Part of the problem is that there are conflicting movements within the business class. Specific business leaders in specific industries are saying "We need skilled workers." But the general trend among the ruling class is to think of education for the masses as a waste, and a desire to return to the days when going to an elite school clearly separated you from the elite fools. Of course, the rhetoric of any politician has to be relentlessly pro-education and pro-jobs, but that is completely meaningless.
I used to be optimistic that the need for skilled workers in specific industries, combined with broad public support for education would keep the community colleges funded. We manage to bring together core pro-education constituencies.
But in Ohio under Kasich the community colleges have been targeted along with the rest of higher education. I think most of the 1% think they can rule the world using robots and cheap labor in China and India.
Republicans' most destructive trick is to de-fund an institution, and then show stumbling performance as evidence that the institution should be further gutted.
When I was a kid, a friend of my parents advised us that if we didn't get into an Ivy League, we should just go to the state college rather than a private college. The quality of education at all three types of institutions is pretty much comparable, he reasoned, but non-Ivy private institutions have all the high prices of Ivies with none of the cachet or opportunities for connections. There's something funny about it, though: the friend in question was a math professor at Tufts. His advice would rule out his own school.
We didn't follow his advice. In hindsight, maybe if we had I would have a larger nest egg right now (update on the house: the deal fell through and we're in the process of getting our deposit back, which is good news, but looking for an affordable place we like is getting more and more frustrating), but looking that far back just to say coulda-shoulda-woulda is meaningless.
Interestingly enough, though, that advice might have depended on where we were. I grew up in Vermont, and now that I check my sources for this comment, I find that UVM is unusually good. Back in the 80s it was apparently one of the top eight public universities.
On topic, maybe that advice was good when I was looking for colleges 15 years ago, but wouldn't hold today or in another five years. Who knows.
I used to agree entirely with the Tufts guy. Now I think it depends more on the specific kid, and whether or not they'll be able to complete a degree at a state school - dropout rates are phenomenal, and some kids do better with more people keeping an eye one them - balanced with what they can afford - start at community college, and then transfer to an institution where you're most likely to actually graduate.
I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how this is supposed to be a "prediction". Excepting a very limited number of highly regarded public schools (which are themselves very selective with admissions), everything in your post is true right now.
6: Nah, I don't think Heebie U or the other dozen private schools in the Austin-San Antonio sphere are looked on more favorably than UT, TX State, or UTSA. Or, I should say, individual performance at the school trumps the school name, for the most part. (Not totally, in case someone locally wants to lock horns about Trinity vs Schreiner.)
What if you go to five public colleges? That has to be almost as good as one private one, right?
I should clarify that I'm not talking about Ivy League schools. Or top public universities. I'm talking about the other 85% of nonprofit undergrad institutions.
4.1: I got and followed that advice. I don't know if it helped or not, but I never had student loans.
7/8, oh, okay. So you're not talking about the top public or private schools (with competitive admissions), but all the rest? I don't see how all the stuff about selectivity comes into play, then.
Christ, now we have to know fractions to read this site?
James Madison warned about the danger of fractions.
I don't see how all the stuff about selectivity comes into play, then.
At this point, it doesn't. That's why this is a prediction.
My claim is that as public tuition grows, next enrollment in public institutions will also start to swell. Then, in contrast, graduation numbers for private schools will be so much smaller than for public, which will make it an attractive way for employers to filter job applications (which handily confirms their distaste for public institutions). Then the local private universities will start to be more selective.
Wait, you think relatively more people will enroll in public institutions as public tuition swells? I don't understand why that would be.
Recruiting new graduates at my job. My boss: "Well, I just drop every CV that doesn't have relevant experience, and then all the ones that didn't go to Oxbridge."
Me: "Seriously?"
Him: "Yes. I'd never have hired myself."
Me: "Is that the only reason you hired me?"
Him: "It was a big factor."
I'm sure you have other wonderful qualities.
12, 14: That's the time signature for singing the comment.
Or not. I went to public land-grant schools, you elitist.
19. In contrast I have worked for somebody who binned all CVs from people who had gone to Oxbridge, on the basis that they were socially isolated and intellectually fragile.
I have to admit, some of the undergrads at the private school I currently attend are pretty bright and motivated. By no means all of them, but some.
I resent that remark. (As in, the real Clement Attlee does. He was at Univ.)
