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> many of the professors at obscure unrecognized universities are amazing teachers who do solid (but perhaps not famous or well promoted) research.

If I were choosing who is going to teach me I wouldn't really care about what research do they do, I would care about how good they are at teaching.

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If you are the university dean or administrator who hires the professors, you maybe prefer the hot-shot professor who brings in a boatload of research grant money over the professor who gets the best teacher ratings.

The university gets a cut of the grant money and gains a bunch of reputation points for putting out cutting edge research. High teacher ratings are great, but the big universities care less about these and more about the number of Science and Nature papers a professor produces.

Unfortunately students aren't involved in hiring decisions. Everything I've ever heard suggests that faculty at prestigious universities are universally there thanks to their research credentials, not their teaching credentials. This was certainly true of the school I went to.

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