A few aspects of my model of university education (in the US):
“Education” isn’t a monolithic thing, it’s a relation between student, environment, teachers, and body of material for the common conception of that degree. Particularly good (or bad) professors can make a big difference in motivation and access to information, and can set up systems and TAs well or poorly to make it easier or harder for the median student. That matters, but variance in student overwhelms variance in teaching ability.
“Top” universities are generally more focused on research, publication, and prestige than on undergraduate education. Professors are tenured for research and prestige, not for teaching ability. Many of them think of their jobs as ‘run my lab/work on papers with grad students first. Do the minimum for most students, identify the future stars to get them into the “real work”’.
Much of the Alumnae value from the institution is about reputation, not about quality of the education they got. If a school is optimizing for donations 15-years on (when the median successful student is getting rich enough to donate), they care about prestige and top outcomes, not median education.
Quality of undergrad education is actually unimportant for most students. If you’re not staying in academia, you need the degree to get in the door of many jobs, but your actual skill and value will come from how well you can learn the actual job and apply what you’ve internalized in school. This will be more about how far beyond the coursework minimum you’ve gone, and how much you’ve “played with” and gotten good at stuff you’ve tried on you own. The actual material is the bare minimum, usually outdated and incomplete.
For law and medicine, undergrad is is only about placement in the “real” school you get your final degree from. For other advanced degrees, undergrad is really pre-grad school, and tends to be research-focused with fairly minimum effort into other classes. Oh, and about washing out the students who want advanced degrees but aren’t actually able to get themselves there.
For most degrees, the first 2 years are just plain worse than the higher-level courses. If you’re just starting, your current experience will likely get better. But still not great if you only look at the coursework rather than all the resources for challenging yourself.
Most of the learning doesn’t happen in lectures. Find the study groups, TA sessions (and TAs willing to spend 1:1 time on interesting topics), and labs where you can really think and learn.
I suspect the vast majority of students would be better off at a lower-ranked school or community college for the first 2 years, and then transfer to a middle-ranked (or top, if your goals and results match that way) university for the degree.
You don’t have much of a LW history, so I can’t guess at your thoughts, goals, level of thinking, etc. My recommendation for the median LW poster (interested in some fairly deep topics, top 20% IQ) who finds themselves at a top university and disappointed by the coursework would be to do enough studying of assigned and optional reading so you just don’t worry about grades—get to the point where you just know this stuff. Identify the outside-of-class reading and groups that challenge you on topics you want to understand more deeply. It’ll vary widely based on your ability, your professors’ attitudes, and the institution’s policies, but you may be able to take the more advanced/interesting classes sooner than most, and get more than most out of the overall experience.
A few aspects of my model of university education (in the US):
“Education” isn’t a monolithic thing, it’s a relation between student, environment, teachers, and body of material for the common conception of that degree. Particularly good (or bad) professors can make a big difference in motivation and access to information, and can set up systems and TAs well or poorly to make it easier or harder for the median student. That matters, but variance in student overwhelms variance in teaching ability.
“Top” universities are generally more focused on research, publication, and prestige than on undergraduate education. Professors are tenured for research and prestige, not for teaching ability. Many of them think of their jobs as ‘run my lab/work on papers with grad students first. Do the minimum for most students, identify the future stars to get them into the “real work”’.
Much of the Alumnae value from the institution is about reputation, not about quality of the education they got. If a school is optimizing for donations 15-years on (when the median successful student is getting rich enough to donate), they care about prestige and top outcomes, not median education.
Quality of undergrad education is actually unimportant for most students. If you’re not staying in academia, you need the degree to get in the door of many jobs, but your actual skill and value will come from how well you can learn the actual job and apply what you’ve internalized in school. This will be more about how far beyond the coursework minimum you’ve gone, and how much you’ve “played with” and gotten good at stuff you’ve tried on you own. The actual material is the bare minimum, usually outdated and incomplete.
For law and medicine, undergrad is is only about placement in the “real” school you get your final degree from. For other advanced degrees, undergrad is really pre-grad school, and tends to be research-focused with fairly minimum effort into other classes. Oh, and about washing out the students who want advanced degrees but aren’t actually able to get themselves there.
For most degrees, the first 2 years are just plain worse than the higher-level courses. If you’re just starting, your current experience will likely get better. But still not great if you only look at the coursework rather than all the resources for challenging yourself.
Most of the learning doesn’t happen in lectures. Find the study groups, TA sessions (and TAs willing to spend 1:1 time on interesting topics), and labs where you can really think and learn.
I suspect the vast majority of students would be better off at a lower-ranked school or community college for the first 2 years, and then transfer to a middle-ranked (or top, if your goals and results match that way) university for the degree.
You don’t have much of a LW history, so I can’t guess at your thoughts, goals, level of thinking, etc. My recommendation for the median LW poster (interested in some fairly deep topics, top 20% IQ) who finds themselves at a top university and disappointed by the coursework would be to do enough studying of assigned and optional reading so you just don’t worry about grades—get to the point where you just know this stuff. Identify the outside-of-class reading and groups that challenge you on topics you want to understand more deeply. It’ll vary widely based on your ability, your professors’ attitudes, and the institution’s policies, but you may be able to take the more advanced/interesting classes sooner than most, and get more than most out of the overall experience.