The only schools that will pay merit money to families making >$250K are schools that need to buy stats. These are typically large, state funded, tier 2-3 schools. Ivies don’t need to meet revenue targets. Same is true for some other elite schools. At other so called “top tier” schools, good luck! Hopkins has a list of 300+ students with identical 1550+/4.5/12AP with status conscious parents that are only too happy to pay full cost just to say their kid went to Hopkins.
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It may not be just the financial aid for some the top 5% excluding the top 0.5%. For those families in that range, there is a lot more space for downward mobility (kid ends up in the bottom 95%) than upward mobility. Add to that the general downward mobility in an absolute sense of this day and age ( https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-millennials-are-running-out-of-time/ ) and we see an even greater incentive to seek eliteness.
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That was poorly worded. It is extremely common that graduate students in all science disciplines are foreign born with English as a second language. It’s not that they don’t speak proper English per se. It’s that accents can be so heavy as to border on unintelligible. I used to meet with students after discussions occasionally just to have a “what did he say” debrief. Any barrier to understanding is a defacto reduction in instructional quality.
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Ivins aren’t offering merit money to anyone. They do offer financial aid to those with annual incomes of 200k, and in some cases, 250k.
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Perhaps elite schools with holistic policies are doing what they can to educate students that won’t mind being a TA in a PhD program because they really love what they do and want to further the cause versus say start a non-profit to try and get into Harvard so that they can graduate and land big $$ jobs?
In a weird way you are marginalizing folks that probably have 1600 SAT and 4.5+ GPA AND the courage to teach in a foreign land. In a fair world, all elite colleges might well have 70%++ kids of that ilk versus yours or mine.
No, you’re completely misconstruing my words and intent. Many science graduate students at all levels are foreign born. They come to the US because they are seeking the best education they can get. I’m in no way minimizing that. Most teach as a means to an end…so they can eat while they study. That does not make them effective teachers though. People paying high dollars for prestigious schools are frequently being taught by TAs that are challenging to understand.
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While I wouldn’t say it’s “extremely common” for a science TA to have no functional command of English, I think @eyemgh was commenting on the impact of those students’ poor language skills in the classroom, rather than their worthiness to pursue a PhD.
[Edit to add ] That said, many students do have valid complaints about the intelligibility of their TA’s. Sometimes it has to do with their language, other times it is their poor teaching skills. As @eyemgh points out, teaching in graduate school is primarily a means to an end, and pedagogical training for grad students is woefully lacking.
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The tradition of “his accent is so heavy I can’t understand him” started with refugees from Nazi Germany- physicists and other scientists who fled and made it to the US, continued with those who made it here from the USSR, and is now flourishing with the latest cohort who come from India and China.
You do realize how xenophobic it sounds when you claim that your kid can’t understand his TA? Or it’s not YOUR kid- it’s someone else complaining?
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It wasn’t my kid. It was ME. That was my lived experience. Roughly 1/3 of my TAs were challenging to understand. It’s no different than having an instructor that faces the board and mumbles. That’s not xenophobia.
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I think it’s a bit hostile to accuse them of xenophobia. The comment was a bit poorly worded but I have had experience with TAs from foreign countries whose accents are a bit hard to understand. I can definitely see how that could become an issue with learning if there was no professor present to clarify. He’s not making an attack on the TAs themselves, just the quality of education that students are expecting when their families are paying a substantial amount for college.
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