Before I became aware of criticisms likening universities to pyramid schemes, I recall hearing a Stanford professor managing a large research team say something like: "For this project, we have around 150 PhD students exploring it further in many directions". I was astonished by the sheer scale of their capabilities, especially because I liked the subject and had hoped to explore it as a hobby with just a few like-minded friends.
Although I'm my case, the other people were mostly at FAANG companies, rather than academia.
This might be true in some cases, but I suspect that ultimately it's only the wealthy who can pursue these higher degrees. Yes, the pay might be low but that doesn't mean they are overall impoverished.
Put another way, the cost of education is one thing, but being able to afford the process might be a higher bar, for some, or more.
They sell indulgences at this point, and I don’t think it’s a false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do you question the price of something that’s equated to a gift from god or certainly using the same language - more or less.
That said, I'd call it an 'aristocracy' instead. But, tomato/tomahto, ya know?
One cannot place all of the blame at the foot of the university. Employers also play a role, when they demand accreditation. Students are also to blame, when they fail to do research on what type of training they need to enter a field.
As for the clergy comparison, let's just say that a multitude of people work within universities and those people have very different motivations from one another. Heck, they have very different motivations from one another even if they have the same job title. Painting them with one brush is excessive.
Behold the romanticization of the diamond ring.
You just, I don’t know, you convince people in their vulnerability, in love, hey, this is what love really is, an expensive ring, venue, etc
Higher education at this point preys on the dreams of the parent/child via a financial vector.
It’s highly pathetic that such a highly regarded element of society has the same business model as a movie theater, which is roughly “now that we found the people that want the real movie experience, we get to charge them $10 for popcorn and $7 for a soda”.
Then the family walks out of the movie theater “hey we’re broke, but you really showed us the value of a real movie going experience, we’ll cherish forever”. I guess? What is this nonsense?
Part of any good experience involves not getting ripped off, on any level.
At least with your two examples of businesses preying upon the vulnerabilities of people, those vulnerabilities are entirely optional. People can, and do, choose other ways of expressing their commitment to their partners. People can, and do, find simpler (and non-commercial) ways to find pleasure in life.
That said, I also think that people have to step back and look at what they hope to gain from their post-secondary education. Let's face it, universities are institutions that largely prepare people to work in institutions (may they be academic or business). For example: you don't need to go to university to become a scientist, but you do to work as a scientist in a university and many businesses. Granted, there are exceptions to that. Your chances of becoming a medical doctor are pretty much nil without attending university.
The problem is that many universities have accreted huge management layers and some non-sensical degrees but this is not unique to universities.
Drop the prices of 90% of majors, that one should be obvious.
Sharing the wealth should be obvious too, but that one isn’t either apparently. So they overcharge, and then don’t pay their own.
It’s massive pricing issue mired in severe levels of piety and self importance. No one wants to replace universities, they want them to stop scamming.
But the core idea of university remains as sound and essential to a well-functioning society as it gets. From time immemorial you needed gatekeepers to recognised professions who: a) provide hands-on training to the next generation b) certify that a trainer has reached a sufficient level of mastery to practice the profession. Calling this process "selling indulgence" is my issue with your argument.
We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when earning £150k+ in big tech or finance isn't unusual. However, PhD students earning a little side income by marking lab reports or programming assessments isn't necessarily bad.
> in 2023-24 one in five tutorials (20%) were taught by hourly-paid tutors – typically PhD students or academics at the start of their career.
By contrast, Stanford's FTEs c. 2004 received such benefits as:
- Choices from 9 health insurance plans
- Vision, dental, mental healthcare, and long-term care
- Employer-matched retirement contribution 1:1 up to 5% of salary, plus free 4% of salary
- Access to then closed mutual funds like Fidelity Magellan
- Secret discounts like on luxury vehicles
- Credit union with 0% VISA debit foreign currency exchange rate
- 50% discount on tuition after being an FTE for 10 years
Summary: colleges are way too selective today at the high end.
Boomers got into elite schools far more easily, although there were less schools.
It's a bit of a disingenuous argument however, because the huge increase of schools down the long long LONG pecking order of school "eliteness".
But the boomer thing is spot on.
Ehn, it really doesn't.
Harvard admits significantly less undergrads than Penn or Columbia, and in personal experience, the "Ivy" cachet doesn't really help that much in most industries outside of High Finance (which itself tends to targets Penn+Columbia instead of Harvard). Harvard was historically overrepresented in MBB+Management Consulting, but that industry is dying now that Accountancies and Implementation firms are bundling MC, and companies increasingly do strategy in-house.
Prestige is a finicky thing. 30 years ago UChicago was not viewed as "prestigious" compared to Harvard (it was Claremont McKenna with snow back then), but ask high schoolers today and UChicago has a strong brand value.
Also, ime, I just don't bump into Harvard grads anymore at high level positions (Director and above). Harvard historically overindexed on MBB and Boutique Consulting recruiting while Penn+Columbia targeted Wall Street and Stanford+Cal targeted Sand Hill and YC. Consulting slowly started withering away, so recruiting is tough.
That said, Harvard does very well in China (largely thanks to John Fairbanks and Roderick MacFarquhar in the 1970s-90s), but they aren't as driven as UPenn has been in trying to diversify their international presence.
Typo: Meant high level positions in the Tech industry.
HBS tends to do pretty well in PE/HF but the overlap isn't significant with Harvard College.
Aside: a comment with the word "boomer" in it is usually offensive in my experience. But doing worry, you'll get a different word applied to you when you reach the same age cohort. Disclosure: not a boomer.
There are two types of people in the world: those that split the world into two groups, and those that don't.
Going back to the main topic of this post, using too many underpaid academics to teach creates some perverse incentives that are IMHO destroying Oxbridge. Many professors are no longer teaching. Teaching is a great filter. It makes sure they stay up-to-date, they are technically good and they take pride in their research field. Professors that are really good and passionate, i.e. Terry Tao-like personalities, are often getting displaced by ladder climbers. This is especially common in experimental fields and really disheartening.
Not least because in academia, either you teach, or you do research. You can't do both.
>> Teaching is a great filter. It makes sure they stay up-to-date, they are technically good and they take pride in their research field.
If that's your experience, that must be something that depends on the field of research and we must be in different fields. In CS, teaching is indeed a good filter- in the sense that it separates the teachers from the researchers. I have the direct experience of my PI, who has not done a day of research after becoming a lecturer. Because there is no time. Teaching takes so much admin work that there's no time left for research. I mean any above-junior academic position takes too much admin work, but teaching really gets the cookie. My experience so far has been that senior academics who still take an active role in research find ways to avoid teaching like the plague. Although you can't really escape it. You'll at least mark some papers in your subject, whether you like it or not (and with TA-ing from PhDs or not).
A high-end fellowship like the ones you mention is also fine if you want to improve your publication track record. In some fields getting a lectureship after your PhD or postdoc might be extremely difficult as the market is too crowded.
Yes, unfortunately. I'm not saying it's easy, but from what I can tell it's possible: you can have your entire academic career as a long string of fellowships.
>> Lectureships demand significant research and teaching and supervision experience.
Yes, but we know that in practice what that means is that the professor leaves the research work to their PhDs and post-docs, and then puts their name on it at the end. Sometimes that's because the professor has run out of good ideas, sometimes it's because they don't really care, most of the time it's because their lectureship duties leave them without enough time to do it.
This was not my experience during my PhD, btw, my supervisor (who is retiring next month, three years after supervising my PhD) was an active participant in my research and he had his own totally hands-on line of research that he pursued separately ... and whenever I told people about that they were full of surprise. "Don't tell me that he is still coding?". That sort of thing. People were surprised because that just doesn't happen.
>> In some fields getting a lectureship after your PhD or postdoc might be extremely difficult as the market is too crowded.
I've had an offer that I turned down because it was in China, and a discussion about another in the UK that I didn't even consider. Teaching is the death of a research career, that's what I've seen and I'm not going anywhere near it. What that means I don't know. It's possible that my research career is already over anyway- next week is the last of my post-doc and I don't have anything lined up after it :/
It depends on where you are. British universities value teaching more than American ones, which are more focussed on research.
This is not true in general. In NZ, most academic positions are 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% admin. Lecturers, distinguished professors, and everyone in between. Big research grants can provide temporary buy-out of some teaching, but it's explicitly part of the role, and not often reduced completely for long. Maybe 10% of academic roles at my university don't include research.
A 40% teaching is the most research-intensive contract you can get at most universities.
Good departments will still let you enjoy a sane workload because they will allocate a realistic amount of that 40% for teaching preparation, marking duties, etc.
I mean that's why most mid-level and senior academics leave the research to their PhD students and post-docs. Yes? Because they don't have the time to do it themselves.
... although my PI didn't :)
When I did it, I had my DPhil grant/post-doc salary and it felt like side money rather than being my 'job' and I was partly doing for the experience, for my CV (good to be able to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it!) and partly because I enjoyed it. I felt quite lucky to be offered tutoring jobs at Oxford as they were much sought-after by DPhil students.
