I know a high school senior with 1600 on his SATs. His parents were not sufficiently loving to change their last name to “Rodriguez” so he is not a shoo-in affirmative action candidate at America’s most elite colleges. Nonetheless with his perfect SAT scores he ought to get into some pretty good schools. The question is where should he apply and attend?
After observing the behavior of MIT and Harvard faculty compared to professors at small town liberal arts schools I’m beginning to wonder if the biggest name schools represent a good choice even for a kid with infinite money. In the old days you had to worry about whether faculty at research universities would pay attention to undergrads amidst the distractions of applying for grants and supervising graduate students and postdocs to perform on those grants. Nothing has changed there except that competition for grants has become ever more fierce, forcing the professors to spend a bit more time applying and writing up results. For an undergrad who actually wants to see and do research it might make sense to choose a school like MIT where there are substantial opportunities for undergrads to get into labs. The professors might ignore the undergrads in the classes that they teach but they won’t ignore the motivated undergrads helping with their funded research.
The big change compared to the 1960s and 1970s is the affordability of housing close to the campuses of some of the top research schools. A Harvard or MIT professor who wants to live in a family-sized house will either need to spend two hours per day commuting from the exurbs or two days per week consulting to pay for the $1.5 million house in Cambridge. In the old days a junior professor hurried from the classroom to the lab. Today she hurries from the classroom to the lab and then tries to depart the campus by 4 pm to beat the traffic out to the exurbs. She won’t spend the evening taking her students out for dinner; if she is socializing it will be with folks unrelated to the university who live near her house.
For personal attention from the faculty it would seem that one should restrict one’s college search to schools in areas where real estate is still cheap enough that professors live close to campus. Brown would be good. Harvard would be bad. Some schools are near cheap housing but are still bad due to the fact that they are in crime-ridden ghettos (Yale and Penn?). Amherst and Williams should be good.
What else should matter to the young male applicant? How about girls? The 17-year-old boy with 1600s on his SATs probably hasn’t had time to become captain of the football team and do the other things that appeal to high school babes. Why then subject oneself to four more years of rejection and frustration by attending a college where girls are in short supply? Fifty-seven percent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded to women in the U.S. Why not choose a school where women are at least 57 percent of the students? Remember that if 40 girls pair up with 40 boys that leaves 17 single girls for every 3 single guys!
Finally I guess we should tell the kid that if he and his parents don’t have infinite money he should go wherever is cheap. A motivated student can learn at most of the better colleges in the U.S. A friend of mine was a brilliant high school student. She went to Tulane in New Orleans as an undergrad where they gave scholarships for smart kids and where she could have a good time. She went to MIT and got a PhD in physical science. People sometimes do ask where she did her PhD work. No potential employer would care where she was an undergrad. For any field in which a graduate degree will be required it doesn’t make sense to spend family $$ on a fancy undergrad degree that nobody will care about (not even the grad school; they always ask “was this your best student in the last 10 years?” and no honest teacher at a top school is going to be able to say “yes” because being smart is so cheap at a place such as Harvard or MIT).
So… where do we tell young John Q. Nerdly to apply? He has the good test scores and public high school grades. He is considering majoring in Biology (smart kid!). He likes to climb rocks. He hasn’t been doing that great with the ladies as far as I can tell (the best vehicle that he can generally muster is a dented 10-year-old Ford Taurus station wagon, which might explain some of this lack of success). His parents could suck it up to pay for an Ivy League no-merit-scholarship cartel university but they’d rather not.
I’m going to be terrifically biased and say that they look into the UC schools. Relatively cheap (well, maybe not for long the way things are going I’m afraid). Large campuses with plenty of people of all types. Not generally in ghettos. Good weather. Berkeley and UCLA are both close to excellent crags (Berkeley has a nice bouldering area up in the hills behind campus IIRC) and some of the best climbing in the country a few hours away (Yosemite and Joshua Tree, respectively) UCLA at least has a rock wall in an old racquetball court–its like climbing in a fishbowl. Academically, neither is a slouch in the sciences. Of course, it sounds like he’s out-of-state so it’ll be expensive until/if he gets residency
There’s also Stanford, which has a number of similar features (pretty good place to train for a marathon. Also features a climbing wall), a skosh more expensive.
Three small liberal arts colleges come to mind.
oberlin.edu, in ohio, has major-league biology labs, for undergrads. If he wants to get on the science treadmill early, this is an ideal place. The nearest rocks to climb are easily a thousand miles away. And… winter!
Amherst.edu. Winter. But… rocks in formations along the CT river.
Occidental (oxy.edu) has the climate, it has the women (not 57percent but still a good ratio), there are real rocks nearby to climb all year round, and he can take courses at CalTech through a joint 5-year program.
Hey, plus if biology works out, Calif. is funding stem cell research!
