References on this board to colleges that focus on "Undergraduate" programs. Versus what?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Having taught at Hopkins and been an undergrad at Harvard, I think that the claim that faculty don’t care about undergrads at these schools is BS. At both schools, there are some profs who are excellent teachers and while advanced grad students lead small group discussion sections at both, they don’t teach intro classes. Actually, I had the same role as a first year grad student at “undergrad-focused” Princeton as (and in my second and third years had an even larger role than) any of my Harvard or Hopkins TAs. FWIW, all three schools grant tenure based primarily on research accomplishments.

The basic problem with college level instruction is that PhDs aren’t taught how to teach. So whether a prof is a good teacher is pretty much a function of individual talent or interest. The mere absence of grad students hardly makes someone a better undergrad teacher. And institutional incentives for good teaching typically involve popularity rather than any attempt at objective or expert assessment of the quality of instruction.

And, having been on, and watched peers navigate) the academic job market, there was little or no thought among candidates about whether various jobs valued undergrad teaching or not. You looked for a good school, with a reasonable teaching load, in an area you wouldn’t mind living and where your partner was employable (or you thought you might meet a future partner). It wasn't a process that funneled the good teachers to some schools and the good researchers to others.

At any rate, I think this distinction is a marketing ploy/branding strategy rather than an accurate reflection of reality on the ground, at least among well-funded private universities.

Some of my best teachers in undergrad were the graduate TAs. Approachable, knowledgeable, and overall much better at relaying the information than the tenured professor. I think the main problem is that the large classes are overwhelming for most. My worst class was a math lecture - really tough to learn math in a huge lecture.

[Anonymous]

OP back. Thank you all for the thoughtful replies, I feel so much better educated (pun intended) now.

Follow up qs:

Does it matter whether the undergraduate student is intending to focus on a research path that is not a typical area of research? So would need to be at a research university but sounds like there may not be an opportunity to have meaningful research undergrad if there are grad students above? Is this something that can be explored during the admissions process?

To the Harvard/Hopkins PP, does it matter if the ultimate goal is to be a prof? Are there greater considerations like reputation instead of undergraduate vs. graduate focus?

[Anonymous]

To the PPs who sent links and lists, thank you!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Having taught at Hopkins and been an undergrad at Harvard, I think that the claim that faculty don’t care about undergrads at these schools is BS. At both schools, there are some profs who are excellent teachers and while advanced grad students lead small group discussion sections at both, they don’t teach intro classes. Actually, I had the same role as a first year grad student at “undergrad-focused” Princeton as (and in my second and third years had an even larger role than) any of my Harvard or Hopkins TAs. FWIW, all three schools grant tenure based primarily on research accomplishments.

The basic problem with college level instruction is that PhDs aren’t taught how to teach. So whether a prof is a good teacher is pretty much a function of individual talent or interest. The mere absence of grad students hardly makes someone a better undergrad teacher. And institutional incentives for good teaching typically involve popularity rather than any attempt at objective or expert assessment of the quality of instruction.

And, having been on, and watched peers navigate) the academic job market, there was little or no thought among candidates about whether various jobs valued undergrad teaching or not. You looked for a good school, with a reasonable teaching load, in an area you wouldn’t mind living and where your partner was employable (or you thought you might meet a future partner). It wasn't a process that funneled the good teachers to some schools and the good researchers to others.

At any rate, I think this distinction is a marketing ploy/branding strategy rather than an accurate reflection of reality on the ground, at least among well-funded private universities.

I'm sure these things vary between institutions, and Harvard and Hopkins may be doing a good job of both undergrad and graduate teaching. It's not the case everywhere, though.

While applicants may not give much thought to whether a job values undergrad teaching or not, the people doing the hiring do. In other words, while almost no PhD programs actually teach candidates how to teach, the liberal arts colleges and other undergraduate-focused institutions will try to hire the subset who do know how to teach, however they managed to come by those skills.

Where this really becomes apparent is in the tenure process. At an undergraduate-focused school, teaching evaluations are a big deal. At large, public research universities, it's not as big a part of the evaluation. Over those first six years, new professors know how they are going to be judged, and apply their efforts accordingly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP back. Thank you all for the thoughtful replies, I feel so much better educated (pun intended) now.

Follow up qs:

Does it matter whether the undergraduate student is intending to focus on a research path that is not a typical area of research? So would need to be at a research university but sounds like there may not be an opportunity to have meaningful research undergrad if there are grad students above? Is this something that can be explored during the admissions process?

To the Harvard/Hopkins PP, does it matter if the ultimate goal is to be a prof? Are there greater considerations like reputation instead of undergraduate vs. graduate focus?

Re your first question. It’s department- and school-specific (and often even lab-specific). So if DC has a particular area of interest, do look at the department's web page and see what kinds of research faculty are doing. Then have DC ask about undergrad involvement in labs. See what senior thesis topics look like, whether there’s a research hospital near campus (if DC’s interests are biomed related), look at internship opportunities, etc. That’ll give DC a sense of the range of opportunities. Remember that not all research opportunities are on campus. NSF often/typically(?) requires grantees to create undergrad research opportunities and some of those take the form of summer programs that prioritize kids whose colleges can’t offer the same resources.

RE the second question, I am that PP (and also the parent of an undergrad who is an aspiring STEM prof). First thing to know is that an academically-inclined kid who stands out as an undergrad can get into an excellent PhD program regardless of whether s/he went to a LAC or a major research university. The best approach is to choose the school that will inspire/motivate/bring out the best in your DC. Personality and learning style come into play here. I loved the excitement of being an undergrad in a place where cutting edge work was being done and the prize was expanding rather than just transmitting what we know. Competition neither motivated nor alienated me, so that was a non-issue. For my DC, a school/department with a collaborative ethos was really important. I’ve known other people for whom a one-on-one relationship with an individual faculty member/mentor was crucial. Some undergrads love having grad students in the mix (both my DC and I fell in this camp). Others see them as competition (for attention, resources).

Talking with undergrads in the same field (after some introspection on when DC has the best learning experiences) is probably the most effective way of finding a match.

[Anonymous]

Re “not a typical area of research”. OTOH, kids’ interests often change during college. OTOH, I wouldn’t encourage DC to go to a school where none of the faculty were doing research in his/her subfield (and that was the case with some LACs wrt my DC’s focus). OTOOH, one can get a bachelors in a discipline and do PhD work in a subfield that he or she had little (if any) exposure to as an undergrad.

My general take is the school should be a promising place to study the particular thing that DC is currently excited about and that it should also support DC’s adjacent interests (or DC’s Plan B or C, which might be unrelated). DC may still end up doing none of the above, but in that case, it’s because, after exploring existing interests, s/he found something even better to do!

Re the prestige question and academia. My sense is network is more important than institutional prestige (and this can be another dimension of the subfield question). Basically, recs matter a lot for grad school admissions and it helps when the profs at the grad school know (or know the work of) the profs at the undergrad school who wrote the recs. And people tend to know/have worked with/been advised by other scholars in their subfield.

[Anonymous]

Most ranking are of the "university." That includes the law school, med school if any, grad programs, the endowment, government projects etc.
The quality of undergraduate teaching is the most important thing I'd assume to parents of most incoming freshmen, but that's not a big factor for most6 of these rating agencies like USNWR.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: Having taught at Hopkins and been an undergrad at Harvard, I think that the claim that faculty don’t care about undergrads at these schools is BS. At both schools, there are some profs who are excellent teachers and while advanced grad students lead small group discussion sections at both, they don’t teach intro classes. Actually, I had the same role as a first year grad student at “undergrad-focused” Princeton as (and in my second and third years had an even larger role than) any of my Harvard or Hopkins TAs. FWIW, all three schools grant tenure based primarily on research accomplishments.

The basic problem with college level instruction is that PhDs aren’t taught how to teach. So whether a prof is a good teacher is pretty much a function of individual talent or interest. The mere absence of grad students hardly makes someone a better undergrad teacher. And institutional incentives for good teaching typically involve popularity rather than any attempt at objective or expert assessment of the quality of instruction.

