Good article in today’s Boston Globe about the travails of being a Harvard undergraduate from a middle class family. The school doesn’t make sense academically for most undergrads; they’d be better off going to a college where the professors are paid to talk to undergraduates, rather than a research university where professors are paid to talk to post-docs and graduate students. The Ivy League line has always been “The professors will ignore you, but you’ll make a lot of connections with society’s future leaders.” It seems that doesn’t work for kids from average families. The future leaders don’t want to talk to them and they end up getting an inferior education to what they would have received at a school where they would have been an academic stand-out.
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Reminds me of this kuro5hin article: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/1/24/11657/1141
The basic gist being: go to a cheap state school where you’ll get a better education for less money, put your energy into getting a high GRE/MCAT/LSAT/whatever score and decent grades, and then go to the more expensive, “prestigious” school for your Master’s since that’s the only one that employers will care about.
I’m afraid state schools aren’t much better. They are in a race to the top (or bottom) to become major research universities themselves and, as such, hire professors to bring in $$$. Undergraduates who really want to learn are better off with smaller liberal arts colleges with few or no graduate programs. Or maybe they might be better off taking the money, hitting Amazon for the handful of books that really matter, and travel to see what the world is really like for themselves.
That’s the American educational system for you. Whoever pays the absurd amounts of tuition in Ivy League deserves to be ripped off. After all, they’re paying for the connections and not for the quality of teaching (ie, being greedy).
Philip,
I am not able to recollect exact words Richard Feynman said when he got offer from Princeton. He disliked idea of not being with out students asking questions. How many current prof. will do now?
Also it is to do with how you measure performance. If it is papers, why teaching? Do minimal and concentrate on papers.
Sam
Ah, but the ticket is the most important thing of all. Around 25% of Americans actually graduate from college. If you get over that bar, where you went, and how you did there matters less and less the longer you’re out of college. You could easily educate yourself as well as most college graduates in far less than 4 years, but without the diploma you’d never be able to prove it to a prospective employer.
Yeah, I are a college graduate and I’m pretty cynical about it.
I’m sorry, I just think that sweeping generalization isn’t nearly true. In fact, what you said is almost certainly false for the vast majority of Harvard undergraduates.
Of course, there will be some students who shouldn’t have gone to Harvard (or MIT). But just as there are unique features of an MIT education that are incredibly beneficial for many students who attend there, so to are there such features of a Harvard education. Interested students have a great deal of contact with professors, advanced research, inspiring peers, and a host of other resources — none of which are present at nearly the same concentration essentially anywhere else.
That particular Boston Globe article was terrible — taking vague comments and twisting them to paint a stereotypical picture that might have been true a hundred years ago (in a vastly different context) but is anything but true today.
Unsaid is what a ripoff the typical American high school education has become. Unless you live in a privileged community where schools like a New Trier or those similar are present, you get something that falls far short of even the developing world’s standard of secondary education. In a sense, undergraduate degrees have become remedial for even bright but less privileged students.
Sam: I’m glad that you’re happy with your MIT education. A friend of mine owns a software company. He says that he is willing to hire 95% of the Olin College (teaching school) graduates that he interviews. Of the MIT graduates that he has interviewed, only 5% are worth hiring in his opinion.
The conclusion that I draw from this is that a student with tremendous motivation to make contact with faculty, get involved in research, pick challenging problems to solve, can do well at MIT (though presumably would have done well at his state university). The process of MIT education, however, must be considered a failure because it produces such inconsistent results.
Sam,
you just wrote exactly what makes smart, poor kids feel out of place at Harvard.
> Of course, there will be some students who shouldn’t have gone to Harvard
That statement is soaked with entitlement. If anyone reading this thinks that that statement is not soaked with entitlement, you need to go reflect on your background. Poor kids who get into great schools are coming from social conditions in which they couldn’t possibly have access to the information that would allow them to make what you believe would have been a more informed decision. They applied to Harvard not knowing that there were schools named Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, or Tufts. Or they applied to Yale because they got a free summer trip there after a student recruiter found them, not knowing there were also schools named Dartmouth, Brandies, or Cornell. Their friends are applying for a limited number of jobs at the local factory. In Michigan their friends are applying to GM. In Arkansas it’s Tyson’s chicken packing plants (largest consumer of industrial sissors, btw). In California they’re going door-to-door looking for work as maids and gardeners.
Some of these top universities need to start turning the equation around: as a condition of graduation they need to start requiring an additional year in Teach for America, after meeting all other graduation requirements. The rich kids would still game the system, but the relative difference in logistical pain between rich students and poor students would be markedly reduced.
@Sambaiah: Feynman got an offer not just at Princeton, but at the Institute of Advanced Studies there (where Einstein i.a. also worked) – a place where, as you correctly pointed out, his interactions with students would have been nil.