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Comment by importantbrian | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I think part of the problem is that people don't really understand this. I have taken classes at a community college, a directional state school, an R1 and my master's degree is from a highly selective school. My n=1 experience is that the coursework from any accredited program is largely the same. The professors at the state school were actually better than at any of the other schools from a pure teaching perspective. The biggest difference between them was the profile of my classmates. The entire value that Harvard et al. provide is the name brand and the alumni network. The education itself you can get anywhere.

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Not necessarily true. The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors, but more importantly, can fund top class research that costs ALOT of money.

Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.

Getting a position as a undergrad on those research projects is incredibly competitive.

MIT is different though as they don't have legacy or athletic admissions.

False. They do have slots for athletes.

"Unlike many other schools, MIT does not send “likely letters” or do “signings,” nor do our coaches have discretionary “slots” which they may fill."

https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/does-mit-recruit-athletes...

Yeah right. From same doc.

"If you’re a prospective student interested in playing varsity sports at MIT, you should contact the coach of your sport by completing a recruitment form. Depending on your potential contribution to MIT’s varsity athletics, they may choose to advocate for you in the admissions process..."

Heavy thumb on the scale with 90% accept rate.

> The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors

Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige.

> Your random college probably can't afford a research nuclear reactor, but MIT sure as hell can if they want.

Idaho State has a research reactor. As does Kansas State, Missouri S&T, NC State, Ohio State, Oregon State, Penn State, Purdue, Reed College, Texas A&M, Cal-Davis and Cal-Irvine, Florida, Maryland, UMass, Missouri, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Washington State.

You don't have to go to MIT to get onto good research projects in that field. And that's true of every field.

MIT is also a bad example because as the sister comment points out they don't have legacy or athletic admissions.

Have to agree about the professors. They aren't there to teach, they're there to do research.

I found that despite being in regular 2 v 1 tutorials, a large number of professors are simply not that interested in teaching.

The best tutors ended up being PhD students. They knew how stuff actually worked, and had been through the material recently enough to understand how undergrads might not get it.

> Better by what metric?

Sometimes, by material.

If the class can be taught from a textbook, the instructor may be irrelevant. The best classes at my alma mater were being taught by professors who handed out paperback copies of their as-yet-unpublished textbook, or had us work from the first-print editions they authored, or who's "textbook" was the aggregation of notes they'd collected over the years.

Your experience is wildly different than mine then. The worst professors I had were the ones teaching out of their own book.

Definitely one of the worst classes I experienced was Thermodynamics where I had to tip-toe around calling out gibberish in the 1st edition book authored by my professor. He was a real hard ass that would make you feel like the idiot for asking why the book and the whiteboard don't match.

I had this same experience. The professor would say just read the book. We would say but we did read it and we are confused. And he would say I don’t understand the issue it’s very clearly stated in the material.

In fairness I actually did have one good experience with this. I had a history professor assign some material he’d written about the civil war and both he and the material were fantastic. Ironically that was at the junior college. Professors become professors by publishing. I’m not sure why someone would think “wrote the course material” would be a feature unique to elite universities.

MIT doesn't have athletic scholarships. But I'm pretty sure they weight athletics like they do many other non-academic activities (e.g. music).

ADDED: If you're national class in a sport, they'll probably try to figure out a way to admit you so long as you meet some set of qualifications which mean you probably won't flunk out. (MIT tries pretty hard to keep people from flunking out.)

They have slots. Coaches have a certain number of slots, but yes there is a minimum academic performance that they have to adhere to. If you're recruited you know it.

> Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige.

I can't explain why you haven't seen it, but it's quite prevalent due to the economy of educational resources.

Let's dispense with qualitative arguments and just talk about availability. For example, try to find a class for learning Farsi/Persian in Fullerton, CA. Community colleges don't offer them and the 2 professors that do have curriculum are either at a UC or part time (specific semester + year) at various State schools while they also teach, the more popular, Arabic. How many of each resource are allocated to how many of each school? There are limits and those limits are influenced by tangibles like salary, accomodations, etc.