Since you mentioned Brown, I’ll give you one story before saying something else. I went to Brown and I loved it. I had one professor who I did a little research with who lived in the suburbs (granted, suburbs in Providence are a 15 minute drive). Some prominent researchers in our field were visiting and he invited me to a late dinner with them at his house. I said, “Thank you, but I don’t have a car so I won’t be able to make it.” He replied, “here are the keys to my car, I’ll have my wife pick me up this afternoon and drop me off tomorrow morning”.
In fact, I went to Brown in part because I visited some older friends from high school at various schools. When I visited a friend at MIT, he said “all the cool research projects and labs are monopolized by the grad students”; I didn’t apply. OTOH, my friend at Brown said, “oh, you should meet this prof and that prof, and so on”.
That said, depending on what fields you’re interested in, I suspect that you can do even better for significantly less money at a small liberal arts college.
Well, of course graduate students are taking projects. Doing research with professors is basically your job description and obviously you’d like to maximize both “coolness” (this presumably being proportional to enjoyment) so this should come as no surprise. It bears directly on your ability to graduate.
I had high SAT scores, and chose to go to a small liberal arts school that was offering me money instead of bigger name schools where I could have gone but paid a lot more. I graduated in May from Ursinus College (http://www.ursinus.edu), and really loved it. I got to do a lot of independent study, I got paid for a summer to be a research fellow, I had the time to travel to Spain for a semester, and I generally got to direct my own education.
On top of that, I graduated with no debt. It’s a huge advantage to me now, as I can do whatever I want to without worrying about being stuck with an enormous credit card bill or big student loans to pay.
Oh, and there’s 55% women. I learned a lot about that species while I was there.
I don’t necessarily mean that he should go to my school (although I loved it), but I just wanted to say that I took the low route and loved it. As you say, it’s the graduate degree that really matters if you’re planning to go that route.
Why doesn’t Harvard recognize the problem and invest in some upscale faculty housing near campus? Ought to be within H’s means. I just finished Emanuel Derman’s “My Life as a Quant”. He mentions living in faculty housing provided by Columbia, if I remember right. If Columbia can afford that in NYC, surely H can afford that in Cambridge.
There’s a fine line between a school being really kick-ass and this being a good thing and a school being really kick-ass and this being a bad thing. I think Harvard would be good- grade inflation has resulted in something like 50% of all grades handed out being A’s- this would be an environment conducive to trying out new fields, and discovery one’s calling. I went to Berkeley, and that was sort of bad- the weeding-out in the basic science curriculum was aggressive enough to discourage all but the more (parentally?) driven hardcore nerds to put up with it. This would not be the place to hop into physics and chem courses to see whether they’re interesting.
Is eating at professor’s houses going to be a major component of this guy’s undergraduate career? If so, knock the big state schools right off the list and head to Rice. Should it be?
I should mention that as a weird side benefit of the Berkeley education factory, I ended up having some really great teachers. Some were tenured, but others were “visiting lecturers” who were getting paid peanuts and trying to get their foot in the door. They, unlike some of the tenured curmudgeons, really loved teaching (hence not getting real jobs) and inspired me to learn.
My affluent high school channeled students to 2 places: Berkeley and Harvard. People surprisingly turned out very well from both places. I’m certain us Cal people dealt with a lot more bureacracy and hassle and crime, etc, than the Hahvud folk, but whether that’s a pro or a con is debatable.
My biased recommendation: University of Virginia. Always a highly ranked public university–tied for #2 with Michigan at the moment. Access to the med school if he finds biology and the life sciences to be his calling; lots of solid liberal arts options if he decides on a different path; . the Shenandoahs so good for rock climbing; and my alma mater, plus the generally Jeffersonian educational philosophy; great social options even without the Greek system (I had a blast and never set foot in a fraternity house). Potential drawbacks: out of state tuition is not cheap and out of state admissions are very competitive; requires high tolerance for Southern kids of privilege; and that Greek system.
I’m of the opinion that engineering combined with a good communications (reading, writing, oral) skills will prepare you for anything in the future.
My daughter didn’t have 1600 SAT’s, but she just finished her first term at Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology). Its in Atlanta, has a very good technical and liberal arts programs (ok, more technical than liberal arts). Huge alumni support. Mostly in the south. Its also more cost effective than most (all?) similar schools in the Northeast US. If your from Georgia its a no-brainer because they have the HOPE Scholarships and in-state tuition is something like $3000/year.
Naturally, we are from NJ, so pay ‘full boat’. With a 1600 SAT, he would be in the hunt for a full ride via the Presidential Scholarship program.
The other thing that impressed me about Tech is the Freshman Experience program. Its a very mature program that gives incoming freshmen an infrastructure for success. Tech went from a 30-40% attrition rate 30 years ago to 8-9% now. They have tutors available Sun-Thurs for all the core courses as well as structured social programs in the dorms.
The campus is in downtown Atlanta, GA, but there is also a lot to do on the campus. ORGT (Outdoor Recreation at Georgia Tech) is a great group for rock climbing, caving (including vertical caving in North Georgia and Tennesee). Lots of intramural as well as varsity sports on campus. Despite being a pretty rigorous school, they have a great basketball team and OK football team. When I was at Tech, Reggie Wilkes deferred acceptance to medical school to play pro football for a few years (his wife was a doctor, too). Imagine going to your doctors office and finding a 6’5″, 285 lb guy in a lab coat!
