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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katelew who wrote (140953)	7/16/2010 12:03:50 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543331

Now at the grad level, I feel differently. There are, it seems to me, some grad progams at certain schools that do indeed offer very superior instruction, teaching methods, networking opportunities, and so on. You are misstating my position. First to the undergraduate level. There are, of course, large quality differences between undergraduate institutions. I don't see any reasonable argument otherwise. The question is whether the surveys actually measure those differences. I don't know any one within the industry that thinks they do so, even the ones that are explicitly advertised as reputational. At best, for parents picking an undergraduate place for a kid, they are a tool in the box, and a dull one at that. As for graduate institutions, what you say is, of course, true. Large differences, but, to some degree it's not self evidently apparent where one should go. If a prospective graduate student is a self starter and wants to come out of a program with the highest reputation, there are a limited set. Certainly within fields I know anything about. But if that student wants the best education in the field and the best job offers on the other end of the pipeline, it's a much more complicated decision, including just how much teaching the faculty actually does, how well they do it, and how much effort they put into helping their grads find jobs. My assumption is that almost all grad students who get into one of these program will graduate with an excellent body of knowledge and a real leg up on the competition. Not neccesarily so for the undergrads coming out of the top tier schools. Well, all other things being equal, a student graduating from Harvard or Yale or schools of equal rank, well definitely have better prospects for jobs and/or grad/professional schools. But the general wisdom in the field is, of course, things are never all equal, and the best wisdom is to find the best fit between student and school. And that's a short cliche that covers a host of issues.