Cal State Fullerton literally offers Persian. They have 9 different course offerings for Persian. My grad school alma mater has 5 and it looks like the availability is pretty sketchy. From a quick look at it you'd actually be better off going to Cal State Fullerton than that particular elite institution if you want to learn Persian. I'm not sure why you think elite institutions aren't also subject to resource constraints for those kinds of classes. Remember schools like that devote most of their massive resources to things other than classroom instruction. They generally have much smaller pools of faculty who are actually teaching undergrads than a big state school will have.

When I was in grad school I missed out on taking a course I really wanted to take because it was offered by 1 professor 1 semester every other year, and I'm fairly confident he taught no other courses. Which is really common at elite universities. If you want to learn a specific subject like that with a truly limited number of professors the best thing to do is target a specific program. But you very rarely need to go to an elite school to get it. If you want to maximize your chances to be able to take whatever course you want you're actually much better going to a massive state school with 10k faculty than an elite school with 1-2k faculty many of whom rarely if ever teach undergrads.

> more importantly, can fund top class research that costs ALOT of money.

That's important if you're at the college to do research; but many people attend college to get instruction. Top class research says nothing about top class instruction.

but some people try to find top class instruction of research. what's can better than hiring best researchers, give them foundation for research and require they teaching students how to research in same time?

The University of Kansas is an AAU school and has an acceptance rate of 92%. Most R1s are big state schools who admit almost everyone who applies. You do not need to go to an Ivy League schools to get top notch research instruction.

You're incorrect about better professors, but the extra money does allow for ease of research.

The only reason research is perceived to be better at certain institutions is due to the extra money, which allows ease of research.

Most researchers at any university can have the same ideas, and be equally intellectually qualified (if not more intellectually qualified at non-ivy league universities, explained in a bit) to do the research.

The difference comes in the availability of specific labs, with extremely expensive equipment, to perform tasks for collaborators. At ivy league universities, the graduate students effectively get to treat their work as if they were a manager who contracts out every price of work needed. Need cryo TEM of some samples? Send it down the hall, don't worry about it for a week, and then get nicely formatted results done for you by staff scientists that perform this service for the university daily. Need statistics to be done? Send it by email to the team, they'll let you know when it's done, etc.

Other universities don't have this luxury, but I would say it improves their capabilities as a scientist; hence my argument that non ivy league universities have more intellectually capable scientists. For example, instead of sending that sample for TEM, they learn how to do TEM, but not on a fancy new system; rather, the one that uses a car battery and a circuit board that you have to understand well enough to add some extra solder when needed.

I've worked in several different universities, and it's definitely still surprising to me, but the level of incompetence from grads coming out of ivy league institutions is astounding sometimes.

> The more prestigious schools have more budget to hire better professors

The prestigious schools are interested in hiring the best researchers. They don't much care how good they are as teachers.

Some are great, many are terrible teachers. And you don't get to see them much since all appointments are with TA kids anyway.

At the unknown schools the professors are there to teach and do little or no meaningful research so the are judged based on teaching ability, not grant-pulling fame. So they are on average much better teachers.

If you want an academic career, you need to hook with advisors who are famous in the field to get your early papers connected to their fame. But if you just want to learn and go into industry, you're better off with good teacher professors at the no-name school.

I did both, having a degree from a school you've never heard of (but is very good) and a degree from a top-1 (or top-3 depending on your biases) university. At the top university I had an advisor who was well-known in our field, which was fun. But I didn't go into research or academics so that advisor connection didn't do anything for my career. And he was so busy with grant and research work I only got to talk to him once a month.

In terms of learning I learned more from the unknown-name school where the professors were dedicated to teaching and were happy to chat about projects every day.

I did both community college and Harvard undergrad. My experience is that while some intro classes were similarly structured, Harvard offered far more accelerated options for people who are prepared for it. You're right that the student body is a huge difference though.

Absolutely, but it's hard to convince people of this. Elite schools (generally) provide better facilities and peer support, but the quality of teaching is usually better at non-elite (but not bottom-of-the-barrel) schools. Also, grade inflation is, or was, not such an issue. You don't get a "Gentleman's C" at a public college.

So be sure to network when you get there. Socialize! Attend the parties! It's not just for fun's sake.

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