I'd guess the less selective private colleges will be even worse off an the state universities, as the student loan racket unravels. There can't be that many unselective private institutions that consist primarily of rich parents paying full freight. But I'm not sure I understand either the theory or which colleges we're talking about.
And his mother's middle name was Bravery. Ellen Bravery Attlee, nee Watson.
Clem Attlee: objectively awesome.
27. Agreed. You can accurately date the moment when the entity known as Jos/h Trevin/o finally took leave of planet earth to the occasion he identified Clem Attlee as one of the 10 worst people of the 20th century.
My ex-boss was an inverted snob of the most tiresome kind.
I'd guess the less selective private colleges will be even worse off an the state universities
I think so. The Swarthmore's and Oberlin's will be fine, but there are tons of small private colleges you've never heard of that are just about as expensive as those. I suspect that many will become unsustainable if present trends continue.
re: 23
Heh, at 23. I wonder what happens to people who grew up on a council estate AND went to Oxbridge?*
I think of myself as a bit of an inverted snob [as in I have what I think is an entirely justified suspicion of the moral values of the middle and upper classes] but even I wouldn't have gone that far.
* ahem
Wait, you think relatively more people will enroll in public institutions as public tuition swells? I don't understand why that would be.
Because there are two ways to increase revenue from tuitions: increase tuition and increase enrollment (and cram them into existing facilities.) If you're a strapped university, I imagine you'll use both avenues.
31. Chris Dillow has a post up at the moment saying that it makes them "socially isolated, geeks, weirdos and nerds". I'm not sure that's a valid generalisation.
I think it will be upheld because the insurance companies like the mandate, and it's an effective bogeyman for the right in the upcoming election.
You know how firmly I try to keep threads on topic.
I prefer to topically keep threads firm.
28 - For instituting NHS or for not having Gandhi shot?
unselective private institutions that consist primarily of rich parents paying full freight
I think this describes L. University pretty well.
31: as in I have what I think is an entirely justified suspicion of the moral values of the middle and upper classes
I've always thought of the middle and upper classes (in England especially) as having very distinct moralities, or perhaps you meant they do and you're suspicious of both?
39. Who knows? It was an unsupported assertion.
41. They do, but the traditional upper class is almost extinct and the new money brings the morality of the Daily Mail with it.
(Speaking of the traditional upper class, does anybody else find it amusing that Mrs Windsor's advisers had her wear green to shake hands with Martin McGuinness?)
So, if you had the opportunity to interview a writer whose career had started out brilliantly, but who descended into a morass of sexism and racism and big door-stop novels with stupid plots, how would you handle that? Certainly, it's tempting to go in and be ingratiating and ask softball questions in order to advance one's career, but whither then any shreds of respect one might have had for oneself and one's principles? An ambush interview might be fun, except that said writer has been interviewed a lot more often than I've interviewed people.
re: 41
I tend to think that they (collectively)* have a distinct morality (from the lower lower middle classes, and working classes) and not for the better. I tend to be continually surprised at how viciously amoral they -- I continue to think of them as 'they', even though 'they' probably expect me to consider myself assimilated -- can be.
* and probably distinct from each other, too, but as Chris Y says, the traditional upper upper class aren't really who I have in mind.
4:UVM is a school with a lot of rich kids (trust fund babies) from out of state. It had a certain kind of cachet even at my boarding school.
43: Start off kindly, and get incrementally more direct and ambushing. Near the end, relentlessly hammer him about the worst of the worst. Afterwards write it up however you want.
43: you're interviewing Ne/al Steph/enson?
I inferred the same as 49. If that's right, do it; I understand he can be amusing in small quantities if he hasn't already conceived a dislike for you. You won't have to be his bff.
46 seems reasonable. I've just been advised to ask a question about a line in one of the writer's earlier works which was particularly fucked up and hurtful. Maybe save that one for the end.
It's 47. Won't be for some time.
The fact that M.A. has a new book out (that sounds fucking horrible, surprise) and would be doing publicity makes it the most likely candidate, I think.
In a CT thread a few days ago someone posted a wonderful rumination on Ma/rtin Ami/s from Unfogged's own Dsquared:
After reading this piece in my Sunday newspaper, an interesting question occurred to me which I wonder if readers could help me with.
What would Mar/tin A/mis have to do in order to lose his reputation as a "major" or "important" writer? Is there literally anything that he could write which might make literary editors and critics say "actually this man is really rather untalented"? Or has he achieved a sort of event horizon of writerliness, at which his seriousness and density have become so great that there can be no escape? I suspect the latter; surely a reputation that has survived "Koba the Dread", survived "Yellow Dog" and now survived this, must be indestructible. Long after the nuclear holocaust when we are all dead, the cockroaches that crawl through the ashes of Western civilisation will still take Mar/tin Am/is seriously, although none of them will know why.
No idea whether M.A. is in fact the writer Mr. Taft is talking about.
HTML fail. The whole paragraph should be in italics.
You can't really stop being a major writer, any more than you can stop being a major artist. You're a brand name.
Unfogged's own? He comes by and makes fun of us occasionally, but I'd hate to claim any sort of property rights there. It was bad enough having a dog that used to bite people.
Now, if he would just piss on a Winnie the Pooh book.
I don't buy the OP at all. Almost three-quarters of college students are enrolled at public institutions and almost two-thirds of all BA degrees are granted by public institutions. The prestige and centrality of state universities is deeply rooted in many midwest, southern, and far western states. Beyond maybe 50 to 100 top private colleges and universities the quality of private relative to public institutions is doubtful -- many lower-tier private institutions specialize in handholding for not particularly skilled students from high income families. Public higher ed is too central to the U.S. to be really displaced as an employment credential. The decline in the quality of the top public institutions relative to the Ivies is just going to impact a small sliver of top-dollar high prestige jobs in NY/SF/LA.
Unfogged's own? He comes by and makes fun of us occasionally, but I'd hate to claim any sort of property rights there. It was bad enough having a dog that used to bite people.
I encountered him here long before seeing any of his other writing, so I tend to mentally lump him in with the Unfogged crew.
I think LSU will still be fine for Louisiana jobs.
Public higher ed is too central to the U.S. to be really displaced as an employment credential.
Too central to whom?
56: I was wondering the same thing earlier, but about Jamie Dimon losing his job.
61: I assume that heebie's argument is that they will have to admit more students, which will lower the value of their degrees. Private schools don't have the same pressures. (I don't quite understand why that should be, though.)
Private schools don't have the same pressures. (I don't quite understand why that should be, though.)
Private schools aren't getting state funding slashed for the forseeable future.
64: too central to the history and institutional infrastructure of post-secondary ed in the US -- too many good graduates come from public institutions and there is too much reputation and history built up there for employers to just stop recruiting in that set of graduates. Especially since the simple public vs. private distinction is very far from being a good measure of quality. (Compare the U of California system to the University of Phoenix to think about just how far things would have to go before you could make a good quality prediction just based on public/private).
With that said, a lot depends on what exactly you mean by 'barrier to access'. College quality (including spending and teacher/student ratios) has long been recognized as having some independent correlation with post-college wages. Presumably as spending declines at public universities that relationship will continue to play out. But I think we're a very long way from seeing the public/private college distinction look anything like the HS/BA distinction. To put it concretely, I think differing majors and fields of study are and will be a bigger barrier than public/private for everybody below the top few dozen schools in the country.
61: I agree with this.
The cuts in public post-secondary education are deep and messed up, obviously. But pearl-clutching aside, they aren't going to make a serious dent in those institutions' ability to churn out Marketing or Computer Science BAs. Less Classics, or Film Studies, or Philosophy? Yeah, very likely, but that's hardly going to be noticeable at the level of the national job market.
Also, what does "high-paying jobs" mean in this context? I see plenty of jobs that, in terms of education, require only a BA, plus several years of experience, that start in the $60K-$70K range. Add on an MA in the field, even from a second or third-tier public school, and you're quickly getting into $100K+ territory. As I've mentioned before, looking over the bios of the top executives at the stock brokerage I worked for, only one had attended an even somewhat-selective SLAC. Everyone else had gone to third-tier schools, or even directionals, and a couple hadn't even attained a BA.
31. Chris Dillow has a post up at the moment saying that it makes them "socially isolated, geeks, weirdos and nerds".
This would be a surprisingly benign explanation of why financial journalism is full of Oxbridge grads.
Private schools aren't getting state funding slashed for the forseeable future.
Although some state schools are already getting less than 10% of their operating budget from the state already, so it's not clear how much more damage additional cuts could do.
I recall reading somewhere that a few state schools would like to cut the cord entirely and go private, but since the state still owns the land and the buildings they can't.
(Compare the U of California system to the University of Phoenix to think about just how far things would have to go before you could make a good quality prediction just based on public/private).
