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Comment by ibebrett | Hacker News Reader

The thing is I'd rather take a course from a top instructor even at a massive scale, than to take a poor course made by a guy who doesn't have any real business teaching the class. There is no reason every tiny state school should be recreating a bad machine learning class (example) when you can take a good one from a good instructor. If you go to even more basic topics (intro to comp sci), the quality you will get from having a TA teach a class to a lecture hall to a top instructor teaching over a MOOC will be like night and day.

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> The thing is I'd rather take a course from a top instructor even at a massive scale, than to take a poor course made by a guy who doesn't have any real business teaching the class.

There's an excluded middle here.

Yes I agree, there are great classes all over the place, and there might be some gems where you least expect it, but for the most part the quality of the classes are going to go down as you go to worse and worse schools.

are you assuming that a tiny state school will have worse quality teachers than a top private school? or even that someone who is not a professional teacher is worse than a teacher at a "top" school?

The tiny state school might have the best machine learning class in the world.

Yes I am assuming that. As someone who attended a small state school compared to the level of some of the coworkers taken by classmates at the top schools it is like night and day. Trust me the machine learning class at stanford is better than the one at eastern ct state university (for example)

Sorry, wrote that in a rush. I meant "compared to the level of classes taken by some of my coworkers"

do you mean level of difficulty or mastery attained by the students?

the quality of the instructional materials, mastery, and level of difficulty yes.

I have taken that specific course, and yes, it is very good. But I don't think it's always the case that professors at top schools are always better than TAs at small colleges. Top professors are almost always research-oriented and some let their teaching skills suffer.

My counter example would be the Algorithms course from Princeton with Robert Sedgewick. I would rate that as basically "just ok."

The top-20 schools have the pick of the litter, they can choose whomever they like from applicants all over the world. That leaves all other schools to choose from a thoroughly picked-over pile.

As a university teacher the most important thing you have to do is to pitch the level right. Anything that isn't a top-level school suffers from the tyranny of low expectations, and the cliff after the first 20-25 schools in the rankings is really quite steep. There are no public ivies.

"There are no public ivies."

Yet somehow the University of California at Berkeley has one of the 4 best computer science programs in the world, and it's better than all but 3 programs at private schools (Stanford, CMU and MIT).

Yes for sure, I am not trying to pick on public schools, its just that VAST majority of schools are not top level, and there are thousands of bad computer science classes being taught.

I disagree. I took Andrew Ng's ML class, and I have a CS(-ish) degree from a tiny state school. Only one of my professors was near Ng's level as an instructor. Also, tiny state schools have a hard time getting and keeping instructors who are knowledgeable about in-demand topics, or higher-level topics. We didn't have a machine learning class at all, although it was touched on in the AI survey class.

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