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> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.

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.

I can't talk about liberal arts, but, in engineering, your peers aren't going to be incompetent.

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.

> but, in engineering, your peers aren't going to be incompetent.

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.

> 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.

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."

> Neither was the case with me. If you want intellectual stimulation, just go talk to the professors!

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.

> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.

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

> You also don't have access to those interesting research projects to begin with.

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.

If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios, low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and have wildly different levels of funding and support for education. And being public does not make them immune from going the adjunct all the way route.

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.

> I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like.

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.

> where Talk to current students/forum/visit etc. If you're gonna spend 3-6 years of your life there it's worth putting in the legwork. And figuring out the amount taught by adjuncts etc - you can just ask.

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.

> If you're gonna spend 3-6 years of your life there it's worth putting in the legwork

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!

Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a highest ranked school that will have you; attend, pass, get good work experience, slap it on your CV a get a good job.