I am not talking about for-profit institutions. Please.
I recall reading somewhere that a few state schools would like to cut the cord entirely and go private, but since the state still owns the land and the buildings they can't.
My institution can go private and has recently threatened to do so. As near as I can tell, only undergraduate instruction for state residents would be affected and that's apparently a small enough part of our business that the threat to go without state support is plausible.
Although some state schools are already getting less than 10% of their operating budget from the state already, so it's not clear how much more damage additional cuts could do.
If I'd attended Oxbridge I would know how to write.
72: I picked the extreme example, but it's still relevant. There are at least 4500 institutions of higher ed for employers to keep straight (actually I think there are almost 7000 accredited for federal aid at least one program), and most of the time the employer will not have heard of 'University of X' or know whether it is non-profit or for-profit. Presumably the web site will look nice regardless. If you mean what you say to apply to only the top 100 or 200 institutions that employers have actually heard of then that is something else. The reputational capital built up by public institutions is a big part of their labor market influence I would think.
You're maybe thinking to nationally. Most local private schools are known by employers in the area.
75: Most people stay regional for college, and further stay regional when applying for first jobs. I'm only talking about people in their early-mid 20s; after that your resume has other bases for judgement. So the central Texas employer does not need to know private schools in central Illinois in order to apply this soft bias.
71 is right, at many (if not most) state schools the majority of the damage from cuts as already happened. Once the state gets down to 0% they won't be able to cut any more. (Which is not to say that they won't be able to do damage, the trend is towards increased state government involvement in the details along with decreased funding.)
At least you didn't have any typos.
True, but reputation still matters if you want the flexibility to move even around your state. E.g. in NY State, Lemoyne College would be known in central NY but I think SUNY Buffalo would probably be better if you were going to end up downstate in the tri-state NY/CT/NJ area.
As someone who graduated from a college who's claim to fame was that Sarah Palin dropped out of it, I don't think I've ever had an employer give a shit where I graduated from.
The just wanted to know I had the piece of paper; no one cared who's name was on it. Its never even been mentioned in a job interview.
In the entire western 1/3 of the US, by my quick mental count there is exactly one private university (Steinford) that's notably more attractive to employers than the major public universities. And I'd say at the low end Cal State is more prestigious than, say, Cal Lutheran or Asuza Pacific.
RH is right, the proposed superiority of history-steeped private schools is not going to work in most places because of a lack of history-steeped private schools.
Steinford
Pomona and Harvey Mudd and whatever
CalTech, that's private
Texas: Rice, Southwestern, Trinity
St. John's College, New Mexico. Which is the only private college in all of either New Mexico or Arizona, that I know of at least.
Occidental?
Santa Clara?
St. Mary's?
Loyola Marymount?
Pepperdine?
Baylor?
TCU?
SMU?
BYU?
To me the last fiv all have associations of religious fanaticism but this probably only describes a small number of their graduates.
@83
That's my impression from growing up in CA as well.*
In fact, having lived in various parts of the country, I think that the reflexive tendency to assume higher quality/prestige for private institutions is mostly limited to the Northeast.
*I suppose Pepperdine might have some sort of cachet among wingnuts.
@84
certainly Caltech, but hardcore science schools are kind of in a category of their own.
Oh, whoops, CalTech is private, of course. But who knows what goes on over there in genius world.
84: USC is an interesting lacuna.
I don't know about "prestige" in the general sense, but my impression was always that USC's strength was a strong old boys network in the SoCal business community.
Don't know if that's still true.
USC has gotten a lot better, but outside a few fields (e.g. working for your dad's real estate development firm) it's not more prestigious for employers than the UCs. OK maybe not Riverside.
83 et al: It's a prediction about the future, not a claim about the current state.
Reed is probably more prestigious than U of O, but has enough of a weirdo factor that it might be a negative for some employers.
I don't know enough about how the public universities in Oregon are regarded to know if Lewis & Clark or Willamette are more highly regarded, but they do have the SLAC advantage of much smaller class sizes.
I'd guess that UW is more prestigious than any private school in Washington.
Though perhaps we aren't including Oregon and Washington in the "Western 1/3 of the US", it's unclear.
I was merely noting that it was interesting that Ned left the 2nd most well-known private university in the west off the list.
I didn't know that USC or CalTech were private but then I don't know much about California.
