Quote:
Originally Posted by jetgraphics
Frankly, if you really believe college is for an education, why would credentials from Harvard or Yale be superior to a State college? The volume and quality of the education is not a magnitude superior, nor are graduates imbued with a nimbus of superiority. And a student with a 4.0 GPA from State U can't be deemed inferior to a 2.5 GPA from an Ivy League institution... yet we all know "it" happens.
Suggestion: Offer credentials by examination, supervised by a public authority.
|
I'm not going to pretend to be without bias here. I'm 18, my Senior year of high school just ended and I will be at Dartmouth College in the fall. Obviously being a future student of an Ivy league institution(and having so many family members having attained an Ivy degree), I suppose I could be slanted a bit, but this background has also helped give me some perspective on things.
There is a big difference in the credentials of an Ivy league(or similarly prestigious) institution and your average state college. I've recently been through the Ivy league recruiting/admissions process, and the sheer difficulty of this alone is enough to convince me that there is a big difference in the quality of an Ivy vs. a state school.
Firstly, the qualifications you need to even think of applying are tremendous. My original SAT score was in the 90th percentile, and it still wasn't enough. That same score, by contrast, would have put me well into the top 10% of applicants at ANY State University of New York School, save for a couple(Binghampton and geneseo come to mind, and even there it'd have been 25%). The standards for extra-curricular activities are similarly stringent.
I am also a recruited athlete(football), and the difference can be seen here as well. At most Division 1 schools, an athlete needs a relatively low score(about 1300 on the new SAT scale) in order to play. These lower admissions standards usually ensure that the average scores for athletes are somewhat lower than the average for the rest of the population.
Not so in the Ivy League. If your score is below 1800, they will not take you. Each year, across the entire league, only a handful(perhaps about 10) recruits with scores below 1900 manage to get in. My 1920 was not enough for them-I needed a near 200 point improvement before admissions would let me by, whereas ANY state schools would have been more than satisfied with my original score.
You do not find those types of exacting standards at state schools. Those guys are there, most of the time, to play football. They are, in essence, semi-pro athletes and, in far too many cases, are treated like athlete-students, not student-athletes.
You might be saying right about now "Ah, that's BS, so what about SAT scores?" and "Who cares about the standards for football players?", etc, etc. So why am I bothering to tell you this? Because it is these same exacting standards for admission that create the differences we're talking about.
The truth is, there is not a perfect correllation between Ivy League educations and greater potential/success. I personally know some students who will attent my local state university in Albany when they could have(if they tried) applied and got into Cornell, among other Ivies. Such examples abound at State schools.
But I do challenge that there is an imperfect, but fairly high correlation. The standards applied guarantee that you
cannot gain acceptance to these schools without having put together a very impressive body of work in secondary school, the type that requires an intense amount of dedication, discipline, and mental ability. That simply means that the student body selected by these institutions typically possesses each of those qualities I mentioned to a higher degree on average than do those at less selective institutions.
Employers know this. They understand that a Cornell 4.0 will not best an Albany State(NY) 4.0 EVERY time. But they will bet on the Cornell grad most of the time simply because he/she has been through a more rigorous academic experience(got through selective acceptance, got through 4 years of serious competition with other very qualified applicants, etc, etc). They've essentially already been screened for the qualities that employers like-discipline, intelligence, and dedication. You can't meet their admissions standards, nor can you graduate without these qualities.
Nevermind the quality of the staff at these schools. You don't get the sheer number of Nobel Laureates lecturing to you at Arizona State the way you get at Brown or Princeton.
These same factors I'm talking about guarantee that your scenario(2.5GPA from Ivy vs. 4.0 from State U) is unrealistic. The average GPA at Harvard, for example, is 3.53. All of the sports teams at Dartmouth average 3.0 or higher. Yale is at 3.6, Princeton about the same. You will not find a lot of 2.5s at any Ivy. The Ivy League is basically composed entirely of the students who spent their entire high school career going postal about a
single B- on their report card. They fret over EVERY SINGLE grade bcause they know that without a GPA approaching perfection(at least 3.7), they will be unable to gain admittance to an Ivy. The only time you'll catch them slipping is in the last semester of their senior year, and even then they rarely average below a B. Go to college admissions forums like collegeconfidential.com. You'll see kids there going postal about having
one B on their report card for Junior year. They hold themselves to a high standard-its the only way to get in.
Please understand that I'm not trying to drum every student at a State U, nor am I trying to portray every studetn at a selective institution as a faultless, god-like scholar. Like I said, I personally know people whom I could consider good, very intelligent friends who are attending such schools for many reasons, and I know that they could(had they so chosen) hold their own at any Ivy. I was puzzled that they didn't apply.
The fact of the matter is, though, that the standards at Ivies(and other similarly selective institutions) are higher. The effort needed to get in is much higher. The effort needed to survive for 4 years is much greater. In general, that usually means that
ON AVERAGE the academic quality of the students(and,by extension, the degree they earn) is a significantly higher.
The differences are there, and they just can't be minimized the way that you(and the author of this article) are trying to.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