And, having been on, and watched peers navigate) the academic job market, there was little or no thought among candidates about whether various jobs valued undergrad teaching or not. You looked for a good school, with a reasonable teaching load, in an area you wouldn’t mind living and where your partner was employable (or you thought you might meet a future partner). It wasn't a process that funneled the good teachers to some schools and the good researchers to others.

At any rate, I think this distinction is a marketing ploy/branding strategy rather than an accurate reflection of reality on the ground, at least among well-funded private universities.

I know who you are.

I disagree re Harvard based on my own experience there. It is definitely not undergrad focused.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Having taught at Hopkins and been an undergrad at Harvard, I think that the claim that faculty don’t care about undergrads at these schools is BS. At both schools, there are some profs who are excellent teachers and while advanced grad students lead small group discussion sections at both, they don’t teach intro classes. Actually, I had the same role as a first year grad student at “undergrad-focused” Princeton as (and in my second and third years had an even larger role than) any of my Harvard or Hopkins TAs. FWIW, all three schools grant tenure based primarily on research accomplishments.

The basic problem with college level instruction is that PhDs aren’t taught how to teach. So whether a prof is a good teacher is pretty much a function of individual talent or interest. The mere absence of grad students hardly makes someone a better undergrad teacher. And institutional incentives for good teaching typically involve popularity rather than any attempt at objective or expert assessment of the quality of instruction.

And, having been on, and watched peers navigate) the academic job market, there was little or no thought among candidates about whether various jobs valued undergrad teaching or not. You looked for a good school, with a reasonable teaching load, in an area you wouldn’t mind living and where your partner was employable (or you thought you might meet a future partner). It wasn't a process that funneled the good teachers to some schools and the good researchers to others.

At any rate, I think this distinction is a marketing ploy/branding strategy rather than an accurate reflection of reality on the ground, at least among well-funded private universities.

I'm sure these things vary between institutions, and Harvard and Hopkins may be doing a good job of both undergrad and graduate teaching. It's not the case everywhere, though.

While applicants may not give much thought to whether a job values undergrad teaching or not, the people doing the hiring do. In other words, while almost no PhD programs actually teach candidates how to teach, the liberal arts colleges and other undergraduate-focused institutions will try to hire the subset who do know how to teach, however they managed to come by those skills.

Where this really becomes apparent is in the tenure process. At an undergraduate-focused school, teaching evaluations are a big deal. At large, public research universities, it's not as big a part of the evaluation. Over those first six years, new professors know how they are going to be judged, and apply their efforts accordingly.

The incentive model strikes me as less than credible. First, you don’t become a good teacher because you need to be. Secondly, all you need to be is a popular teacher and there are easy ways to do that (which don’t involve good teaching). Thirdly, if carrots and sticks are what produce teaching excellence then tenure insulates profs from those motivators. LACs may find it easier to purge bad teachers (in part because their bad teachers are unlikely to be stellar researchers) and research-oriented universities may squander teaching talent (by refusing to promote faculty whose approach to teaching slows or lowers their research productivity). But, before tenure, every college is hiring from the same pool (of largely untrained teachers whose classroom abilities are very difficult to evaluate) and after tenure, profs do what they want to do and/or what they are able to do. Stellar researchers can mentor undergrads whom they believe have the potential to become stellar researchers. Faculty who aren’t kept on their toes by a constant influx of grad students can coast by teaching the same course the same way year after year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: Having taught at Hopkins and been an undergrad at Harvard, I think that the claim that faculty don’t care about undergrads at these schools is BS. At both schools, there are some profs who are excellent teachers and while advanced grad students lead small group discussion sections at both, they don’t teach intro classes. Actually, I had the same role as a first year grad student at “undergrad-focused” Princeton as (and in my second and third years had an even larger role than) any of my Harvard or Hopkins TAs. FWIW, all three schools grant tenure based primarily on research accomplishments.

