| Topic Name: |
UGLY DUCLKLING OF IVY LEAGUE -- Which School? |
| Message Name: |
Damn. You're exactl |
| Date Posted: |
11/08/1999 |
| In Reply To: |
What a fool -- textbooks have little to do with the quality of education. I'm pretty sure that Northeastern uses the same textbooks as Northwestern, and Hamline uses the same textbooks as Harvard. The essence of an institution's rigor lies in many intangibles -- e.g., quality of faculty, the intelligence of your peers, and the expectations of your professors. As for quality of faculty, I had a high school classmate who went to Maryland and bragged that most of his professors had their PhD's from Ivies. I had to tell him that I doubt Maryland was their first choice. Usually, PhD's from Ivies and other top-tier achools are given a shot at teaching at other top-tier schools right after graduation. If they lack the skills to teach or lack the true scholarship to publish, they don't get tenured. So then they move down to a Top 50 school. If they don't teach well or publish there, then they move down to the third tier, etc. Of course, this is a gross oversimplification of the process, but it is generally true. As for intelligence of peers, the Ivies and about two dozen other schools (including liberal arts colleges like Williams) have what I would call an Intellectual Environment. This sense pervades everything from the classroom to the drunken fraternity party on a Thursday night. There are plenty of jackasses at these schools, but no one can deny that pretty much everyone there possesses intelligence that is far above average. Such an environment helps learning both in and out of the classroom, and is something that less-competitive schools just cannot match (even with silly "Honors" programs). Finally, regardless of where a professor received his/her PhD, their expectations of student intelligence (and thus, their respect for students) is low at lower-ranked schools, high at top-tier schools. So, even if textbooks are the same, I can guarantee a professor at Cal-Berkeley goes into greater depth and elicits deeper intellectual discourse during class than her counterpart teaching at Cal State-Fullerton. (For those who care, I went to UVA). |
| Message: |
Damn. You're exactly the type of people I went to high school with. You think that you are inherently better than someone because your parents shell out wads of cash for you to attend an ivy league school? Now granted, they are difficult to get into, and the common claim is that "everyone there is brilliant," but some of the biggest idiots I have ever met have come from Ivy league schools. Please don't accuse me of jealousy, because I was accepted to three of your precious "Top Tier" Universities (Harvard, MIT, and Cornell). I opted to attend CWRU, because the curriculum was a shitload more challenging than any of those three. So to all of the narrow-minded and elitist "Ivy Leaguers" on this board, I'd like to say, from the bottom of my heart, eat big, steaming, feculant piles of penguin dung.
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