Harvey Mudd is pretty good, right? But that's a tech school, obviously. The other Claremont colleges aren't bad either. (My sister went to one of the less selective there and got a good education, partly, because she took a lot of classes at Pomona.)
USC's law school has a better reputation than Hastings, right?
It's just a blur of movie stars, high house prices, and smog.
I'm not saying that USC or any other school is a bad school, not at all. Just that there is not anything like a prestige advantage for private colleges on the West Coast -- if anything, it's the opposite, and in general the best you can do with a private education is about as good as the public schools. I guess that could radically change over the next 20 years but in a depressed economy paying the sticker for, say, Pepperdine is going to look increasingly unattractive.
Chapman? But I don't think anyone is going to view Chapman as more impressive than Cal or UCLA except in certain programs. (Today, at least. When Heebie's dystopia arrives and Cal is the University of Phoenix - Berkeley, who knows.)
Wow, yeah. I have never thought of USC as anything other than a sports team. It's up there with Clemson and Marshall. And Gonzaga, which may also be a prestigious western school for all I know.
Heebie U has a program that always cracks me up: if you get into UT, we'll offer you Heebie U at the same price as UT. Of course, along with being cheaper, UT is far more prestigious and located in freaking Austin. But wouldn't you rather come to this worse school in a sad, poor town, if we give you the same low cost?
What is the program in which anyone would view Chapman as more impressive than any of the UCs?
Just that there is not anything like a prestige advantage for private colleges on the West Coast
Yeah. I'm generally startled when I hear talk that favors private colleges. By and large, the Ivies are just off my radar. They have no pull on me one way or the other.
(My own assessment was that Stanford took the fucking amazing kids from my high school, UCB took everyone who was very good, and Harvard took the kid who had never impressed me.)
What is the program in which anyone would view Chapman as more impressive than any of the UCs?
Dance?
My own assessment was that Stanford took the fucking amazing kids from my high school, UCB took everyone who was very good, and Harvard took the kid who had never impressed me.
So there was only one kid who wasn't 'very good', or are you just leaving out the big pile of kids who went to UC Sta Whoever and got functional vocational degrees that would have been OK before the shit hit the fan?
My own assessment was that Stanford took the fucking amazing kids from my high school, UCB took everyone who was very good, and Harvard took the kid who had never impressed me
In California things are somewhat skewed by the fact that, in general, kids really don't want to leave the state.
My experience was similar to Megan's. Stanford was as high as you could go. No one even considered the East coast. Harvard Scmarvard.
UC Sta Whoever
I do not know this school.
There are really huge regional differences within the US in the number of private colleges relative to the number of public ones and the perceived differences in prestige between the two kinds. Halford's point about the West is one side of this; there just aren't very many private schools period in that area. In contrast, the South has tons of small private colleges that no one has heard of, most of which aren't very good. Texas patterns with the South in this respect, and I think heebie is basing her prediction on that context.
98 totally tells the lie of 94
92.2 the public universities of the PNW are dominated by UW and then... meh.
I went to a math/science high school that got the second highest test scores in California. (Lowell in SF got the highest. Lemony Snicket went to Lowell.) Everyone went to a UC, but I was talking about how the A students who had their pick of colleges distributed themselves.
No one even considered the East coast.
St. John's College, New Mexico. Which is the only private college in all of either New Mexico or Arizona, that I know of at least.
There's also the College of Santa Fe (which was rumored to be folding a few years ago but appears to still exist and to have changed its name to Santa Fe University of Art and Design) and the College of the Southwest in Hobbs (which is very obscure even within NM). There may be some private schools in the Phoenix area, but I don't know of any offhand.
113 may in fact be what's behind this debate. Also that Texas has been much worse about establishing a healthy state school system than other places.
Huh, it appears the College of the Southwest has also rebranded itself as a university.
Also that Texas has been much worse about establishing a healthy state school system than other places.
Much worse than what other places? UT is one of the best public school in the country.
the South has tons of small private colleges that no one has heard of, most of which aren't very good
This really gets driven home the first year you are on the academic job market. I'm supposed to get excited about this job... where?
UT is excellent. The supporting system is worse - the other schools in the UT system and the A&M system - far too few spots to support the number of students who want to go to college, compared with other states. (And perpetually underfunded.) I don't remember the details, but Gail Collins made this assertion in As Goes Texas and backed it up with lots of statistics.
My experience was the same as Meagan's, which is not too surprising since I went to Arcadia which similarly is an LA suburb HS with good test scores. There were a few kids looking at Ivies but overwhelmingly the goal of the academic kids was Berkeley or UCLA with the lesser UC's being fallback positions. Some of the real eggheads went to Cal Tech but places like USC and Pepperdine were for kids who weren't real academically inclined but whose parents had plenty of money.
Alaska patterns with the West in this respect, of course. There's one private university (there used to be two but the other one went bust a few years ago) and a public university system divided into three units that are largely autonomous and effectively function as separate universities.
114.1: I would contend that USC is in fact "well-known", not saying anything about academics or reputation etc.
My entire knowledge of the Alaskan university system comes from watching a video of some poor guy getting slammed by a moose after he walked out of door and unknowingly came between moose and mooselet.
124: Hugely well known. I just didn't know it was private.
My entire knowledge of the Alaskan university system comes from watching a video of some poor guy getting slammed by a moose after he walked out of door and unknowingly came between moose and mooselet.
Which campus was that at?
108 - I was actually thinking of film, where my understanding is that it's a step below USC but a peer to UCLA (and Berkeley doesn't rank).
Could have been any of them, really. That sort of thing happens all the time.
This was a while ago. Back in the days before YouTube, we had to rely on things like When Animals Attack.
I just didn't know it was private.
Me either.
128 -- Ah, that may be right, with the caveat that film school is basically worthless.
Who knows? It was an unsupported assertion.
New mouseover text?
I thought USC and CalArts had the only film programs that weren't worthless, as far as getting a job in the industry went? And CalArts is its own thing, of course.
And CalArts is its own thing, of course.
Is this set theory again?
Hm I guess it's just the animation program at CalArts; didn't know they had a separate film program.
Even USC is pretty worthless in terms of getting a job in the industry. I don't know anything about the CalArts animation program, one way or the other.
If you attend USC film school you get to say "I went to the same film school as the Star Wars guy."
120: I'll have you know that Gardner-Webb and Limestone College are easily the equal of your Fairleigh Dickinsons and your St. Bonaventures.
140: The Northeast has no shortage of small, obscure private colleges too, of course, but I think overall the South has more.
I'll have you know that Gardner-Webb and Limestone College are easily the equal of your Fairleigh Dickinsons and your St. Bonaventures.
What is Fairleigh Dickinson the equal of? The only alumna I've ever heard of in the Wikipedia list is Peggy Noonan, which, y'know... (When Mrs y used to supply their library, the account was generally referred to as "Fairly Ridiculous".)
Ohio is chock-a-block with tiny liberal arts colleges (many of which seemed to have been all up on doing the right thing, like admitting women and black folks, long before everyone else).
143: It was routinely referred to as "Fairly Ridiculous."
145: Bahaha. I only read 50% of any comment! They used to run a state-wide foreign language forensics competition and we won in Russian twice. So I've even been there!
144: Yeah, the Midwest seems to have a similar pattern. Really I think the overall difference is West v. East, with some diversity within each.
At Berkeley High in the early 90s, the UCs seem to have been considered fallbacks by many of the academically ambitious.
@148
If the wholesale destruction of the UC system continues on schedule then I suppose the landscape will look very different to future HS seniors then it did to my cohort when we were scoping out colleges.
Were things already headed downhill in the 90s?
I don't know, teo. Pennsylvania has 67 counties and I think almost every county with more than 50,000 people has an obscure liberal-arts college. Let's just figure it out once and for all.
Adams County - Gettysburg College
Allegheny County - Point Park, Chatham, Carlow, Robert Morris
Beaver County - Geneva College
Berks County - Albright, Alvernia
Bucks County - Delaware Valley College
Cambria County - Mount Aloysius, St. Francis
Chester County - Immaculata
Crawford County - Allegheny College
Cumberland County - Dickinson, Messiah College
Delaware County - Widener, Haverford, Swarthmore, Cabrini
Erie County - Mercyhurst, Gannon
Franklin County - Wilson College, which was founded in 1869 and even I have never heard of it
Greene County - Waynesburg University. They played in the FIRST TELEVISED FOOTBALL GAME.