I think it's also worth pointing out that not all Oxford colleges are 'rich' and many have buildings and grounds that are expensive to maintain. I don't think most of them are better placed to pay more than other UK universities.
There's an argument to be made that people teaching at universities should be paid more, but it does feel unfair to single out Oxford.
Oxford singles itself out as elite, thus "good to be able to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it [the CV]!". They are being held to that standard.
It's also not good for the Universities, who are constantly losing institutional knowledge and having to retrain people from scratch. Did you offer a kickass course on Neural Networks last year? Well, too bad, the guy who offered it is now gone. But here's a fresh guy with a PhD in economics, and that's just as good.
Woke up one day, said fuck it, pissed off my doctoral advisor, a somewhat rotten old tenured professor by suggesting that it wasn't worth doing this any more. Looked around and picked up a job for £26k within a month. Never looked back.
it really is that simple
phd students love doing supervisions, they literally queue up around the block for the teaching experience and the tax free cash
Maybe they have no choice and are being exploited. PhD students current and former that I've spoken to definitely think they are being exploited.
As examples, look at the comments from actual PhD students and postdocs on this page.
vs. the alternative available part time work (sainsburys/tesco)
definitely exploited
>> One of Oxford’s top colleges, Christ Church, which had an income of £42.6m in 2022-23, is currently advertising a stipendiary lectureship in modern European history for £15,244 to £16,983.
For comparison, 15-16k was the range of my PhD stipend at Imperial College London between 2017-22 (I never got a clear answer what it was supposed to be exactly, from the admin, so I had to estimate it from my monthly pay, which fluctuated). It always stayed below minimum wage (so I didn't have to repay my undergard tuition fee loan). That's normal for PhD stipends, but it really shouldn't be for a lectureship.
I believe what you're thinking of is TA work: "marking lab reports or programming assessments". I did some of that, during my PhD. I don't remember the pay rate but it was less than minimum wage and the jobs were part-time and didn't last for more than a semester obviously. That kind of job is, indeed, ideal when you're looking for "a little side income", but a lectureship is supposed to be your main line job, not a side hustle.
Because it definitely is a class barrier, and since my spot wasn't filled by someone else, also a lack in research output.
A lot of people make money from zero sum games, or from things with a small positive sum socially (e.g. selling something for a little bit less than someone else).
I was raised in this institutional class that had contempt for "trade" and it's a cover for meekness, envy, and a smallness that justifies some pretty terrible worldviews. I love brilliant people, but someone with the mind to be an academic is only ever poor becuause of their own fatuous snootery. they do it to themselves and they moralize their envy by blaming "systemic" factors while affecting an unworldly out of touchness that makes them repellent to anyone with responsibility.
perhaps I have a bit of a chip from being outside of it, but having managed some personal success in spite of it, the problems of bureaucracy are the problems of children to me.
As a huge fan of William Gibson, that's some lovely writing, my fellow greybeard.
>> I was an obsessive control freak
There are 'control freaks' and there are the rest of the sea of humanity. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Einstein, Feynman, ... I like my place in the set of the control freaks of the world. The key is to not ever try to control other people, only our own circumstances, including our own selves.
I thought Brazil was weird when I first saw it, but over the years I've overlaid it on reality sort of, and it has matched up quite well.
For example, are you DeNiro in real life when you run an adblocker?
CS I would have no idea about. I work for a company that does software now but tends not to hire any CS grads.
My overall sense of universities is that, like a lot of places, they increasingly see people as disposable and don't invest in them as much unless they're unusually financially profitable. Student housing is probably a bit different because people are marrying and having kids at older ages, but in the cases I know of the housing and housing cooperatives were still being used and liked. The subtext of discussions that I recall was that this wasn't enough, that the land needs to be put to use making more money for the university rather than supporting graduate students.
The bigger problem is universities (are forced to?) behave like corporations more and more as opposed to academic institutions, in order to survive silly politics (national and not) but without having the requisite corporate infrastructure and corresponding personnel. Instead, all jobs are offloaded to academics, and made part of their "progress and development report" or whatnot as the main driving factor. Which then dilutes the quality of both teaching and research, cuts down on creative time and replaces it with mountains of bureaucracy and counterproductive deadlines, forces people to cut corners just to keep up with it all, and eventually burns them out.
Example: we have recently been asked to enter a cleaning rota for the office, because management fired the cleaners. And I think it's ridiculous and a sign of things to come, but I do it anyway. I don't know if refusing to clean will somehow find its way on your probation record as "not good academic citizenship", but it's not something I'll refuse to do anyway because I know everyone's in the same boat and I don't want to cause trouble for my team. But, then this behaviour gets normalised, and honestly, at this point academics might as well start mowing the lawn and cleaning the toilets too.
But academia still has better structures / people built around attacking the more 'creative', less profit-driven problems, whereas industry is has different incentives, which seriously constrains where that research can go in its own way. And a lot of the time, when you look under the hood, industry claims are little more than hot air trying to get a quick buck, or they're the last little brick building on years of academic work and then going full PR and taking all the credit; whereas academia does things "slow" and steady for a reason.
not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary stepping stone to professorship, whereas now universities are perpetually and increasingly relying on this cheap labor to cut costs, making the path for academia an increasingly tortuous one. It's highly counter productive because who wants to go through all that instead if you can get a job in industry that values you much more? The result is that you don't get the best and brightest educating the next generation, except maybe at a few universities - Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. - where the prestige itself is enough of a draw.
higher institutions realized that they could conveniently circumvent the rightfully high cost of labor to do experiments by hiring "graduate students" who they can pay poverty wages to do the manual scientific labor in exchange for a degree. as a student i am classified as a 20 hour per week worker, 20 hour per week student, and paid 37k a year. to be honest i wouldn't mind this if i actually were allowed to work 20 hours per week but this is not the case. the expectation, is that you will work 50-60 MINIMUM. and don't even get me started on postdocs. the PhD market has become so oversaturated due to the over-training of PhDs that to be competitive you must do an additional 5-8 years of "training" as a postdoc (again at poverty wages around 45-50k) before you get the opportunity to APPLY faculty positions.
this has had some predictable but unfortunate consequences. for one, institutions no longer select for the best and brightest. their number 1 criteria for offers of admission is "ability to finish the phd" aka willingness to be subject to these labor conditions for 4-7 years. of course you do need a minimum level of intellectual ability to get there, but trust me when i say this, the bar is low. and academia has suffered because of it imo. prestigious institutions get by as you mentioned by having their pick of the smartest AND hard working.
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. Finally, it should be clear by now that with more than half the kids in America already going to college, academic expansion is finished forever.
Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ..."
"The picture so far is pretty bleak. The American academic scientist earns less than an airplane mechanic or child support profiteer, has less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours than a Bolivian silver miner. ... Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas. Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India. ..."
That said, like the lottery, the PhD system does work out for some people.
But in general, the PhD process is a deeply broken system that chews up most people who go through it. Freeman Dyson has written on this as well. One example: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/freeman-dyson-phd-...
""Oh, yes. I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.""
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off.
Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air. In the past week, Columbia's graduate teaching assistants went on strike and temporary, or adjunct, faculty at New York University narrowly avoided one. Columbia's Graduate Student Employees United seeks recognition, over the administration's appeals, of a two-year-old vote that would make it the second officially recognized union at a private university. NYU's adjuncts, who won their union in 2002, reached an eleventh-hour agreement for health care and office space, among other amenities.
Grad students have always resigned themselves to relative poverty in anticipation of a cushy, tenured payoff. But in the past decade, the rules of the game have changed. Budget pressures have spurred universities' increasing dependence on so-called "casual labor," which damages both the working conditions of graduate students and their job prospects. Over half of the classroom time at major universities is now logged by non-tenure-track teachers, both graduate teaching assistants—known as TAs—and adjuncts. At community colleges, part-timers make up 60 percent of the faculties. ..."
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
Anyway, having passed through three PhD programs (in Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Ecology and Evolution plus essentially visiting another in Computing/Robotics for about a year), there is a lot more I could say on this (and have elsewhere).
Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students.
I did my undergrad at one of those places. Currently the ratio is 1:17. The percentage of classes with under 20 students is 60%.
Because it's low ranked, the pressure to get grants isn't as high. Because each course has fewer students, the professors are much more available. As an example, a professor who had only 3 hours a week for office hours was thought of as "stingy". Most had about 6 hours. They'd combine the OH for all the courses they were teaching, and could easily offer 5+ hours because there are so few students (at times no one would show up).
Only one humanities course was taught by a non-faculty member. Everyone else was tenured, on the tenure track, or a permanent assistant professor (i.e. spousal hire).
The quality of education was pretty good, too. They probably had a lighter load than a top university, but I'm not sure that's bad. I went to a top 3 school for graduate studies, and took some of their undergrad courses while there. It was brutal, and the undergrads were clearly overworked. Worse - most of the work was just busy work. They weren't really working on anything more challenging than the folks in low ranked universities.
Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.
If you really want the name recognition, go do a quick MS at a top school thereafter.
