I’ve known students from and visited all sorts of colleges. There is just a different sort of thinking among students at the top schools. My undergrad was one of the Patriot League schools. Not quite ranked as highly or as well known as the Ivy League, but similar in terms of academic and athletic philosophies. These students at these schools tend to be very competetive.
Someone upthread commented that not everyone wants to work for a whiteshoe firm or investment bank or become a CEO eventually. The reason that many people do go to top schools is that they do want to achieve those things.
Now I get that everyone doesn’t want those things. They just want a regular nine to five job and maybe have no desire to enter into “management” or even “corporate America”. I guess that’s the point. Those top schools want to attract the top students with the intelligence and drive and ambition to become our nations future leaders (in whatever field).
My entry-level comp sci course involved learning a language hardly anyone uses and forcing it to do things it was never intended to do. I hardly remember the tests but I don’t think we ever needed to hand-write an entire program. I hated the language intensely and made a C or D in the class.
We did, however, hand-write entire programs in my community college class for C#. The mathematics wasn’t all that obscure – he made sure it was definitely stuff we KNEW, since the test was not on obscure math but on programming. Made an A.
Oh, and I went to the University of Texas. Not quite Harvard, but not exactly Joe’s Podunk College and Bait Shop. The local community college works with UT to make sure the classes transfer over and many students do (or at least used to) most of their foundational courses there to avoid huge tuition bills, huge classes, and weed-out curricula.
There has been some controversy whether the ciriculum at the elite schools may be too theoretical. After all, no matter what school you go to or how good your grades, you still need to start at an appropriate level and learn the basics.
I went to an “elite” school, one of my siblings attended a Patriot League School, the other a Big East school. I agree with you assessment above regarding those schools.
But I am not sure what you mean by “too theoretical” here, nor do I know how you would measure it even if you define it.
I don’t recall my education as “too theoretical” or even theoretical at all. I do recall learning insight skills above all else, skills that would transfer in a rapidly changing world. I am pretty satisfied with that, I am not aware of any classmates that feel their education was “too theoretical”, even with 25-30 years to look back at it.