The basic problem with college level instruction is that PhDs aren’t taught how to teach. So whether a prof is a good teacher is pretty much a function of individual talent or interest. The mere absence of grad students hardly makes someone a better undergrad teacher. And institutional incentives for good teaching typically involve popularity rather than any attempt at objective or expert assessment of the quality of instruction.

And, having been on, and watched peers navigate) the academic job market, there was little or no thought among candidates about whether various jobs valued undergrad teaching or not. You looked for a good school, with a reasonable teaching load, in an area you wouldn’t mind living and where your partner was employable (or you thought you might meet a future partner). It wasn't a process that funneled the good teachers to some schools and the good researchers to others.

At any rate, I think this distinction is a marketing ploy/branding strategy rather than an accurate reflection of reality on the ground, at least among well-funded private universities.

I know who you are.

I disagree re Harvard based on my own experience there. It is definitely not undergrad focused.

Not sure why your experience trumps mine. That said, I never claimed Harvard was undergrad-focused. I said the distinctions being drawn between Harvard and Princeton wrt undergrad teaching don’t hold up. As my subsequent posts indicate, I think different undergrads want (or need) different things from faculty and different faculty have different investments and abilities when it comes to undergrad teaching.

[Anonymous]

I think the main difference is class size. Schools with an "undergraduate focus" tends to just be another way to say small class side.

In a LAC, the professors may not have research to distract them, but they teach more classes. The time they spend per class is the same. But the time they spend per student is not, because the classes are small.

There are pluses and minuses to big research universities. It really depends on your kid which is best.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Also, can anyone help with a list of those colleges that focus on undergraduates versus those that don't?"

Undergrad Focus:

All LACs
Princeton
Rice
Brown
Dartmouth
William and Mary
Wake Forest
Tufts

Not very undergrad focused:

UC System
Caltech
Johns Hopkins
Columbia
NYU
USC

Add Harvard to the not undergrad focused.

Add following research universities to not undergrad focused:

Princeton
Rice
Brown
Dartmouth
William and Mary
Wake Forest
Tufts

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP back. Thank you all for the thoughtful replies, I feel so much better educated (pun intended) now.

Follow up qs:

Does it matter whether the undergraduate student is intending to focus on a research path that is not a typical area of research? So would need to be at a research university but sounds like there may not be an opportunity to have meaningful research undergrad if there are grad students above? Is this something that can be explored during the admissions process?

To the Harvard/Hopkins PP, does it matter if the ultimate goal is to be a prof? Are there greater considerations like reputation instead of undergraduate vs. graduate focus?

Re your first question. It’s department- and school-specific (and often even lab-specific). So if DC has a particular area of interest, do look at the department's web page and see what kinds of research faculty are doing. Then have DC ask about undergrad involvement in labs. See what senior thesis topics look like, whether there’s a research hospital near campus (if DC’s interests are biomed related), look at internship opportunities, etc. That’ll give DC a sense of the range of opportunities. Remember that not all research opportunities are on campus. NSF often/typically(?) requires grantees to create undergrad research opportunities and some of those take the form of summer programs that prioritize kids whose colleges can’t offer the same resources.

RE the second question, I am that PP (and also the parent of an undergrad who is an aspiring STEM prof). First thing to know is that an academically-inclined kid who stands out as an undergrad can get into an excellent PhD program regardless of whether s/he went to a LAC or a major research university. The best approach is to choose the school that will inspire/motivate/bring out the best in your DC. Personality and learning style come into play here. I loved the excitement of being an undergrad in a place where cutting edge work was being done and the prize was expanding rather than just transmitting what we know. Competition neither motivated nor alienated me, so that was a non-issue. For my DC, a school/department with a collaborative ethos was really important. I’ve known other people for whom a one-on-one relationship with an individual faculty member/mentor was crucial. Some undergrads love having grad students in the mix (both my DC and I fell in this camp). Others see them as competition (for attention, resources).

Talking with undergrads in the same field (after some introspection on when DC has the best learning experiences) is probably the most effective way of finding a match.

So helpful, thank you!!!