Private colleges are a waste of money for white, middle class kids

Post by geebee » Fri, Dec 19, 2014, 11:27 PM UTC

klochner wrote: post #20

loganadams_ wrote: post #10

I have a tough time with this article. I understand what it is trying to say. The costs are ridiculous. But what I see among my friends is that those who went to large public flagship schools got lost, and had a much tougher time. However, those who went to smaller private schools on scholarships built better connections with professors, and tended to do better long run.

My experience is that top students can get an equivalent if not better education at large public universities. (I went to Duke and Michigan) Public universities are much less forgiving , which means mediocre or unmotivated students get crushed in cases they would get hand-holding (and A- grades) at a private university. As for connections, they're important and you get better ones at top schools, unequivocally, but y…

I agree, but I'd add one thing. In addition to the mediocre and unmotivated students, there is a depressing number of motivated but somewhat unprepared students who get crushed as well. I really think a lot of these students would have thrived at a university that was more supportive.

I'm not advocating hand holding or coddling, but I do think that impacted majors at very strong public universities aren't really doing right by the talent level they enroll. They do society no favors by enrolling a student who didn't have a strong high school calculus curriculum, giving her a C her first semester, and then telling her that her GPA is too low for engineering now.

Post by pfisch » Sat, Dec 20, 2014, 6:36 AM UTC

hueving wrote: post #32

pfisch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't assess anything until college is over and you are actually in the real world. Good Grades does not mean you will succeed in real life. It mostly means you are good at following orders.

>It mostly means you are good at following orders. Maybe if you went to a terrible school. In any decent school it means you were able to come up with a solution to a problem presented to you. This is especially true for upper-level classes where the majority of the grade is based on a personal project.

Solving discrete problems with discrete answers is just not the hard part of real life, at least not the entrepreneurial part which I am the most familiar with.

Starting and completing a huge project that doesn't have deadlines where you have to figure out how to bring it from idea to market is real, and it rarely takes a semester and it isn't at the discretion of a single person to look at it for 30 minutes and then put a letter grade on it, and then throw it in the garbage. The most important difference though is that amount of effort only loosely correlates with the success of a venture in the real world. In school you can really just brute force most problems.

Re: Private colleges are a waste of money for white, middle class kids

Re: Private colleges are a waste of money for white, middle class kids