Posted on 10/23/2007, 1:11:25 AM by jazusamo
October 23, 2007
High school seniors who want to go to a selective college in the fall of 2008 should already be making arrangements to take the tests they will need before they apply ahead of the deadlines for such schools, which are usually in January or February.
One of the consequences of taking these tests is that, if you do well, you may be deluged with literature from colleges and universities all across the country.
Some students may feel flattered that Harvard, Yale or M.I.T. seems to be dying to have them apply. But the brutal reality is that the reason for wanting so many youngsters to apply is so that they can be rejected.
Why? Because the prestige ranking of a college or university as a "selective" institution is measured by how small a percentage of its applicants are accepted. So they have to get thousands of young people to apply, so that they can be rejected.
While we are on the subject of reality and prestige, one of the tragic misconceptions of many students and their parents is that you have to go to a prestigious, big-name academic institution to really get ahead and reach the top.
Some students get sunk deep into depression when they are notified in April that they have been rejected by some Ivy League school that they had their heart set on. When they are accepted, some parents go deep into debt to finance the education of their offspring at the college of their dreams.
Seldom is either reaction warranted.
Stop and think: What is an academic institution's prestige based on?
Academic prestige is based mostly on the research achievements of the faculty. Places like Harvard or Stanford have many professors who are among the leading experts in their respective fields, including some who have won Nobel Prizes.
Good for them. But is it good for you, if you are a student at Prestige U.?
Big-name professors are unlikely to be teaching you freshman English or introductory math. Some may not be teaching you anything at all, unless and until you go on to postgraduate study.
In other words, the people who generated the prestige which attracted you to the college may be seen walking about the campus but are less likely to be seen standing in front of your classroom when you begin your college education.
Lower level courses are usually left to be taught by junior faculty members or even graduate students. Yet these courses are often the foundation on which higher level courses are built.
If you don't really master introductory calculus, physics or economics, you are unlikely to do well in higher level courses which presuppose that you already have a foundation on which they can build.
By contrast, at a small college without the prestige of big-name research universities, the introductory courses which provide a foundation for higher courses are more likely to be taught by experienced professors who are teachers more so than researchers.
Maybe that is why graduates of such colleges often go on to do better than the graduates of big-name research universities.
You may never have heard of Harvey Mudd College but a higher percentage of its graduates go on to get Ph.D.s than do the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford or M.I.T. So do the graduates of Grinnell, Reed, and various other small colleges.
Of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations surveyed in 2006, only four had Ivy League degrees. Some -- including Michael Dell of Dell computers and Bill Gates of Microsoft -- had no degree at all.
Apparently getting into Prestige U. is not the life or death thing that some students or their parents think it is.
Unfortunately, prestige rankings are so hyped in the media -- especially by U.S. News & World Report magazine -- that many people think that is how to choose a college.
What you really want is not the "best" college but the college that fits you best. For that, you need in-depth information, not statistical rankings. For such information, you could start looking up colleges in the 900-page guide, "Choosing the Right College." After that, campus visits would be in order.
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Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
Good advice from America’s greatest living intellectual!
Definite ping!
I was an Ivy League graduate, and chose my college because it had the smallest grad school of all the Ivies -- thus the big name professors actually taught undergrads. I had one of the world's living authorities on 17th century England teaching me as a freshman, and the guy who wrote the definitive study of the German medieval folk poems teaching me German . . . . Also, the classes were very small, and no TAs. I had one TA my entire four years, and that was in a Greek 101/102 class where the precept sessions were entirely language drill (it would probably be done now on line instead of with a human!)
My daughter applied to my old school, but during the application process we learned a lot of things that gave me a great deal of pause. The undergrad student body has increased in size. The grad school isn't much bigger, but apparently the big name professors are now spending all their time writing books and doing lecture tours, because they are no longer teaching many undergrad courses. TAs have reared their ugly undereducated heads, and the lecture classes are getting larger and larger - A friend's daughter had been admitted the year before, and she was miserably unhappy, felt she had been sold a bill of goods (actually her parents were the ones who were sold, with the $50k plus tuition . . . ) and she was looking to transfer.
Daughter was a borderline admit to my old school, put on the short wait list. I could have moved heaven and earth and called home a bunch of favors . . . but my daughter said NO, don't bother.
