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Comment by importantbrian | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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? 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.

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?

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.

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