I also am of the opinion that the ten year old, dented Taurus isn’t a factor in dating. I’m driving a dented 13 year old Taurus (150K miles) that runs just fine ;).
I have no comment and would not recommend the state school that I went to. However, I find this guide to be interesting. Take it with a grain of salt as someone always has an axe to grind
http://www.studentsreview.com
Philip,
I’ve never heard dating ratios put that way. It perfectly explains what happens when male to female ratios are out of wack, as they are here in Tahoe, only in reverse of what you describe. Tahoe is a great place to live, as long as you aren’t interested in meeting a lot of single woman. And what single, straight man isn’t?
My comments on that are here:
http://www.baus.net/mathofdating
Regarding the previous suggestion of UVA, I can only add that the last time I went through I found that a large number of the geeks had gone goth. Not in a bad, dreary, “I’m changing my name to Raven Nightstar” way but in a just-stepped-out-of-The-Matrix-or-some-anime way. I love it. I’m all for geeks embracing sleek fashion as a group. It has had the added bonus of producing a more equal gender balance (my theory is that there are smart, stylish girls who are geeks at heart but resist expressing it due to stigma, but who are perfectly willing to be known as intelligent perki-goths) resulting in far fewer dateless nights for those involved. Take that as you will.
Cornell. Most of the professors I had at Ithaca College lived within 15 minutes of campus. I think Cornell has a good Biology program as well.
How about one of the better “teaching schools”? Like a small LAC or regional master’s? He’d likely get into the honors program there, which would make it free, and the professors will really care. It’s not that there isn’t any research being done at these places, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to get a kid into the research that *is* being done at a small school than at a large one.
I teach at one of these LACs, and I had never experienced the kind of attention as a student that my students get from the professors here (including me).
I’d go with my hometown and alma mater (sort of) bias and say UC-Berkeley. But there’s no way this kid would get in with *just* a 1600 SAT (for the 2002-3 freshman class, UCB turned down 652 kids who had SATs between 1500 and 1600; this group had an average GPA of 4.17).
I’d suggest my “alma mater”, The Colorado College (http://www.coloradocollege.edu). It has an excellent biology department, a great small liberal-arts setting, and a thriving climbing community.
If social life and faculty involvement are as important as you mention, avoid UC San Diego. Faculty can’t really live in La Jolla and social life is nonexistent. I’ve met many unhappy biology undergrads here, no happy ones.
The student might not be considering it in the first place, but if it is as difficult to get into Berkeley as posters above would suggest, then he should know that UCSD is probably not an OK second choice.
I do believe he could get a great education at UCSD, but doing so and meeting girls would require quite a lot of work, and probably many visits to San Diego State.
My wife did her undergrad work at Brandeis and got a Ph.D. from MIT. She got a full undergrad scholarship from a couple of foundations, without having to meet any ethnic qualifications.
When the perky kids from Brandeis call her up asking for a donation to her alma mater, we cough up a few bucks, unless we’re seriously strapped for cash. When MIT calls us up, we laugh.
As a professor at several smallish liberal arts state colleges and universities for a long time, I offer a simplified formula:
giant university + great graduate programs = crap undergraduate programs
Find a highly ranked university that is primarily undergraduate (preferably < 10K students) in a geographically acceptable location.
Byron
>Well, of course graduate students are taking projects.
Yes, I should mention that I expected this and that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s jut why I would consider somewhere like MIT or UCB a great place to go as a grad student and a horrible place to go as an undergrad.
If education counts, check out The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
Grinnell College – Grinnell, IA
Since the UC schools have been nominated, I should mention this: housing around UCSB is impossible. I actually paid less rent when I was in the Bay Area. The university owns several blocks of apartments and is willing to rent them to you the student for merely exorbitant prices; if you don’t want to live there or don’t win a spot in the housing lottery and so can’t, anywhere within reasonable biking distance of school draws—especially in August and September—excessive rents. My brother lives in Pasadena, we pay about the same rent, and I could fit my entire apartment in his living room.
The UC schools do still have merit scholarships which they award at their whim, which was a benefit to me as I was not a citizen at the time I applied and was therefore ineligible for almost everything. You do not get a merit scholarship from the UC system as a whole, but instead from the individual school; I got one from UCSB and not from Berkeley.
So the housing situation is bad, but I should mention that the College of Creative Studies is a fantastic program, if he can get in (1600s on SAT should be a shoo-in for UCSB, but not necessarily for CCS). The philosophy of education, at least in math and science, is to get all the normal undergraduate curriculum done real early so the student can do interesting stuff. If the kid can get into that, I’d say go for it. I was taking graduate courses in mathematics the year I decided to add it as a major, and very happy about it.
