<p>The question sounds stupid but is it? No matter how great the intellectual environment is in an ivy school one can always find his/her own intellectual environment even in a community college. No matter how many brilliant people are there in a top university one can never get in contact with all of them and one can also find intelligent ivy-caliber people in a tier 3 college.
So, what do you think?</p>
<p>Recruiting</p>
<p>In my opinion, it’s about the gaurantee. You’re almost guaranteed at a top university to get the kind of teachers you want to have, who love what they teach. You’re almost guaranteed to meet people who fit the same kind of mold as yourself. You’re almost guaranteed to be challenged in all your classes the way you want to be. It’s basically going with a brand name over the store brand. If you’re stuck between the two in price and opinion, you’re probably going to pick the brand name product.</p>
<p>An answer I’ve offered before:</p>
<p>It’s all about the college peer group which when all is said and done, has a greater influence on a student’s goals and aspirations than any other factor.</p>
<p>If you’re intellectually gifted you may have opportunities to join college communities in which there are many similarly-gifted students or some in which there are (for the most part, but not entirely) less-gifted peers. Imagine if your gift was not in academics but in tennis, and you were deciding to go to a live-in tennis academy to develop that talent. You could go to the Bollettieri Tennis Academy where you’d play with and against the top emerging talent, who would in the coming years be the stars of the pro tennis world. Or perhaps you could go to another tennis academy where the students weren’t so motivated by tennis, but had attended primarily because others told them they should. At the lesser academy, you might play against your fellow classmates and find that no one could return your serves. You’d hit average ground strokes and your opponents would whiff instead of returning competent shots. You might find that you were underchallenged, and accordingly, weren’t getting any better. You might show up for practice and find that your opponent was a no-show, having blown off class for the day. You might be thrilled to learn that Roger Federer or Serena Williams was coming to campus to speak to students and then find that other students weren’t interested in seeing them and weren’t interested in talking with you about the visit that you attended. A really talented tennis player either wouldn’t be satisfied in that kind of environment or may eventually dull down his or her passion and goals to match those of the classmates.</p>
<p>The same dynamic works with academically-talented students. And it’s not just about compiling a resume in order to land a job. It’s about developing yourself to the fullest in order to enjoy your life to the maximum. That’s the main benefit of a top-level college.</p>
<p>I don’t understand this part of your analogy:</p>
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<p>Why would person A tell person B to attend a clearly inferior school, assuming that price was equal?</p>
<p>I haven’t measured myself by my peers in HS and I don’t plan to in college either.</p>
<p>We’re not talking about measuring yourself by your peers. We’re talking about IMPROVING yourself via your peers.</p>
<p>co-sign gadad.</p>
<p>wittywonka, I think gadad meant that a lot of students attend college, period, because that’s what you’re supposed to do after high school…he wasn’t saying that people go to CC’s because people told them to go there instead of a selective school.</p>
<p>I assume by ‘top university’ you mean a ‘top ranked university’, and you are probably thinking about the most popular ranking service, US news.</p>
<p>25 pct of the ranking criteria that is used here is prestige, peer prestige. This get to one reaon one might want to go to a top university, so defined: prestige, especially for POST college, and not necessarily DURING college. You want your potential employers to have heard of , been positively impressed with, your college.</p>
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It is not clear to me that the tennis analogy is valid. Practicing tennis has the ultimate goal of improving one’s ability to play a game of tennis, while education does not have any singular aim. “Learning” is really a rather amorphous idea that can be done in a variety of fashions.</p>
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<p>Well what they want you to believe. It’s all marketing. But there is no way professors are better at loving what they teach or are better professors at say the ‘top 20 schools’ or ‘first tier’ vs. ‘third tier’. I’m one, I know, having taught across the board from Ivy to tippy top to state. </p>
<p>With the exception of LACs (really in their own category), professors at top ranked schools are hired, rewarded and promoted on the basis of their research productivity, period (with very very few exceptions); at less well known schools, they are not research based, and they have higher teaching loads and hire and promote more on the basis of teaching not research. </p>
<p>You’ll find gems and stinker at all these schools. No guarantee at all!</p>
<p>“Practicing tennis has the ultimate goal of improving one’s ability to play a game of tennis, while education does not have any singular aim.”</p>
<p>Education has the singular goal of improving my mind. Tennis has plenty of underlying elements and skills: forehand, backhand, spin, power, etc. So too does education. One element might be memorizing some facts, and sure, that part you can learn at a public library. But reading every book in the world is not going to improve your ability to formulate, support, and defend ideas. Only top-notch discourse can do that.</p>
<p>Why would I choose a top university? The social networking. Nothing like obtaining a career thanks to a buddy’s recommendation.</p>
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But how do you determine whether a mind has been “improved”? Tennis may have underlying skills, but they all contribute to one ultimate metric that is easily quantifiable: victory or defeat. The same is not true of education.</p>
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<p>Use your imagination-Oh wait.</p>
<p>In the end, i figure that no matter what people say, people want to attent top schools because of the prestigious name and the opportunities for successful jobs…Though, i could be wrong.</p>
<p>Does it all come down to money?</p>
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<p>That’s the feeling I get, plus I think people just feel proud when they say they went to a prestigious school, but it’s mostly about the $$$.</p>
<p>Regarding the peer influence - The single greatest influence on a student’s goals and aspirations is not the instruction, not the subject matter, not their grades. It’s the peer group. Your peers will set the bar and your professors will teach to that level, wherever the bar is set. As with anything in life, the reward you get out of college will be in direct proportion to the personal involvement you put into it. Spending four years in a setting of highly motivated, highly involved, highly capable peers is an entirely different experience than spending it among peers for whom it’s merely a sequence of hoops that need to be jumped on the way to a credential.</p>
<p>“But how do you determine whether a mind has been “improved”?”</p>
<p>How do you determine whether you are in love?</p>
<p>The fact that something isn’t quantifiable doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or isn’t worth striving for.</p>
<p>Next year, I hope I’ll be lucky enough to choose between my state university (UNC) and another top university. If I have that option, I would go out of state in a heartbeat. Top universities have the luxury of drawing people with a diverse range of experiences and backgrounds–a luxury that Chapel Hill, at 82% in-state, simply doesn’t have.</p>