What makes a good university good?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I haven’t read through the thread yet, but it depends what you’re looking for.

I excelled academically in high school but it wasn’t really a great school, so I had a lot to learn when I started college.

I went to a top-ranked college and I think I got an exceptional education. The academic standards were very high and I loved the depth of the coursework, but I think the greatest asset to my education was the school’s commitment to diversity (and is in fact a major reason I wanted to go there.) What was going on in the classroom was important, but all that extra stuff - who you talk to, what you learn about your peers, what activities were happening on campus - to me that’s what made the experience.

9/11 happened my first week of college and the educational context of where I was when that happened turned out to be invaluable. My own roommate was a Jewish girl from Long Island - don’t make fun of me, but she was the first Jewish person I ever met! I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center was. This is how culturally isolated I was growing up. After 9/11 there were student- organized meetings featuring students from all over the world, including the Middle East, who could speak to their own experience living in these countries and their perspective about what was happening. We talked to Muslim students who couldn’t go to mosque because of bomb threats. There were guest speaker events all over campus discussing the political implications of what was happening. And then there were the conversations we had at parties - not unlike what you’d find on these boards, only with more drinking.

I don’t think it’s lip service to say that diversity is a tremendous asset to an educational institution. It is a good in and of itself, for the greater good of the student body. I think the size of the institution (about 50,000 students) meant there was always something new to learn about somewhere. It also enabled you to take a class about pretty much anything that interested you. Chances are someone there was teaching a class on it.

That was really my Renaissance!

For grad school I actually did go to an Ivy League school and I loved the program but was disappointed by the campus culture. It didn’t seem to value diversity that much, and was conservative, in the sense of not wanting anything to change. Academically it was meh, but I know grad students tend to have easier coursework and it may have been a radically different experience for an undergrad. Still, I learned a lot and would speak highly of the specific program. And for the area I was living in, it absolutely made me more employable. I ended up moving out of that area so I don’t have access to the network anymore, but it was an advantage for sure. I had a couple of jobs where I was hired just because of the degree.

For context, in college I was a Spanish major undergoing an intensive language program, but I got carried away and took all kinds of classes. I nearly majored in philosophy minus a few credits, and I took courses in English, German, etc.

In grad school I was a Master of Social Work with a macro concentration.

So my education was very focused on the humanities and I think I’m a better critical thinker because of it. I truly look back at my undergraduate institution as the birth of my consciousness.

22

As a related aside, I’m very sad that international students are being driven out of institutions in the US and that international enrollment has plummeted, because students like those made my education what it was and I know they were similarly enriched. It’s a real loss.

23

Yeah, one of the benefits of going to a top-ranked undergraduate school is that a lot of people were smarter than me. A lot of people I had to work just to keep up with them. It was a good, if humbling, experience for me. Not unlike how I often feel positing here.

I did that too. I met him during freshman orientation, but it took a year before I realized I loved him. I have to say, though, it wasn’t in my 5-year plan and it was a real curveball to meet my life partner when I wasn’t looking for one yet. I still hadn’t decided on a major.

24

There are 38,000 universities worldwide and the better schools are therefore ranked in the top 1%. A lot of this is based on reputation. More credible metrics to look at include admission averages, scholarships, number of major awards and grants won by professors, professorial research papers and their prestige, library holdings, reputation scores by program, ranking of student experience, graduate starting salaries and this ratio to tuition fees, etc.

It isn’t foolproof. A great university may have many good programs and many shoddy ones, tough courses with high standards or unambitious ones where 70% of students get an A, put much or little effort into extracurricular and athletic programs, offer lots or little financial or emotional support, prepare its students for real life well or weakly, be located in a sophisticated city or offer little apart from the university community.

25

I prefer ones that don’t spend millions on sports programs.

26

Well, mine would be right out, then. But of course a lot of that football revenue went toward our fancy-ass campus.

I think I attended exactly one football game.

27

MIT is an edge case, I suspect. When I took what amounts to Physics 101 there in 1973, it was taught by the legendary Philip Morrison [of Manhattan Project fame, among many other distinctions]. Admittedly many of the class meetings were led by graduate student assistants, but the final exam was a private talk with the man himself. He asked about my hobbies, focused in on letterpress printing when I mentioned it, and he queried me intensely on how my new knowledge of physics affected my understanding of lead type, ink and paper; apparently with satisfaction, since I passed… It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life, and his approach to teaching and learning has informed my entire life since then. I hope and trust he made similar impressions on many more of us.

28

Wait, 8.01? I graduated in 1973, but when I took 8.01 pretty much the entire freshman class was in 26-100. We had a good though non-famous teacher, but I can’t conceive of how anyone could have interviewed each person in the course.

I had the highest test scores in my gigantic high school, but far from the highest GPA. I learned how to work well enough to not think I was the smartest kid in the world. My roommate however was a standard deviation above anyone else in his Texas high school. (I went to his home for Christmas, and went to visit one of his teachers. The guy was in awe of him.) Being so much smarter than anyone else in that school, he never learned how to deal with challenges, and it hurt him. He never, ever, bragged about being smart, but I could tell his high school experience was not helpful.

