<p>What’s more, at all of these schools, students have a lot of choice in courses, and can have more or less contact with professors as they wish.</p>
<p>I don’t see what my “allegiance” has to do with the veracity of the points that I am making. </p>
<p>Yale University has a whole can’t be “undergraduate focused” by definition because most of its faculty (more than two thirds) do not teach undergraduates and probably hardly ever even think about undergraduates. That is not to say that Yale undergraduates don’t get a “good” education; they probably do. But you know what, it’s not all that different from the education you get at other top schools, just like JHS said. Other top schools have plenty of inspiring teachers, and students can go to office hours and have close contact with senior professors or stay away and be anonymous, as they wish. The problems is that Yale likes to say that it is “more undergraduate focused” than its peers, without ever offering any proof. In fact, I could probably find hundreds of posts on this board, if not thousands, claiming that Yale is a better place to go to college because it’s better for undergraduate education. Where’s the proof? And when you make these kinds of assertions without any facts to back you up, isn’t that called a “fraud”?</p>
<p>ske293: </p>
<p>I don’t know why you have so much bile, but it’s affecting your reasoning powers.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>When people say that Yale is more focused on undergraduates than its peers, they are essentially talking about Harvard and Stanford, maybe Columbia. No one, in the history of the world, has argued that Yale is more undergraduate-focused than Princeton, Dartmouth, or Brown, not to mention Amherst or Swarthmore. That would be a patently silly argument. </p></li>
<li><p>The argument for Yale has always been that it is a happy medium between places like Princeton and Dartmouth, which are really liberal arts colleges with minor graduate programs, or real LACs like Williams, etc., and Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, where graduate and professional education has traditionally dominated over undergraduate education. Versus the first set, Yale can argue that it has a larger, better faculty, and a more vibrant intellectual community, and that the presence of graduate students enhances rather than detracts from undergraduate education. Versus the second set Yale can argue that the centrality of the college ensures that it gets its share of resources, and that its culture demands that faculty pay attention to undergraduates in a way that does not always happen at the second set of peers.</p></li>
<li><p>At least as of a generation ago, Yale WAS clearly more undergraduate-focused than Harvard, Stanford, or Chicago (and less so than Princeton, etc.). I know that from personal experience at two of those places, numerous friends/relatives at the third, and the official histories of the fourth. Whether being more or less undergraduate-focused made it better or not is legitimately open to question. I know that in my major field of study Princeton and Dartmouth were simply not interesting places back then, although they had some excellent teachers. (One of my favorite Yale teachers moved to Princeton, but he was an ultra-conservative throwback, not hip at all. Which was fine, of course, unless you wanted some hip, too.) Yale was the center of the world in that field at the time; it was a great, heady environment, and very open to undergraduates. Stanford was a great university, but for the most part the undergraduates didn’t care. There was almost limitless opportunity for any undergraduate who sought out faculty involvement, but that’s because only a tiny percentage of them did. The great institutional discussion at Stanford at the time was how to bring the quality of the college up to the level of its graduate and professional programs.</p></li>
<li><p>Your definition of fraud would apply to 99% of posts on CC. People believe passionately that one educational structure is better than another, or than any other, and none of them has a scrap of valid proof. What’s more, I challenge you to define a research program that would yield actual proof either way. So what? The debate is perfectly interesting. Whining “Fraud! Fraud!” doesn’t advance anything. If you have an actual argument to make, make it.</p></li>
<li><p>There has to be something wrong with the numbers that yield a 3,000-member faculty at Yale and only 1,000 in the college. The professional schools are not that large, they don’t have thousands of faculty. (Yale’s business and law schools are about 1/3 the size of their Harvard counterparts, for example.) The exception may be the medical school, where every doctor who ever supervises an intern gets some sort of faculty designation. In any event, one of the features of Yale (and of many other similar universities, too) is that professional-school faculties DO teach undergraduates. When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I had several courses with law or business faculty (and I wasn’t even that interested in law or business then), and the Law School, especially, was very well integrated into the life of the university, with law students serving as TAs and RAs, lots of lectures of general interest, etc.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>JHS, I can see writing that Dartmouth has “minor graduate programs,” but Princeton? In the fields with which I am most familiar (e.g., economics and math), Princeton’s programs are top-notch (they even dominate Yale’s).</p>
<p>I thought it was clear I was talking about quantity, not quality. Of course Princeton has top-notch graduate programs.</p>
<p>Even on the quantity front, the difference between Princeton and Yale is a little less than I thought. Princeton has about 2,000 non-professional-program graduate students at any time (counting Woodrow Wilson School as professional); at Yale, that number is about 2,700. In total graduate students, Princeton has 2,400 (half the headcount of the college): Yale has 6,100 (about 15% larger than the headcount of the college). For comparison, the equivalent numbers for Harvard are 3,700 “academic” graduate students, and 13,600 total (a little more than twice the headcount of the college), and Dartmouth has about 1,000 academic graduate students and 1,700 total (less than half the headcount of the college).</p>
<p>So I agree that lumping Princeton and Dartmouth together was a little facile. In terms of PhD students vs. undergraduates, Princeton and Yale are about the same, and both offer more than twice the number of PhD programs than Dartmouth does, to more than twice the number of students. In terms of total grad students, Yale is meaningfully bigger than Princeton, and Princeton is much more comparable to Dartmouth. (I will note that it is always surprising to me that Princeton and Dartmouth are close to the same size. Princeton plays much bigger to me, and Dartmouth smaller.)</p>
<p>EDIT TO ADD: Since it is relevant to this thread, I want to note the essential similarity among HYP regarding the ratio of arts and sciences graduate students to undergraduates: Princeton is about 5/12, Yale 1/2, and Harvard 6/11. That is the ratio that is going to come closest to quantifying the “undergraduate focus” of those institutions, and I suspect that it fairly accurately represents the differences between them, i.e., not that much.</p>
<p>There is another way to look at these numbers that does capture something important about the differences among these universities:</p>
<p>At Princeton, arts and sciences students (undergraduate and graduate) represent 94% of total students, at Yale that figure is 81%, at Harvard it is 50%. At Dartmouth, it is 86%; at the University of Chicago, 60% (with a graduate/undergraduate ratio within arts and sciences of 3/4). The implication of this – and I think it is accurate – is that the university administrations at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Yale spend a much greater proportion of their time on the parts of the university that matter most to undergraduates than the administrations at Harvard or Chicago.</p>
<p>I also checked the Yale faculty numbers. As I suspected, out of a total of 3,600 faculty, the Medical School represents 1,850 – more than half. Non-Medical School faculty is 1,750, of which Arts & Sciences faculty represents 1,100, and the next largest group is the Law School with 120. This includes adjuncts, research fellows, and non-tenure-track faculty. It’s a little hard to break down further, because the various schools have such different structures. (The Drama School, for example, has no tenured or tenure-track faculty at all.) The Medical School disproportion, however, is about the same no matter how you look at it.</p>
<p>An informal poll of LAC faculty (conducted during D’s college search) pretty clearly indicated that among HYPSM, Yale and Princeton were thought to be the places most devoted to teaching undergraduates.</p>