Picking a college

In response to a new study offering more sophisticated measurements of how good a job colleges do of actually educating their students (which found evidence that unknown UT-Permian Basin might be doing a better job than prestigious UT-Austin), a reader writes

Your social circle in college is likely to be the one you stay in for life - not doing the same things with the same people, but probably remaining within the same broad social class. I don't have any numbers to prove it, but I would bet that social upward mobility is a lot less AFTER college than it is DURING college and graduate school. Sending your child to a prestigious university is the single best thing you can do to ensure that they remain in or climb into the upper middle class. Upper middle class people rarely marry straight out of college nowadays, but a degree from an elite university virtually guarantees entree into the prestigious jobs and professional schools where they can eventually meet socially suitable partners. Why else would so many conservative but affluent parents send their children to the little red schoolhouses of the Ivy League? I'm a bit surprised that you - one of the very few writers willing to talk honestly about social class in America - dismiss the overwhelming importance of that factor in the college selection process.* (Class being relevant from both perspectives - that of the prospective student and his parents and that of the institution; of course, neither side would dream of admitting it publicly.)

A further example: In the report itself, the authors of try to show the fallacy of USNWR-type rankings by demonstrating that they are dominated by the following factors: fame, wealth, exclusivity. Uhh, right ... who the heck wants any of THOSE things for their kids?

It's a bit naive to imagine that a good education, in a quantifiable, knowledge-poured-into-brain-and-processed sense, is the most important factor in deciding where to go to college. For those with a choice, the social factors described above will surely outweigh the education itself in most cases, with ample justification.

None of this even gets into the question of how one compares educating students with the intelligence and preparation of Harvard freshmen to educating students who barely finished public school in a marginal district ... mainly because I haven't had time to read the whole article yet. I will, I promise.

In other words, who cares whether UTPB teaches better than UTA? It's a nice thing to know, and I'm always in favor of more data rather than less, but, honestly, would send your child off to Odessa (not even Midland, mind you ... Odessa!) if Austin was an option?

A historian writes:

I'm sympathetic to the idea of having a better set of college rankings than presently available. It would be helpful to see what "value added" schools provide. There's an important caveat, however, that comes from my experience with several varieties of institution as a faculty member and graduate student.

Having a critical mass of engaged, capable students really matters because it sets a tone that raises the level of instruction. Part of this involves IQ and raw ability; working with the wrong side of the bell curve is hard at a certain level. But there's also preparation--students who aren't comfortable with reading or writing by age 18 or 20 don't do well a serious humanities course--and a sense that learning matters for its own sake. Self-selection and the admissions process at selective institutions, especially at liberal arts colleges like Pomona, Swarthmore, and the University of the South, guarantee that most students are intellectually engaged. Those who aren't face pressure to become so.

At non-selective institutions, the reverse process operates as faculty teach to the mean. For a humanities course, subtract the high IQ students in sciences or engineering who don't care in literature, history, or art plus the bulk of the population who treat college as five years of beer and circuses. That makes the course a conversation between the instructor and three or four students. Everyone else is just there.

Students who want to learn find this painful. A freshman girl once cried in my office because she had been accepted to two elite liberal arts colleges--Rhodes and the University of the South--but her mother made her attend the local state university that gave a full scholarship. She was the only student in an introductory Western Civilization class who wanted to learn, and all her classes were taught by necessity at a level below her own. We can dismiss this as a sob story, but I've often heard similar laments about students frustrated with the lack of engagement among their peers. Another student who did two years at community college before transferring spoke bitterly about what a fraud many of her classes were. Now she plans to go to graduate school for the education that should have been available to her as an undergraduate.

Even if UT Perminan Basin improves its student's ability more than prestige schools, I'd still want my child to be with other bright engaged students at a school where the apathetic and unprepared are weeded out. Yes, Virginia, there is a difference.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer