Reply to Anyone touring top schools and finding then all to be dumpy and unimpressive?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Anyone touring top schools and finding then all to be dumpy and unimpressive?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We toured almost every T15(all but stanford and Caltech) and found them all great, and they all emphasized small classes. All my kids attend a different one of these schools and find them intellectually stimulating with less than 1/4 of their classes over 40, including stem. We never toured any school outside of T25 that was not W&M or VT or W&L, so we did not see the big schools with the pretty pools and fancy dorms we have seen online. We were looking for academics and found the only ugly/dumpy one to be MIT, yet loved the intellectual vibe of our quirky tour guide. similar-vibe tour guides were WM Hopkins and Brown, but did not select the final schools based on love of tour. People do not pick T15s for beauty, they pick them for academics: faculty, peers, smallish classes. To each his own. [/quote]

Many T15s have large classes, especially in the first two years. [/quote]

Mine are at private T10 and an ivy and the classes are not large compared to UVA, UCB , others. Cousin at a different T10 and also has not had the large classes of a state school, even as a premed. We personally know kids who graduated '23 and '24 from three of the other private T15/ivies. Each of these kids has had one or two classes above 100, all the rest have been half under 30, half 31-70, and in junior and senior year most classes are under 20.  Maybe that is "large" to some, but coming from public HS with 35-40 in each class it is very reasonable. UVA has almost all classes above 200 for the first 2 years. Sure, there may be LACs that have overall  smaller average class size than ivies, but they also have classes in the 100s for at least some intro courses. Ivies/T15 for the most part have dramatically more seminar-style classes than top state schools, other than William&Mary which is mostly seminar and is modeled after the private/ivy style of education.
Even more important than class size is the opportunities for research with professors as early as freshman year, and professors connecting students for summer internships, volunteering to send emails and make connections. The students still need to hustle and investigate all options, but the connections the profs have with peer institutions is remarkable. That is what you are paying for, in addition to the value of having extremely bright peers and professors. And for some of us it is not 90k, because we get need-based aid bringing the cost to less than UVA with aid. [/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