Huntingdon County - Juniata
Lackawanna County - Marywood, University of Scranton
Lancaster County - Franklin & Marshall, Elizabethtown College
Lawrence County - Westminster College
Lebanon County - Lebanon Valley College
Lehigh County - Cedar Crest, DeSales
Luzerne County - King's College, Wilkes, Misericordia
Lycoming County - Lycoming College
Mercer County - Grove City College
Montgomery County - one of the highest concentrations in the country, with Bryn Mawr, Gwynedd-Mercy, Arcadia (the former Beaver College), Ursinus, the opulently situated Rosemont College, the Swedenborgian Bryn Athyn College, and quite a few religious seminaries
Northampton County - Lehigh, Lafayette, Moravian
Philadelphia County - Chestnut Hill College, La Salle, etc.
Snyder County - Susquehanna
Union County - Bucknell
Washington County - Washington & Jefferson
Westmoreland County - Seton HILL
York County - York College
Obscure public colleges:
Butler County - Slippery Rock
Clarion County - Clarion
Clinton County - Lock Haven
Columbia County - Bloomsburg
Indiana County - IUP
Monroe County - East Stroudsburg
Tioga County - Mansfield
No colleges:
Armstrong, Bedford, Blair, Bradford, Cameron, Carbon, Centre, Clearfield, Dauphin, Elk, Fayette, Forest, Fulton, Jefferson, Juniata, McKean, Mifflin, Montour, Northumberland, Pike, Potter, Schuylkill, Somerset, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Venango, Warren, Wayne, Wyoming
Jesus, Pennsylvania, what happened to you?
Is the Swedenborgian college still perceptibly Swedenborgian?
At Berkeley High in the early 90s, the UCs seem to have been considered fallbacks by many of the academically ambitious.
Definitely was not the case at my heavily Asian So Cal high school when I graduated in '94.
As such, those of us in Pennsylvania have a multi-decade head start on the rest of you in our propensity to think "How do all these colleges stay in business anyway? There's gotta be a crash sometime."
Ohio is chock-a-block with tiny liberal arts colleges (many of which seemed to have been all up on doing the right thing, like admitting women and black folks, long before everyone else).
Including my DFH alma mater, which was, sort of, the first to do both. Other schools had admitted African-American men before but DFHC was the first to do so as a matter of course. It was also the first co-ed school, and thus the first for African-American women.
I'm rambling on about this because there is still no good solution to the "women and blacks" (or "women and minorities") language problem, which is annoying linguistically and politically. As Barbara Smith says, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave.
Franklin & Marshall
WHADDYA MEAN OBSCURE?!!1!
150: I know faculty at a surprisingly high percentage of those schools.
Has anyone considered starting Unfogged U? "Gooooooo Mineshafts!"
I graduated in 94/95 and most of the people with "elite" college ambitions were looking at Ivy's or elite private colleges like Amherst, Swarthmore, etc. I think being in Berkeley ruled out Berkeley for some people, since it would mean not going away for college. Also, I don't know how much race/ethnicity/nationality plays into application decisions, but the honors/AP classes were very white while I was there.
I don't think the UC system seemed to be in any clear decline at the time. I didn't seriously consider any school other than Berkeley, but I was really lazy with college admissions, so I didn't actually research any other school one I knew I was guaranteed to be admitted there. (BTW, I don't consider myself to have been academically ambitious - I just got good grades and good enough test scores.) I've never seen anything since to suggest that, if you chose your courses well and actually did the work, you couldn't have gotten just as good of an education there as at a private school. If you compare averages, I'm sure the UCs would come out lower, but I think that's probably always been true. And of course there's more to college than coursework - I'd certainly have benefited from a more residential experience, but I didn't know that at the time.
Also, the charts I've seen showing tuition rates show the UCs as being a good deal in the 90s, with maybe even a drop in tuition in real dollars in the early part of the decade. I remember reading stories about how UC applications from Californians were increasing as people realized they could get a pretty high quality of education at the UCs, especially Cal, UCLA and UCSD.
Obscure public colleges:
Butler County - Slippery Rock
Their water polo team is famous!
147: My experience in HS was that the bulk of the real grinds were either looking at the near-Ivies, especially the local ones; the Ivies; or honors programs at big state schools (including the Techs). Then the smart, academically gifted, but not snotty about it people were usually either looking at an alma mater of one of their parents or someplace unusual and far away that had a particular program that sounded good to them. The one person I knew well who went to Harvard was certainly very smart, but not as smart as a bunch of people who went to, say, Carleton, Grinnell, Oberlin, Swarthmore, etc. Many, MANY people, both smart and average, just defaulted to the U of Minn. because they knew the campus, knew the best opportunities, and had plenty of family connections (as virtually everyone here does.) Plus, a lot of use did the Post-Secondary Options Program, so we knew we could hack the classes pretty easily. One very smart girl I knew went to Kalamazoo because of their wacky academic year.
158 was me.
Also, w/r/t USC, in the 90s I don't think it was that highly regarded, but also not bad, mind you. Then they started making a real effort to join the elite universities and for a while they seemed to have the money to poach senior scholars and set up new Centers for the Study of This, That, and Other Stuff and I don't know where they stand now because I stopped paying attention. I wonder if they saw the UC's imminent decline as an opportunity.
The South may have obscure private colleges, but their public colleges aren't too great, either. Ole Miss, anyone? Alabama? Tulane beats LSU; Emory any of the Georgia publics. I'll grant UTA, Chapel Hill, UVA and William and Mary. But it's a fairly thin crop.
Will no one answer my question about the reputation of USC's law school?
And now that I've caught up with this thread (and most people are through with it) I can add that probably 20-30 people from my high school went to the east or the private college midwest. Maybe as high as 5 or 6 to Yale alone, with a smaller but above 1 number going to Harvard.* The largest numbers went to the UCs, with I think only Lowell and maybe one or two Southern California schools sending more to Berkeley.
*The two kids with perfect and near perfect SATs went to one or the other, but I can't remember who went to which.
"from my high school" should be "from my high school graduating class". About 550 people in that class overall.
162: I'm not particularly inclined to, put that way, but USC's law school has a very good reputation locally, and my understanding is that it has a very good scholarly reputation nationally.
150 - Wait, Beaver College (pbui) isn't in Beaver County? What sense does that make?
161 - Georgia Tech is a top-10 engineering school.
TBH I could name about two private colleges (Buckingham = crazy hard-rightists teaching z-rate students, and that French one Charles Pasqua invented).
Neither of them would impress me beyond the level of a UK ex-poly.
166: Beaver College n'existe plus. I think it's something like Acadia College now, because of pervs like you.
159: Kalamazoo College? What was wacky about the academic year?
This thread confirms for me that the American educational system is really confusing for an outsider. Or at least this outsider. Public vs private vs top-tier vs Ivy league vs ... who knows. Sheesh.
I think y'all should switch to single-payer universities. (Well, maybe I don't think that, but it would amuse me to watch certain segments of the American population lose their minds as they debated it.)
Of course here students are on strike for lower tuition and the stand-off is several months old now, so we're having an actual public debate about the issue. Of sorts.
Arcadia College, per 150, but it's not in Arcadia County either. BRING BACK BEAVER.
I think y'all should switch to single-payer universities.
Not an individual college mandate?
Pennsylvania has 67 counties and I think almost every county with more than 50,000 people has an obscure liberal-arts college.
See, in the South even the counties with fewer than 50,000 people have obscure colleges.
Whereas in the West virtually no counties have either colleges or 50,000 people.
I crunched number of colleges/universities (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2009) versus state population (Census, 2010).
Rank / State / Num. per 1,000,000
1. ND, 40.14
2. VT, 39.95
3. SD, 36.85
4. WV, 31.30
5. IA, 29.22
6. MT, 28.30
7. DC, 28.25
8. NE, 26.28
9. ME, 24.84
10. PA, 23.22
Pennsylvania is the top-ranked out of states with a population of more than 10 million. After it in that cohort are Ohio, New York, Illinois, Florida, California, and finally Texas, which is also last- ranked out of 51. California is #46 overall.
What about enrollment/population?
176: Very different. Top 10 are DC, AZ, IA, RI, UT, MN, ND, MA, NE, CA. Big states: CA, IL, NY, PA, OH, TX, FL.
175: Not at all surprised that the Dakotas come out on top; they have a totally absurd number of colleges for such small populations (mostly public, though, I think).
DC being, understandably, about twice as much enrollment per capita as AZ.
177: Thanks. Those small colleges really can make a difference. Also, small (population) states.
148
At Berkeley High in the early 90s, the UCs seem to have been considered fallbacks by many of the academically ambitious.
This was the case for me (early 70s). And while I went to college in California my brother (and his kids) went to east coast schools so a local preference was not universal.
167 --- what, no love for Oxford? Cambridge? Ruskin? St Andrews et al?
Not that those are private, but they aren't exactly public either really. (Well, complicatedly.)