Public Universities Chase Excellence, at a Price

[ckramer]

“We need a top-10 university, so our kids can get the same education they would get at Harvard or Yale,” said J. Bernard Machen, the university president.

To upgrade the university, Dr. Machen is seeking a $1,000 tuition surcharge that would be used mostly to hire more professors and lower the student-faculty ratio, not coincidentally one of the factors in the much-watched college rankings published annually by U.S. News & World Report. This year, that list ranked Florida 13th among public universities in the United States.

Like Florida, more leading public universities are striving for national status and drawing increasingly impressive and increasingly affluent students, sometimes using financial aid to lure them. In the process, critics say, many are losing force as engines of social mobility, shortchanging low-income and minority students, who are seriously underrepresented on their campuses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/education/20colleges.html?hp&ex=1166677200&en=8286211a2ea13023&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[IndyOp]

1. Yep. And lowering faculty-to-student ratio does not impact most students..

Introductory courses for most areas - bio, chem, psych, business, criminal justice - a the huge cattle-call classes. Class size drops as students get older, but the majority of students will participate in only 1 seminar style class with less than 40-50 students. Those students who choose relatively less populated majors and who work to find the seminar-style classes will benefit from an overall lower faculty-to-student ratio, but most students will not.

:(

[brentspeak]

2. The "excellence" of a Harvard or Yale education: Grade inflation.

House tutors, gentleman B's, A's which might be B's or even C's at public universities, exams which never veer from the lecture notes or anything not extensively covered in class (a method I agree with, though). Basically, students are coddled and have their hands held at a lot of the so-called "elite" schools.

[J Miles]

3. Spend a semester at Cornell

And then tell me if your opinion has changed.

[INDIA]

5. He's got a point though.

Although the Ivy leagues are tough to get into, the amount of A's and B's given out is absurd. The professors logic, "Well, they got in, they must be smart. I don't want to screw up their Grad School chances, so I guess I'll just throw em a B."

Princeton discovered something like 70-80% of their grades being handed out were A's and B's. They took appropriate measures to require more C's and lower be handed out, and the students freaked out.

I'm not for a strict curve or anything, (I'm in law school right now and a strict curve sucks.) But you have to agree that grade inflation at Ivy league schools has gotten out of hand. Schools like Penn State are all too happy to hand out C's and D's.

[AndreaCG]

6. I went to Syracuse

And when I was between an A or B or B or C I almost always got the latter grade. This was 25 years ago, I don't know if things have changed. I REALLY wanted them to go to the plus/minus system though. Not only would I have benefitted, but it is more precise.

[NashVegas]

4. It Really Doesn't Matter What They Do

Higher education is an industry. They don't exist to educate and stress excellence, they exist to turn out future employees while padding their endowments.

In the end, having the same alma mater as the majority of those who'll be interviewing you (at various levels of employment) is what opens the most and best doors.

[kineneb]

7. forget that nonsense

I am a California State University graduate, and none of my classes were that large. I think I got a better education because I went to a so-called "second-tier" college. (Not to mention that it was a great deal cheaper.) Almost all of my classes had under 30 people, and some were under 15. Incidently, I did my lower division work at a Junior College and was able to transfer all my units without difficulty.