I went to Brown and got a biology degree in 1997. I worked in software during the dot-com runup, got out before the bubble burst, and played for a year and a half. I’m now at Harvard for a Ph. D. program in neuroscience. Brown had a lot of strengths (some mentioned in other posts), but one thing that bothered me was taking classes with all the premeds. As a group, they were intellectually listless grinds who sucked the life out of a subject and a classroom with their “is this going to be on the test” attitude. I don’t know how escapable this is in undergrad biology, but if this kid cares about being around other smart excited biology geeks, I think he should look for a small, weird school (Reed?) where geeks aren’t outnumbered by grinds. From what I’ve seen so far, the dynamic reverses in graduate school — top-tier programs are essentially grind-free, and the people are smart as hell, which is nice to be around.
i advise against UC Berkeley for two reasons.
1. the point brought up by Davi Bock stands out at cal. the undergrads are mostly uninterested grinds that have no interest in anything except grades. this creates a non-stimulating atmosphere, unless you want to compete in memory gymnastics.
2. a minor point, which is easy to get around with some effort: the girl situation is horrible. a porsche GT2 would not save you at cal.
I work for my Alma Mater, Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT. Pros for Fairfield: Girl ratio is excellent, almost 60/40; small school – 3600 undergrads, so he would be a big fish in a small pond; biology program is hot right now here; campus is beautiful; faculty is very accessible.
Cons for Fairfield: expensive (he’d be able to get a generous scholarship and aid though with those scores); people get trapped in the “Fairfield bubble” and forget about everything but the Real World and the OC, but that may not be just a Fairfield thing; not many rock climbing opportunities unless you take a ride down 95 about 20 minutes to Norwalk’s indoor rock climbing facility.
If he wants a tour, have him contact me.
Not Cornell. Too big (predictably huge enrollment in core undergrad courses means little interaction with profs), and poor weather. From what I recall, biology was especially cut-throat because most of the students are pre-med (I’m sure this isn’t unique to Cornell).
FWIW, I went through the engineering school and thought I would have been better off at a smaller school that still had a decent engineering program (like Lehigh or Lafayette) because I would have been more comfortable in that environment. But that’s just me.
The correct answer to this question is highly dependent on just *how* nerdy young John Q. Nerdly is. Is he just girlfriendless, or does he have genuinely subnormal social interaction skills?
If he’s not a hardcore nerd, the rest of the advice you’ve received applies.
Hardcore nerds, though, like I was, should go to all-nerd schools like MIT, Caltech, or the University of Chicago. Going somewhere where you’re “normal” and fit in, rather than being the freak on your dorm hall, makes an incredible difference in social development, which may be more important to long-term happiness than the actual education.
FYI, Berkeley has ~12K women, ~10K men (undergrad). Just don’t get stuck in the enegineering program like I did…then it’s like 200 to 3K ratio. Socially, Berkeley is great, so close to San Francisco.
I would suggets looking at Sewanee (The University of the South) in Tennessee. Excellent school, great location. Everyone I have ever known who went there has loved it and been accepted where and when they wanted in graduate school. Just a suggestion out of the mainstream.
I agree that your undergraduate school is a foundation for later education, but less important than where you go for gratuate study. However, I believe those experiences in college are paramount in later life successes.
Actually, if he’s choosing to major in Biology with an advanced degree in life sciences (but not medical school), we should tell him about the life sciences glut at all levels.
There’s also a glut of physical sciences PhDs too, which probably explains why your friend with the PhD can only afford to live where she has to travel for 2 hours to the exurbs.
I actually go to Berkeley right now. Many good things have been said so far but if the person wants to hear from a real Cal student or have an informal tour, let me know. I personally think that going to Cal should be prefaced by a 6-month break to discover life….and since I’m studying for finals now, I must say that I wish we had grade inflation like…some other schools. Of course it matters which major you pick (I’m a math major)
If one looks for education he/she will know where to go. But if one looks for preparing for the “life after the education” think about:
1.Prestige and connections to make.
2.Future career perspectives.
So it will boil again to the Ivy league.
I am a senior at Duke University, a terrifically wonderful place, not that I am saying that it is the place for him. Schools are expensive and even if he can go for free, which he probably can at many places, the expense can also be measured in giving four years of his life to an institution. The price one pays is not the price for attending class, but the price of access to the university and the university community. When you enter into that community, you open yourself up to the potential to become a different person and quite certainly all of my friends from high school and freshman year of college have changed over the past few years – it is incredible that at some point you wake up and notice, or someone points out to you, that you have changed – picking a college is not only about finding a place with good off-campus housing or the right meal plan, it is first and foremost about finding a place that will shape that change into a positive thing for yourself – depending on who you are and who you want to be, different colleges offer different opportunities. I have many friends who have gotten “run over” public universities (I am from CA and most of my high school friends went to UCs), they never had an administrator care about what their future, personally or academically, would entail, nor did they establish any meaningful relationships with professors. I also have friends at smaller colleges who have never had the opportunities as the big-university kids. They have not cried when a team lost a football game or seen a fabulous pianist in the main auditorium, a lot of smaller schools simply don’t have the critical mass to give students the opportunities that a larger school might
I chose a medium, size prestigious school because it had an inexplicable spirit that spoke to me – I feel a connection with alumni I meet because of that spirit and I know that I have grown because of the relationships I’ve fostered here. College will be a lot of work for this young man, hopefully he will push his efforts into everything he does, if it is in a lab or on a stage or trying to fix-up old cars to get girls, if he is in a place that is good for him (you can only tell this by “breathing the air” there) and if he consumes everything he can there, he’s going to have a wonderful experience.
