31–40 of 78 posts
I wish someone would measure the bang-for-the-buck without considering politically correct metrics.
Real education covers more than "skills and credentials I need to get a well-paid job."
I do think it's a bit difficult to separate reputation from educational quality. Educational quality is affected by professors, facilities, research opportunities, etc, but these factors are saturated at a lot of research universities. Another factor of educational quality is the peer group, and in this sense reputation matters a lot. There's an "if you build it, they will come" circularity here, where if you have a good reputation, you will attract students who will burnish your reputation. Conversely institutions can get stuck in a loop of low reputation and marginal students.
If however, you are armed with the knowledge that the non-circular components of education quality are saturated at, say, the top 50 universities in the US, well that opens some doors. You can rest easy that your flagship land grant university honors program is giving you the same education you'd receive at an Ivy League school.
Personally I think student debt load and chosen major matter way more than which school you go to.
All of the above applies tenfold for foreign students coming to prestigious US universities, as they pay exorbitant sums to get the name recognition, creating all sorts of weird incentives.
As someone who went to a somewhat prestigious university (Vanderbilt), fingers crossed we nationalize the whole system sometime soon... I think we can all agree that focusing on football, campus amenities, and marketing aren't where these billions should be going. Vanderbilt, to their credit, gamed the rankings a ~decade ago by offering to meet 100% of student's government-determined financial need with grants, which is probably the best outcome possible of this weird system.
My favorite thing I've ever heard said by the principal of our kids' elementary school: "Our test scores are down, which is great, maybe that will keep some of the school shoppers away this year." Our city has a school choice program that includes a portal where you can look up these kinds of quantitative measures, and I think I agree with him. Tiger parents slosh from school to school as they chase after rankings, a…
It's such a strange way to evaluate schools. My high school was inner city. But they had AP programs, computer science classes, advanced mathematics. It's all about your child and the individual path they'll take within the school. And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.
My favorite thing I've ever heard said by the principal of our kids' elementary school: "Our test scores are down, which is great, maybe that will keep some of the school shoppers away this year." Our city has a school choice program that includes a portal where you can look up these kinds of quantitative measures, and I think I agree with him. Tiger parents slosh from school to school as they chase after rankings, a…
It's such a strange way to evaluate schools. My high school was inner city. But they had AP programs, computer science classes, advanced mathematics. It's all about your child and the individual path they'll take within the school. And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.
The probability of that happening is greater if average test scores are higher. The "tiger parents" aren't just looking for schools that offer the best programs, they're also looking for schools that have less problematic students that disrupt the learning environment and would be bad influences on their kids.
My favorite thing I've ever heard said by the principal of our kids' elementary school: "Our test scores are down, which is great, maybe that will keep some of the school shoppers away this year." Our city has a school choice program that includes a portal where you can look up these kinds of quantitative measures, and I think I agree with him. Tiger parents slosh from school to school as they chase after rankings, a…
It's such a strange way to evaluate schools. My high school was inner city. But they had AP programs, computer science classes, advanced mathematics. It's all about your child and the individual path they'll take within the school. And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.
I took those classes, and they were all milquetoast.
It was all just a potemkin village.
In contrast, the Caltech course catalog had classes blandly labeled "introductory" when they were well known for being brutal.
Ha, pretty funny article. Well written for sure, but it's got major "if only they let ME run things, everything would be fixed in day!" vibes. College rankings aren't broken because some data scientist made a bad decision, they're broken because they're an essential part in the contemporary American class system: sending your kid to SAT bootcamp and then a "prestigious" university is one of the few ways the top 10% c…
Without such skin in the game, a student is more likely to do as little as possible and focus on having fun instead.
I wish someone would measure the bang-for-the-buck without considering politically correct metrics.
Viewing college through this lens is part of the problem. It's college as job training , not education. Real education covers more than "skills and credentials I need to get a well-paid job."
I'm curious what real education would be that does not impart a skill that others are willing to pay for?
I speak as someone who selected classes based on maximizing skills that would be useful in the career I wanted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bang for the buck exists if you get into a top 10 or 20 school where admission standards are so high that people are impressed simply by the fact that you were admitted and/or you get to network with resourceful people. Otherwise, any state university should suffice. A few states have some state schools with very low acceptance rates and difficulty to get in that might serve to advertise/network you better than anoth…
You also network with old money, the politically connected, and the global elite. The “top” universities don’t really need to be better, they just need to have the correct names and the prestige to attract those names. You may have the best professor teaching all the most useful knowledge in the middle of no where state university, but the folks attending won’t have as much opportunity despite their education because…
Here's an insider's insight: Colleges hate these rankings too, including the shit eating grin they have to plaster on their face when they go out in public and say things like "We're one of the top 10 small public non-land grant research institutions in the upper middle pacific northwest region!" But too many families have been convinced that rankings like this are useful so now the institutions have little choice bu…