29

I’d say another huge factor in “good schools” is cherry picking only the very best students.

It should probably be no surprise a school is “good” if they only choose the very best students to attend.

30

It was particularly bad for me because being good at school was the one bright spot in my life and it was the only part of my identity that was really positive. My belief in my ability to excel academically is one of the major things that enabled me to survive my childhood and kept me hoping for a better life. I thrived on positive teacher attention. And I honestly believed once I got to college I would do great and be fine and forget all about my past.

Instead I got, “Oh, this is hard, actually, and you’re not nearly as good at this as you thought you were. Welcome to feeling stupid all the time.”

It’s one of the reasons I fell apart. College was somehow simultaneously the most magical and darkest time of my life. It wasn’t just the disability accommodations I needed to succeed - I had to take a year off from college, spend it trying to piece my life back together, and then petition the academic board for a retroactive medical withdrawal so I could return. I had severe PTSD, severe recurrent major depressive disorder and a bunch of other issues, and on top of that, undiagnosed ADHD. It took me six years to graduate.

Now that I’m healthy I wish I could go back again and enjoy it more. And get better grades. :face_with_tongue:

31

And that’s exactly why companies recruit at these schools. The good candidates are preselected.

Now, while the not so great college I mentioned had an open admissions program, I taught computer science where there was some filtering for the better students. And none of my students were stupid. There was that.

32

It may not have been the final exam, but at some point in the semester I and the several classmates I knew all had a similar brief experience with Professor Morrison. If I hallucinated it, it was still memorable and life-enhancing. PS: I later crashed and burned at MIT [too clever in high school to have yet developed a good work instinct], but went on to a very satisfying career as a technical assistant at the RI School of Design, helping spread the spirit of deep inquiry and passionate exploration among the best and brightest.

33

One thing I’ve noticed about the elite universities versus the lesser schools is the quality of the physical plant, particularly the classroom buildings, dorms and such. At the elite schools, the classrooms were in beautiful buildings and were nicely equipped. And meanwhile at the lesser school where my father taught, the classrooms were cinder-block rooms with nothing in them except for chairs that weren’t fixed to the floor. The nicer schools hire starchitects to design their buildings. The better schools offer things like full machine shops to the engineering majors or the latest computing hardware to computer science majors.

34

Columbia students: “A lot of good that did us!”

The building began receiving harsh criticism even before it was completed. The escalating ramps have never met their purpose as a social meeting place, instead taking up valuable space and slowing movement between floors. The gigantic rectangular hole in the interior of the building caused by the ramps is the main target of criticism, as it could be used for more student and study space. The hole gives Lerner Hall a doughnut shape, as one can see all the way down to the first floor from the fifth floor. Due to space constraints, few student activities have individual offices, the vast majority receiving only locker space. The layout—particularly in the administrative areas of the building—has been described as labyrinthine. Neighbors protested that the building serves to further wall off Columbia from the community. Architecture critics have lambasted the building for managing to be simultaneously dull and offensive, and failing to conform to the beaux arts style of the surrounding campus.

35

The Stata Center at MIT has issues as well.

On October 31, 2007, MIT sued architect Frank Gehry and the construction companies, Skanska USA Building Inc. and NER Construction Management, for “providing deficient design services and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emergency exits.

36

On the other hand the not very good school I mentioned was in excellent shape, helped no doubt by the oil money the state was getting. The student center was kind of a dump, but the computer science building was beautiful. I had no complaints about the classrooms I taught in. Probably helps if there are alumni in the legislature.

37

Just a side note on this “Ivy League” stuff. The Ivy League was originally a college athletic organization. Today it’s used as a term to describe 8 universities with long and well-established legacies, but there are other schools that are as good or better than the Ivy League, especially in specific fields. Three that come to mind are MIT, Stanford, and CalTech, none of which are “Ivy League”.

38

This is entirely a matter of funding and not directly correlated to educational quality, though there’s often a loose correlation between those two things. The university where I took the majority of my studies and later worked for many years was one of the top 10 in Canada, but not really “elite”, but it was fortunate to have exceptional funding and has one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever seen. All the buildings constructed until maybe around the 70s were modeled on the Gothic architecture of Oxford, surrounded by vast amounts of well-maintained park-like green space.

39

Yes, the fancy physical plant isn’t directly correlated to educational quality but the prestigious schools are, generally, the wealthiest and the money translates to nice looking buildings. And lots of American campuses have that Gothic architecture, so much so that there’s an entire style called Collegiate Gothic that became popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I grew up near Yale and much of that university was in that style, but most of those Medieval-looking buildings were constructed roughly a hundred years ago (unlike similar buildings at Oxford and Cambridge that really were built in the 1400s and 1500s).

40

Is it possible to look at the results produced - percentages of grads in various careers, and then reverse engineer to see what the U did to help them get there?

Seems like it would have countless different interpretations, tho…. Largest number of wallstreet millionaires or many social workers…