Student faculty ratios can be reported using "full time equivalent" faculty. Meaning, your class of less than 20 students might not have a more available professor, because they're actually also teaching at 2 other universities in the same system to make ends meet. It's not the ratio to the number of tenured faculty, adjuncts count.
For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.
And outside of liberal arts colleges, where are you going to get those statistics?
The places that openly boast these things tend to be very expensive, and hard to get admission into.
Certainly, if you have a shortlist already, you can email the department and ask for those stats directly. Most people don't have that shortlist, though.
> For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.
And that's why you look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. It's certainly easy to find universities with as good a faculty/student ratio as what I posted, but with only 20% of the classes having less than 20 students.
Incidentally, if they have dozens of small classes, it's a good sign. A lot of departments will cancel a class if it has less than, say, 8 students.
and on the percentage of classes under 20 - that's the exact metric I'm talking about being easy to game. You'd want to figure out what the sizes of the classes you actually take are.
There are over 500 public universities/colleges. Your advice is great after you've made a shortlist. My advice is on making the shortlist to begin with.
> and on the percentage of classes under 20 - that's the exact metric I'm talking about being easy to game.
Technically true, and overly pedantic. I'd put money that 90% of the schools that have that metric actually will have fewer students in the classes in the major of your interest (likely engineering). In the real world, these kinds of counterexamples you speak of are, well, the exception.
Engineering is demanding, and many students drop out after the sophomore year. At least in my department, they had a very clear and open goal: If you don't do well enough in the introductory courses, you will simply be disallowed from taking junior level courses. You needed a B on a key (not easy) course, and a grade of at least 75% on that course's final exam.
I sincerely doubt there are many (if any) universities trying to game that metric. Letting professors teach small classes is expensive. Which is why I said that if a university really has a weird distribution where there are lots of courses with a tiny number of students - that in itself is a good omen!
This outweighs pretty much everything else for me.
Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people.
Every lecture I have is booked for 300 people but only 20-40 people ever show up. And yet everyone complains that the courses are too hard.
Is it easy and low stress? Probably. But I feel like I'm being driven into mediocrity.
And, in my case, I found that the increased access to grad students and professors more than made up for any possible "weakness" in my peer group.
The Westinghouse engineers used to have a friendly rivalry because so many of them came from both CMU and Pitt. However, if you got both groups drunk, the CMU engineers would grudgingly admit that the primary difference between the two was an extra 10+ years to pay off their student loans.
True - they were not incompetent where I went. But they also didn't dream big, the way you'd see students at top universities do.
Neither was the case with me. If you want intellectual stimulation, just go talk to the professors!
> Is it easy and low stress? Probably. But I feel like I'm being driven into mediocrity.
Quoting another comment of mine:
"Yes, you need the motivation to do well. In my experience, and of those I've asked who were in a similar situation: If you are aiming high and go to such a school, you believe you're getting an inferior education (mostly false), and you compensate by studying more than what is assigned. Then you go to a top grad school and find you know more than your peers who went to a top university."
Many of the professors don't make their own slides. They just read stuff someone else wrote and pretend to understand it. Then they proceed to buy a test bank and grade us on content they don't fully grasp.
I don't even care about the education; it's just wanting to meet like-minded people and not being able to.
Really, the only thing that's motivating me is the job I'm going to after graduation. I did a 16-month internship, and I don't think I've ever been happier/more emotionally fulfilled in my life.
You also don't have access to those interesting research projects to begin with. To be that's the biggest downside (if you're in the sciences / engineering).
I do generally agree with your post -- but I think it only works if you 1) apply yourself sufficiently despite not having peers pushing you (have to be able and willing to buck the tide; not everyone is), and 2) go to a top grad school (as you did), which requires point 1 to get accepted
Faculty members still need to do research to get grant money and pay part of their salary. They still want to publish papers. They still compete. At least where I went, the research was interesting enough.
> apply yourself sufficiently despite not having peers pushing you (have to be able and willing to buck the tide; not everyone is),
Yes, you need the motivation to do well. In my experience, and of those I've asked who were in a similar situation: If you are aiming high and go to such a school, you believe you're getting an inferior education (mostly false), and you compensate by studying more than what is assigned. Then you go to a top grad school and find you know more than your peers who went to a top university.
But if you're not motivated, then this whole thread is rather pointless. And if you're not motivated, you definitely are better off going to a mediocre state school. You could seriously get burnout at a top university and drop out. I've known fairly smart people at those top universities end up that way.
it's basically free labor for the hospitals
Edit: I mean the research portion of course. The teaching part is more of a classic multi-level marketing scheme.