I’m not writing to recommend my undergraduate school (Johns Hopkins), but to defend the idea of sending a kid to a school located in the so-called ghetto. Half of JHU was in a dicey neighborhood, and half of it was in a relatively nice area. Most of my classmates came from the suburbs, and the exposure to the bad area was a learning experience for them (I experienced major culture shock moving from San Francisco to Baltimore). If you’re not forced to do it in college, it may never be done.
On a second note, JHU fails your criteria based on it’s high male-to-female ratio, and general reputation for student apathy. But in terms of research opportunities, the med school is an invaluable resource.
I have to recommend my alma mater, the University of Chicago. The academics are great, the class sizes are small, and if my experience and the experience of my friends is any indication, it’s easy to work with a prof in a lab setting. As for the social side of things, many people complain that it’s boring, but I found it to be just about ideal. It’s true that there’s not a lot of partying going on, but there are fascinating people and interesting conversations everywhere you go. It’s a wonderful thing, being surrounded by ‘hardcore nerds’ as another poster described us. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
I’m getting into climbing myself, and the climbing gym I go to most often has a couple regulars who are math grad students at the U of C. So there are places in the city to climb.
Bill Mill offers sound advice. I recommend a small liberal arts school known as being a feeder school to medical school. If your friend is really majoring in biology he will also want to go to medical school rather than graduate school, as the career situation for biology PhDs is terrible.
Ersatz intellectuals in fields other than biology read The Selfish Gene or equivalent popular biology book and imagine biological research as witty British academes exchanging verbal jabs, unlocking the mysteries of life, and receiving millions of royalty pounds from their cloned maize patents . In reality biology is a windowless lab above the food court in Longwood, with 3 chinese guys, an indian, and a russian, packed into a 6×8 space, trying to do just enough work so that they don’t lose funding and get deported. One autistic asian girl does all the wet lab for the entire department and a team of shell-shocked dot com losers are responsible for absorbing all the grant money still being allocated to various dead-end “informatics” programmes. The female doctoral candidates all decide to abandon ship and go to optometry school or manage a pet shop after their thesis defense whilst the male PhDs seem more inclined to waste even more life with endless journal clubs, data sharing, journal sharing, data clubs, and so forth for the rest of $20K/yr post-doc eternity.
Medical school is a (not much) duller , but far more fiscally sensible. If you get bored making $300K a year prescribing acne cream, you could always use your income to set up a lab in your basement. Even post docs have to figure out how to pay rent, so a lot of prime equipment ends up on ebay.
Whoops, I got carried away. Back to the topic.
The issue with smaller liberal arts colleges, is that the schools with recognizable names:
1) are almost as expensive as Harvard (or more)
2) don’t offer any merit based scholarships.
thus one has to do a bit of legwork to figure out the less-well-known schools offering full-tuition packages. The place I went to was one of these but it was in the midwest, which is cold, so I don’t recommend that. In any case it is harder to find any school offering merti based scholarships, but there must be some out there.
On a more prurient note, the male/female ratio really is an important consideration. If one is bent on a career science or engineering, the opportunity curve for hooking up post-graduation drops off dramatically upon graduation. Do as much work in this area as possible while still in school.
Some guy earlier mentioned Reed; I don’t think they offer any scholarships, but the area is nice, and Portland girls are easy.
I did my undergrad at Penn State and my grad work at Columbia. While I appreciated Penn State’s bargain price and decent opportunities for advancement (it’s common for PSU’s best performers to go on to the best grad programs), I feel that I missed out on much of the socialization opportunities that a small, elite school could have offered. Had I to do it over again, I would have taken on the extra loans to do a Bowdoin or a Brown.
I made sure my younger brother didn’t make the same mistake. He’s currently an incredibly satisfied sophomore at Haverford College (a top ten liberal arts school in the Philly suburbs). It’s neither cheap nor known for its financial aid, however he’s enjoying its fantastic biochem program (not to mention its fun atmosphere) and he’s feeling OK about his prospects for admission to an Ivy med program. He always speaks highly of his Haverford experiences, both academic and social.
I agree with post #2. Oberlin College is fantastic for the sciences. They just completed building a big new science center. You’re taking small classes and doing research in labs with full faculty members at ages 20, 21 & 22. (No grad school.) A very valuable, rich experience
Echoing Kevin to some extent, don’t write off a school with fewer women if you are a guy still looking for his first date. A science/engineering school with over 80% guys sounds bad, but what sort of guys are there? If you have any social skills at all and a real interest in meeting girls, you may find it easier to out-compete a bunch of fellow nerds than the socially-skilled crowd at more balanced colleges. Worked for me 🙂
One of my college lessons was to watch out for the “harder is better” trap. I was a star student in high school, and made the naive assumption that I should go to the most selective school which would accept me. I turned down the likes of Harvard and MIT, and went to Caltech. I made it to graduation, but it’s not fun being in the bottom third of the class when you are used to the top 1%. I probably would have learned more engineering and science in a school with less of a “we teach to the future nobel prize winners” attitude. [One disclaimer: I have heard that Caltech is taking better care of all its undergrads now than 25 years ago.]
You don’t have to choose between the Ivy League and access to top faculty; just go to Dartmouth. The culture is focused on undergraduate education, where senior faculty teach all levels of undergrad classes–that’s part of why it’s still called Dartmouth *College*, despite the presence of graduate and professional schools. The male/female ratio is near 50/50, and outdoor recreation opportunities are huge.
Yeah, I’m biased. One of the other things about Dartmouth is that it routinely ranks #1 in alumni loyalty.
harvey mudd college, one of the claremont colleges near los angeles, sounds like a good candidate. it is nearly undergrad-only, and there are many opportunities for students to participate in research programs (and it’s generally required in the senior year).
back when us news ranked undergrad engineering colleges, hmc was consistently in the top few. it also has great programs in all of the other sciences, including biology.
and scripps college (all women) is right next door.
I did my undergrad at MIT and grad school at Stanford. From my perspective, there’s a world of difference between an Institute and a University, and this difference is far more than just semantics. It manifests itself in the tone, timbre, and content of the everyday interactions you have with your peers.
At MIT, you could walk up to just about any random person in the Infinite Corridor and ask them a question about linear algebra, and as long as they spoke enough English to understand you, that conversation would not be viewed as being totally out-of-bounds. Weird, maybe, but you could have it with most people. On the other hand, my experience was that MIT is definitely NOT the “best-four-years-of-your-life” kind of a place. It can be cold and hard, and it often feels like a sustained assault on your self-confidence and self-worth. For some it leaves lasting scars. (See also Seth Gordon’s comment [12/16] above. Amusing but also very telling, in that it doesn’t surprise me at all.)
If you tried the same conversational experiment at Stanford, most people would run. There’s a self-perpetuating barrier between “techies” and “fuzzies,” and the latter tend to stereotype the former with a (sometimes uninformed) mixture of awe and scorn. That said, if you have reasonable social skills and interests outside the lab, you can have a really, really good experience at Stanford. On any given day, you might attend a lecture by the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, have a Nobel Laureate in Physics drop by the TA meeting of the class you’re teaching, and go photograph several Olympians in a swim or track meet for the student paper. (I was lucky enough to experience all three.)
I don’t have any firsthand experience with smaller liberal arts colleges, but the comments made by previous posters seem quite reasonable. I’ve known a number people who got outstanding educations at smaller, non-“brand name” schools, and by the time they get to graduate school they are every bit as bright as the people who got their undergraduate degrees from more prominent institutions.
My advice is to visit a lot of places, and to talk to as many people on each campus as you can. Then make whatever decision your gut tells you to, provided it is financially feasible.
I have to admit I’m a big fan of state schools at the undergrad level (depending on the state, of course). UVA, Michigan, North Carolina, Ga Tech, many of the UC schools etc are all excellent values for in-state students, but even for out-of-staters. If money is a limiting factor, and post-graduate work is all but certain, I am not convinced that it is worthwhile to spend the money on a private school. A quality undergraduate education is attainable at many, maybe even most, colleges, large or small, public or private, liberal arts or engineering. Spend the extra money on law/med/grad/business school. Coming out of college with massive debt is NOT something I recommend for anyone; I’ve tried it. For the most part, the only difference the undergrad school seems to make is which football/basketball/etc team you pull for later in life…
From a personal growth standpoint, I tend to favor large schools over small ones as they tend to be less insular and more diverse in student population.
One point I will concede is that there are elaborate social (ie, “good ole boy”) networks that one has access to at many of the elite private schools. This has a clear practical benefit.
I did my undergrad at Yale and am now back for gradschool. I thought it was a wonderful place to be an undergraduate. If you’re interested in studying computer science I think Yale’s relatively small department, which features small class sizes and a number of highly regarded and accessible professors, is very well suited to ambitious undergrads. Anyone who describes New Haven as a “crime-ridden ghetto” either has never been there, or last visited sometime in the 70’s or 80’s.
Even if the kid isn’t from California, I would have a hard time not suggesting the University of California. As competetive as those schools can be for the out-of-stater, with a 1600, and no gross abnormalities manifest at interview, he ought to be a shoo-in. And why not consider Stanford, if he can get some money to pay for it.
Quality of life is important. Atmosphere is important. Access to faculty after hours is nice too, but not more important than the other things. Affordability is really important but underemphasized. (I think recent undergraduates are unthinkingly taking on way too much debt for undergraduate education, which can really limit postgraduate opportunities in undesirable ways. It is cruelly misleading to tell a student to go wherever he wants and can get into and suggest that payback can always wait till later).
I went to private universities in the East, ones that are now relatively prohibitive in cost. At the time I was in school, it was a good deal; I am not so sure it still is, even though admission there is much more difficult.
Harvey Mudd? Some of the best science/tech undergrads around, and the professors there are there to teach first and do research second. Caltech would also be a good choice. It is small enough to treat students as people, not tuition. Instruction quality varies widely at Caltech, but research opportunities can be had for the asking.
As a Caltech alum, I would recommend a school with nerdy students — it’s much easier to fit in socially. Furthermore, while the male/female ratio may be skewed, the guys tend to be less socially competent so the qualified-to-date male/female is actually pretty balanced!
Phil,
I have to put in my vote for UT @ Austin. Is it Ivy quality? Who knows.
What I do know is it has absolutely the most stunning array of cute college women I have ever seen. Ever.
I defy you to find a college with better female scenery. Well worth a photo expedition and study into what must be a statistical anomaly.
If not there? Then a small private college. Play racquetball with your instructors, take undergrad classes form people who love to teach. Grinnell is nice.
By the way, I went to neither Grinnell or UT.
I am a residence hall director at a University so I have had the opportunity to visit many schools.
I didn’t attend this school, but I think the best choice for him could be Rice University. It is as small as a liberal arts college but offers as many or more undergraduate research opportunities as MIT. Because real estate in the Museum District fo Houston is about 1/3rd the price of Cambridge, many professors live nearby – something that Greenspun appreciates. The weather is fantastic during the school year (despite being very hot and humid when the students are gone). If they aren’t familiar with Rice University, it would behoove them to look into it. With 1600 SAT, he would be pleased to know that Rice has a greater percentage of National Merit Scholars than does MIT. His parents will enjoy the fact that Rice has lower tuition than MIT and that Kiplinger’s ranks it #1 among college values.
Ben Lunsford, UVa Grad and Rice Admirer
Oh, the other thing about Rice University is the financial aid. U.S. News ranks it #1 for “least amount of debt among graduates” out of 1,600 private schools in the United States. Its endowment per student is also larger than MIT’s. (Sorry for all of the comparisons to MIT, nothing against MIT.)
Bill Mill said:
“Ersatz intellectuals in fields other than biology read The Selfish Gene or equivalent popular biology book and imagine biological research as witty British academes exchanging verbal jabs, unlocking the mysteries of life, and receiving millions of royalty pounds from their cloned maize patents . In reality biology is a windowless lab above the food court in Longwood, with 3 chinese guys, an indian, and a russian, packed into a 6×8 space, trying to do just enough work so that they don’t lose funding and get deported. One autistic asian girl does all the wet lab for the entire department and a team of shell-shocked dot com losers are responsible for absorbing all the grant money still being allocated to various dead-end “informatics” programmes. The female doctoral candidates all decide to abandon ship and go to optometry school or manage a pet shop after their thesis defense whilst the male PhDs seem more inclined to waste even more life with endless journal clubs, data sharing, journal sharing, data clubs, and so forth for the rest of $20K/yr post-doc eternity.
”
Well, speaking as an ersatz intellectual from a field other than biology working in a 6×8 cubicle in a small, windowless lab above Longwood cafeteria with an Asian MD/PhD and a shell-shocked dotcom programmer absorbing all the grant money still being allocated to various dead-end “informatics” programs, the real trick is to avoid graduate school altogether and find a cool boss who will allow you to do research. Take one class per semester, really focus on the final project, and make a great impression on the professor. He’ll give you a project to work on, but don’t accept money, because your boss already agreed to pay you. In return, just ask him to send you to conferences where you find out where the exciting research is really going on, and where you learn about how science really works. Help your professor write a large grant proposal, and he’ll remember you forever. Get involved in open-source community projects that are for a good cause, and you’ll feel good about what you do. Every once in a while, you’ll run into people who are concerned that you are “not yet a graduate student” but for the most part, you look and act more like a post-doc than a grad student, because you are actually having fun. When you get tired of the roller-coaster, world-traveller existence, you can always apply for grad school and see where they’ll accept you. Fortunately, having met all the professors you want to work with outside of a classroom context, you are in a much more informed position than the typical grad school applicant.
Another no for Cornell. Forget the lousy weather – you don’t want to go there because undergraduate classes are enormous (the intro biology course overflows the 2000 seat concert auditorium), you have no contact with professors, the non-English speaking TA problem has been a campus issue for at least twenty years now, and (probably worst for “nerdy” kids) the campus culture is fraternity oriented – the university doesn’t have enough housing, and after freshman year you have to take your chances with a limited upperclassman housing pool, join a frat, or live off-campus. In the sciences and engineering freshman year is a pressure cooker and Cornell has the lowest honors graduation rate in the Ivies. The city of Ithaca has no real culture or industry other than that supplied by Cornell and Ithaca College (another 4K students). If I were to do it all over again I’d go to a school of about 2000 in a city within an hour of a major metropolitan area with guaranteed housing and professor-taught small classes.
Many have recommended the UC’s. I’m a graduate student at UCLA right now. From everything I can make out, the ‘C’ in UC does not stand for California. The lab I’m trying to get into has been outsourced to China–the prof keeps saying he can get someone form Microsoft China. As for the undergraduate school, there is probably a UCLA special that flies from LAX to Kaitak. It’ll be tough here if you are not Chinese. 1600 SATs will not impress anyone here the way being Chinese will.
Amherst/Williams might be a good choice. I myself went to a small liberal arts school and got a full scholarship. Would not recommend a no-name school–you never know when you might need it and if he ever plans to be an academic, the undergraduate school will count too. One more thing, except for MIT and CalTech, the big name schools may not be harder or more competitive than the lesser known ones. So why not a big name–Stanford and Harvard give a lot of A’s.
Looking beyond the Ivy League is a great book on this very subject.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140239529/103-9158435-9907020
Though I should say the great thing about going to stanford was the students, who were usually doing really interesting things. Community colleges I’ve attended for spanish or composition classes have had much better teaching, but chatting with the other students after class wasn’t nearly as enlightening. For people that don’t want to be professors, access to other students who are great role models is very worthwile.
Kevin, Steve, and Justin: I profoundly disagree with your analysis.
First, Mr. Greenspun’s point about ratios only hints at the desireability distribution. While I was doing a summer study abroad program, a couple of the girls (non-engineers) asked me “Have you ever noticed how the few girls who go into engineering usually aren’t that cute?” I was too politically correct to agree, but they were right. So the handful of girls who do choose “Nerd U” over “Collge of Books” usually won’t be mistaken for Eve Andersson.
Secondly, our young friend can’t afford 4 years hanging out with “Napoleon Dynamite” clones. Even if he’s borderline cool now, he’ll have a lot more fun, and develop more socially, if he can find some moderately cool guys to be friends with (provided they’re smart enough that he can relate to them). Otherwise, despite his best efforts, his nerdy traits will increase, leaving him socially crippled for life.
Mother of student in question here (who happens to be Philip’s oldest nephew). He’s actually not really nerdy, and is working on his second serious girlfriend. But he does drive an old Taurus wagon with dents, so sometimes his girlfriend, whose attorney and pediatrician parents bought her a new Audi sedan when she got her license, drives when they go places.
In any event, here’s the rundown:
accepted to Duke, Cornell, Dartmouth and Harvey Mudd
waitlisted by Harvard
rejected by Stanford
considering Harvey Mudd quite seriously as they offered him a merit-based scholarship of $10,000/year
visiting Dartmouth and Cornell right now with his father
needs to decide by May 1st, but Harvard could pop into the picture later in the summer
Parents worried he’ll choose college based on climbing conditions in proximity (that’s why he currently favors Dartmouth and Harvey Mudd). Mother here praying he gets off the Harvard waitlist since it’s several hours to good rock climbing and he’ll likely be busy going back and forth to Princeton, New Jersey for a short while anyway to visit with girlfriend (who was accepted by Princeton, but rejected by Harvard). He’s being flown out to Claremont by Harvey Mudd to an open house weekend (they’re even picking the kids up at the airport and taking them to one of Claremont’s finest restaurants). Trip with father this weekend to Hanover, New Hampshire and Ithaca, New York funded by father who wants to see whether it’s really worth $44,000 to attend an Ivy League school. Everyone grateful he has a lot of good options and just praying he doesn’t hurt himself rock climbing if he goes to Harvey Mudd which is next door to Joshua Tree National Forest or Dartmouth which is in the midst of mountains.
Thanks to all of you for your insights. Cheers!
I apologize to all of you, as I had separated much of what I said with new line/enter, but apparently Philip’s software melds it all together. So, in the previous comment, all of my line separations got eliminated. But all of you are smart enough to figure out what I meant, n’est-ce pas?
As I stated previously, my hubby took Norman off this weekend to visit Hanover, New Hampshire and Ithaca, New York. When I returned home from our sixth-grader’s soccer game this afternoon, there was a Dartmouth t-shirt in the mailslot with the card of an alumnus, welcoming him to Dartmouth. I must say the welcome accorded him by Dartmouth, which actually wrote him in early March to say they were planning to admit him in April, is impressive (compared to the supercilious tone of some other institutions which either waitlisted or rejected him).
Again, appreciate all your insights. Brother Philip, do you want your other teenage nephew, the computer programming geek type, to correct this flaw in your software? He is right now collapsed after a late night Sweet Sixteen party at a fancy country club. With the father out of town and therefore unable to knot his tie for him, he looked on the internet for instructions and did a pretty serviceable job.
How did we survive before the www?
My cousin did his undergrad work in 2006 and got a Accounting and Finance Ph.D. from MIT. He got a full undergrad scholarship and got the old cheap loans (student loans) which tided him over, and scholarships from a couple of foundations, without having to meet any ethnic qualifications.