She is at a small, southern, private liberal arts college without any grad school at all, a stellar academic reputation, and tiny classes (her Spanish class has 6 students, and even her chemistry class only has 25). The college also has a well deserved reputation for personal attention to every student and a positive "in loco parentis" attitude. My daughter is a sophomore now and still perfectly happy with her choice of college. And she's just a 4 hour drive away, instead of being up in the Northeast.
Nice system. That and the smug liberal brainwashing.
Small liberal arts school, not a research school for undergrad.
If you want, go to a name school for a Master's or PhD.
After that, nobody will CARE where your undergrad degree is from.
Cheers!
.
NEVER FORGET
.
IRAN-2007 =
“It’s time for the world to start imagining a world without an America in it”
.
SOWELL-2007 =
“The two greatest dangers facing America today are:
1) IRAN with a Nuclear weapon
2) The GULLIBILITY of the American People”
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NEVER FORGET
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Sounds like your daughter is very happy with the choice and I don’t blame her, plus she’ll learn.
I love to read Dr. Sowell’s column regarding higher education and academia, he never pulls any punches.
column = columns
My daughter aced the SAT and she got a lot of literature from a ton of colleges -- but none from the Ivies, although I think maybe she got a postcard from Dartmouth. Surely if the Ivies were angling to get folks to apply so they could turn them down, they would have gotten the list from right down the road at Educational Testing Service and started licking stamps . . . . ?
Does anybody have any personal experience with receiving promotional literature from an Ivy?
I really think the Ivies don't NEED to recruit to have tons of applicants, so many people think that's where they HAVE to apply that they have more applicants than they know what to do with anyhow. The regional top tier schools I can see doing this little dodge, they certainly sent us enough stuff to fill a 55-gallon burn drum.
Including organic chemistry, which I would crawl over broken glass and live toads to avoid . . . . but she wants to major in biology and go to vet school, go figure.
"A research paper by Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger (1998) (link to pdf file) confirms that people who attended more prestigious schools earn more money. They looked only at students who were accepted to multiple colleges, so they were able to determine what happens if a student is accepted to a better school but attends a lesser school. From page 24:
Based on the straightforward regression results in column 1, men who attend the most competitive colleges [according to Barron's 1982 ratings] earn 23 percent more than men who attend very competitive colleges, other variables in the equation being equal.
23 percent is quite a bit of money, it’s almost like getting two college degrees instead of one!
They also discovered that there was a benefit to attending a more expensive school. The more expensive tuition resulted in a lifetime internal rate of return of 20% for men and 25% for women. "
http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/08/attending_an_iv.html
Mr. Sowell is accusing the Ivies of sending promotional literature to folks with no prayer of getting in, just to inflate their rejection percentage and thus keep their selectivity high.
Nothing at all to do with the benefits of actually managing to matriculate at one of those places.
(I'm surprised, btw, at the greater advantage to women of an Ivy degree. I would think that childbearing and other career-inhibiting choices would cancel that out.)
Nothing at all to do with the benefits of actually managing to matriculate at one of those places."
From the article:
"Maybe that is why graduates of such (less prestigious) colleges often go on to do better than the graduates of big-name research universities.
You may never have heard of Harvey Mudd College but a higher percentage of its graduates go on to get Ph.D.s than do the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford or M.I.T. So do the graduates of Grinnell, Reed, and various other small colleges.
Of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations surveyed in 2006, only four had Ivy League degrees. Some -- including Michael Dell of Dell computers and Bill Gates of Microsoft -- had no degree at all.
Apparently getting into Prestige U. is not the life or death thing that some students or their parents think it is..."
As somebody who deliberately avoided a large NYC law firm because I did not want to work 90 hour weeks, even for a high six figure salary, I can tell you all about other factors that play into earnings. (I'm not sure that 70 hour weeks were all that much better, but it sure looked better at the time!)
How much is the application fee? That might be a motive, to send a $3 packet and get a $50 application fee.
But my former school has (or had in recent years) the largest endowment per student in the country, so I don't think they would resort to the academic equivalent of the 'pigeon drop' to get $47 per applicant. Although, given that they have thousands of applicants every year, that's what I would consider a significant chunk of change.
But then I don't have multiple millions of dollars lying around either.
I wondered about that sort of thing when my husband got offers to apply to grad schools.
$30 profit per application x 100,000 applicants = 3 million in profit
if all schools get more selective, then students apply to that many more schools, and schools can charge that much more to read the application
Selectivity becomes both a measure of prestige and profit center.
College search PING! Also mention of Grinnell College ping.
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