Reply to What’s the educational difference between a highly-rated college and a good one?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "What’s the educational difference between a highly-rated college and a good one?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Professor quality" will be equally great at top-notch and good schools and even the ones considered not so great.  The job market for academics is terrible (especially in the humanities) so just ok schools can recruit the best and the brightest. I teach at GW and literally all my colleagues (myself included) got our PhDs at top universities and are very well regarded in our fields. So from that point of view the education your child will get is exactly the same as at Yale etc.

I think it is true that the peer group at top tier schools will be stronger. 
[/quote]

+1 I'm a professor at UMD. I previously taught at Hopkins. No measurable different in colleagues or "professor quality." In general I agree about peer group. However, there are many smart kids at UMD that would do well at Hopkins. [/quote]
This is because UMD is a top research university on par with Hopkins (UMD does not have a medical school while Hopkins has the top-most one, which helps it a lot of in rankings). You'll find a lot of top PhD's among the top publics due to research.

The difference of course is that access to these professors might be lower in a public than a private. Not necessarily by all that much (they are generally inaccessible everywhere), but enough. Also classes tend to be smaller in privates which can help in both learning and interacting with professors.

SLACs on the other hand will have much better professor interaction than both top publics and privates. However generally the best and brightest PhD grads don't want to go to SLACs because they value research first and foremost, while SLAC jobs tend to consist of a lot of teaching. SLACs will also hire a lot of PhD's from schools with name-value but weak research (i.e. Vanderbilt)[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics