One of my young relatives, who will remain nameless to protect him from the ridicule that he so richly deserves, has decided to attend Harvard College. He is inclined toward math, science, and engineering. Had he asked me for advice, which he did not, I would have suggested Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts (“out west” as we Boston/Cambridge folks say). Harvard, of course, has a great reputation, but it is mostly for research achievements. It occurred to me to wonder why any high school kid would sign up to be an undergrad at a research university.
Research universities do not bother to disguise the fact that promotion, status, salary, and tenure for faculty are all based on research accomplishments. A high school kid with an above-average intelligence should thus be able to infer that a professor at such an institution would spend as little time as possible with undergraduates. Joe Research Professor will want to talk first with his postdocs, second with his graduate students, third with other faculty members. Any time that Joe spends talking to an undergraduate will reduce his chances of getting tenure, his status within the university, his salary, and his status among peers at other institutions. Teaching undergraduates or meeting with them face-to-face falls into the same category as watching television or other leisure activities. Joe Professor might enjoy it, but in the competitive academic world he inhabits is unlikely to indulge.
An Ivy League college would make sense for a rich kid who wants to party with other rich kids. An Ivy League university would make sense for graduate school, where the professors do have an incentive to talk to the students who are working on their research grants.
It seems surprising that kids, faced with a $200,000 purchase decision, are so dazzled by the Ivy League reputations that they fail to ask the obvious question “Why would a busy professor trying to deliver on a research grant want to talk to me?”
Seems pretty plain that he’s not looking to buy the educational experience, he’s looking to buy the peers and the prestige of the university.
And in my experience of what school is good for, he’s making the right decision.
You wanna learn? Set up a book budget and talk your way into or build your own facilities to play with the subject you’re interested in. Lectures are a lousy way to learn anyway.
But you don’t go to college to learn, you go to college to make the friends who are going to be on a similar arc as you go through your own career, and to build your reputation by association. The right thing for him to do, having gotten into Harvard, is to party his ass off, doing just enough to stay in school. That way he’ll cement those friendships that’ll be so important as he goes through his career, learn how to pronounce “ar” in the eastern seaboard style, and if he doesn’t already know most of what he’ll need to to actually do stuff in his career, he can pick that up once he gets into grad school or into the workforce.
I suspect your memory has dimmed from your high school days. Even the smartest HS students I knew had no idea about the factors you describe. And it’s not entirely a bad thing.
A top school, be in research or otherwise, attracts top people. You may not interact much with those top people, but you’ll interact with the people they attract. The postdocs, the grad students and the other undergrads. I learned at least as much, if not more, hanging around with smart people at university than I did in lecture halls.
And yes, the school’s reputation will make a difference during the period of your life where employers and others care about the external reputation of the school you went to. That one’s not as important, but it does have merit.
Now I didn’t go to an Ivy league school, but I did my undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, which is perhaps Canada’s top research school in Math and CS and has the largest math faculty in the world (and at the time, one of the few.) But even when I was a frosh, the professors were happy to talk extensively with me, and throughout my time they they knew me and I felt no shortage of contact. Though I wanted to spend more time with people my own age, and the staff who developed software tools for the mainframes who let me learn software engineering as well as theory.
I would recommend that experience to anybody over a lower tier school. The bright other students were not just people to learn from, but people to judge yourself against, so that you drive yourself.
Perhaps Harvard is far worse the Waterloo, but otherwise, I would take back your advice.
I can think of at least two possible answers, for science/math/engineering inclined students. These would be mostly reasons to choose MIT in particular, but I could imagine they’d apply at other top research schools too.
1. On average, the smartest group of people at MIT is actually the undergrads. The very best research schools attract a large critical mass of brilliant undergrads, and you will get smarter just by hanging out with them. Because there are a lot of them, you will find a bunch who share your interests. I’m friends with a few of the Olin undergrads, and they’re brilliant, but there aren’t all that many of them by comparison to MIT.
2. At the top research schools, undergraduates DO get involved in research. They’re probably not interacting frequently with the professor, but they probably are interacting frequently with the professor’s graduate students, and the best graduate students are at these big research schools. I had a couple of graduate student mentors who were really outstanding.
3. (Harvard or other Ivies only.) You will meet and make friends with rich kids with good manners who will provide critical angel funding and business connections for your startups.
So it’s not obviously completely irrational to go to Harvard (or at least MIT). That said, I would also probably advise undergrads to go to Olin.
Student in question was rejected by MIT (has letter of rejection from Ms. “Crash and Burn” Marilee Jones dated March 17, 2007 on his bulletin board), waitlisted by Caltech (and then finally told in mid-May that they would be unable to keep him on the waitlist), and accepted to Cornell’s School of Engineering. He felt the caliber of the engineering instruction at Cornell would be marginally superior to Harvard, but he concluded he might regret not going to Harvard. And his dear uncle lives just behind the Science Center and owns a sports car he dreams of driving!
Most students have nothing more to go on than those big books of college data and college rankings in magazines. Only a minority of elite high schools even have guidance counselors who know much about colleges outside their state. Is it unreasonable for a 17-year-old to think that a top University will provide a top education simply because it’s part of what they are supposed to do and because they (the school, if not the professor) are paid to do it?
Alas, that naive assumption turns out to be wrong. At Caltech I met a lot of very smart people (though not many “rich kids with good manners”) who inspired me and in some cases became lifelong friends. I’d have gotten a better engineering education at any of 20 other places.
I also studied CS at a large school where the faculty primarily focused on research. By the end of my sophomore year there, I’d landed a job with one of the research projects, and learned a tremendous amount working on it. If you’re bright and motivated enough to get into Harvard, you’re bright and motivated to find positions like that. You’ll graduate with real work experience, and have plenty of contact with professors, grad students, staff researchers etc. A tiny, instruction oriented school is far less likely to have those kinds of opportunities.
Years later when I did collage recruiting, the resumes with nothing but “I went to class and did my homework” went to the bottom of the heap. Fast.
I would imagine that Joe Student is going to use his Harvard degree to get a higher-paying job or into a better graduate program than is as easily possible with a second-tier university degree. It’s not that mysterious or laughable, is it?
I have a high school friend who had a full boat ( scholastic, not athletic) scholarship to Harvard as an undergrad, then got his postgrad degree at Harvard. Now is a CEO of a large company pulling down a $1.2 million salary with the pension, options and perks to boot. Very smart guy with very good connections all cultivated at Harvard.
If my kids have the grades, (so far they do) and want to go to a school like Harvard, if they get in I’ll let them go. You’re probably right about the professors time allocation, but I don’t see that big of a downside at the undergrad level, as long as the professor does his/her job.
> It occurred to me to wonder why any high school kid would sign up to be an undergrad at a research university.
Huh. Why did you sign up to be an undergrad at a research university, Philip?
Paul: No argument that a kid with great social skills is going to make a lot of important connections at a school full of rich kids. Sadly, I think that our family’s skills are more in the technical rather than the social areas… Anyway, a kid who can’t expect to be the life of the party would, I think, be better off at a college where the professors have some interest in teaching him.
Cotton: I was 14 years old when I started college. I did a lot of stupid things as a teenager, but I don’t expect other teenagers, especially in our world that is much more thoroughly suffused with information, to repeat my mistakes. I had a job as a Fortran programmer working with some MIT graduates. I liked them a lot better than the people I’d met in my high school, all of whom wanted to go to Ivy League schools, so I decided to go to MIT.
Having been educated in France, I don’t know very well about the non-educational factors that matter in the US universities, so can someone tell me whether the added prestige of a school like Harvard results in a better career ?
Over there, I am pretty sure that you asked any grad from Polytechnique (one of the top two schools in the country) why he chose that school, “quality of education” would be by far the least likely answer. The prestige of the school is virtually guaranteed to help you in your career. This prestige attracts the brightest students. Being bright, those students go on to great careers. This just has nothing to do with the education received there, which is anyways so heavily infused with theoretical science as to be almost useless for most of the graduates.
I’m not too familiar with Olin, but the student is “inclined toward math, science, and engineering.” That’s different from “has irrevocably devoted his life exclusively to technical subjects and technical people.”
On the undergraduate level, perhaps it is prudent to go to a comprehensive university rather than a purely tech school simply for the intellectual diversity. He will have the option of going into a non-technical field. At least he’ll be exposed to intelligent non-technical people for a few years, after which he can spend the rest of his life working for technical employers in a technically-oriented towns (San Jose, RTP, or other places a sociologists seriously call “nerdistans”) with other technical people and a sprinkling of not-very-bright HR people and such.
I think these factors are important even aside from the “partying and making connections with rich Harvard kids” angle. If it we were discussing at a less elite student, I’d still recommend a decent comprehensive state university instead of a tech school.
Q.T.: Economists who’ve studied the question of whether or not an Ivy League education is worth it generally have concluded that students who were accepted to Ivy League schools and chose not to attend (saving money by going to a state university, for exampe) ended up with the same lifetime income. Being the kind of person who gets admitted to Harvard has a lot of economic value. Attending Harvard turned out not to have any economic value.
That was one of my primary motivators behind going to MSOE (a small private Engineering College). They have no tenured professors… and all the profs teach all their classes… no TA’s.
WOW, I had been trying to figure out what was wrong with Cal, UC Berkeley, and that’s it. Yea, it’s a great school (in terms of accomplishments) but when it comes to teaching, it’s far too impersonal.
I’ve looked at these economic studies, too, but there often aren’t good data for kids who’ve been accepted to Ivy League schools and then choose to attend the state school — more often, these math-science magnet kids I know end up at Caltech or Harvey Mudd with a partial or full scholarship. It will be interesting for me to observe how my son’s friends who turned down elite private colleges in favor of University of Maryland fare. Probably very well, just like U. of Md alumnus Dan Snyder!
For our particular son, who was selected by Cornell for one of 15 “Irwin Mark Jacobs Engineering” scholarships, we thought Cornell was a no-brainer. But it turns out Duke was more generous with grants, and Harvard also appears to be offering grants rather than loans.
I forgot my ipod while running at the beach, and had to borrow my son’s. A song he had on it, “High School Never Ends” by Bowling for Soup, sums up the social networking in our very intense world. I think Harvard is good training for any affluent urban or suburban milieu. There is always a popular, “in” crowd, but an Ivy League college forces you to confront your limitations very quickly, and maybe learn some humility in the process??? (but most people complain that Ivy Leaguers tend toward arrogance)
Having done some graduate work, I understand very well the distinction between research and teaching, as well as the importance of reputation of the school you are attending. My undergraduate was also a research school, and even if people are mot intersted in teaching, then the reputation of research schools (i.e. Harvard) is worth more than whatever teaching classes one has foregone by not going to a more teaching oriented school. Given that the student in question on this thread is interested in engineering, I don’t see that there is a difference between the coursework at Olin College of Engineering and Harvard. I didn’t think there was much pedagogy in engineering.
Zhihong
If he decided to go to Harvard for engineering, God help him. He’ll find that in the real world, technical people will have two reactions to a Harvard trained engineer: (a) distain at anything having to do with Harvard and (b) surprise that Harvard has an engineering school. Harvard is a great place to go as an undergrad if you want to get a job “leveraging synergies of the blah blah blah” or at one of those thinktanks trying to save the world by writing reports, but not if you want to actually do something useful like science or engineering. It says something that in the world of technology, Harvard is known for its dropouts.