UCONN is an excellent educational institution for any student athlete

[Teacherdeb]

Ok, this is

 

[Teacherdeb]

Oops- premature posting! Meanwhile, I am sick of reading about how Duke and/or Stanford are such superior schools! A student gets out of school what they put into school, and believing that Duke and Stanford offer better education is fallacious. The onus for a great education is on the student- a savvy, ambitious student can find challenging opportunities to excell at more reasonably priced schools. The cost of attending exclusive private schools is ludicrous especially in comparison to the cost of a state school, but many people are brainwashed into believing that more expensive equals better. So an athlete concerned about academics should go for the best fit-

 

[UcMiami]

Oops- premature posting! Meanwhile, I am sick of reading about how Duke and/or Stanford are such superior schools! A student gets out of school what they put into school, and believing that Duke and Stanford offer better education is fallacious. The onus for a great education is on the student- a savvy, ambitious student can find challenging opportunities to excell at more reasonably priced schools. The cost of attending exclusive private schools is ludicrous especially in comparison to the cost of a state school, but many people are brainwashed into believing that more expensive equals better. So an athlete concerned about academics should go for the best fit-

Teacher - everything you say is true about a student's own approach to education being the single most relevant issue in the quality of education they receive. But there is also another truth which is the more academically rigorous an environment is the better the 'average' results are. And that is not just the school requirements but also the peer environment in which students find themselves. If you take an average student and put them in a slacker environment they will perform worse than if you put them in a dedicated environment. And if you demand 50 units of the quality for an A from an average student, they will do 40 units and accept a B, but if you demand 75 units of quality they will give you 60 units for the same B.
A lot of 'ratings' on Universities are full of meaningless measures, but the ones that I think matter most are the ones that identify the quality of the students that make up the population and the ones that attempt to monitor the rigorousness of the academic requirements for graduation.
I agree that Uconn is a fine academic institution and any student that goes there has the chance to receive an absolutely top of the line education. And there are a lot of more expensive private schools that do not provide a better peer environment nor a more rigorous educational demand, simply a wealthier or more in debt group of students. But there are also some state schools and some private schools that do provide both a more rigorous academic demand and a more academically challenging peer environment. Duke, Stanford, Cal - Berkeley, U of Chicago, Princeton, etc. fall into that category. A student going to any one of those can get through four years doing less and learning less than a dedicated student at Uconn, but the 'average' student graduating from them if you could figure out a way to accurately measure would come out ahead of the 'average' student from Uconn. The measures that do get used are usually based on five or ten year career paths, which may be somewhat bogus, but they also point to another advantage and one I benefitted from personally - the networking that happens during the four years of college does matter, and the more successful the people you become friends with, the better your connection are in whatever your career path is. And the better the 'average' education of those connections are, the better their 'average' careers will turn out.

The interesting parallel to this is with women's college basketball teams - the Uconn program is the MIT or Yale of women's college basketball. It has the best teachers, the most rigorous demands of its 'students', and accepts only the top of the quality pool of 'applicants' and through four years its 'students' make the most progress on average of any program in the country, and its graduates when measured five and ten years down the line have a measurable advantage in their chosen profession. Anyone can argue that the top end of the intake of the program would have excelled at any lesser program (EDD for example) and it is difficult to prove that one way or another, but I think it is the 'average' intake that does prove the point. It is not the Mayas and DTs, but the Jessica Moores, Ketia Swaniers, Ashley Battles, and even Meghan Gardlers and Kaili McClarens that prove the value of the education they received at Geno's IOB (Institute of Basketball. (And you hear from the graduates - 'they demanded something of me that I did not know I had it in me to give.' or as Stef is just quoted as saying 'I never believed I could be an All American when I arrived at Uconn')

I'll take it to another level as well - by most international comparative measures the US has a less well educated population than it did 50 years ago because both the educational environment and the academic rigor of our education system has slipped (some say 'is broken.') That does not mean that the top end of our output is not brilliant, nor that the inflow into the system has become less worthy, but the 'average' output is not as good comparatively to the countries where the population truly reveres education (and does not 'distrust it') and where the academic institutions demand more rigorous standards.

Sorry - this is a long winded reply, but it is actually something I feel strongly about. And I grew up in Storrs as a faculty brat of a Uconn professor who taught there for 50 years and he loved the university and I do as well. He was actually a Princeton graduate, but when it came to his will, he left money to Uconn and not his alma mater.

 

[UcMiami]

Whoops - the other argument you make is cost, but for an athlete on scholarship, the cost is mostly the same. The choice of college involves all sorts of considerations for any student, and the choice for an elite athlete is even more complicated though most of the financial burden issue that other students find real is greatly reduced (there are still travel consideration for the student and their family if they want to watch games.) For a self motivated student or a financially challenged student I strongly agree that state schools have a great advantage.
(In a different time, but still somewhat relevant I remember my mother saying to my father about one of my sisters - 'I know she is not going to pursue an 'academic' career, but she is going to marry someone she meets in college, so it does matter what school she goes to!' And she was right about the marriage part.)

 

[pvdoggy]

Very well articulated and to the point. If I was a student athlete and want to study engineering
for example, anybody who thinks that UConn will provide me as good of an education as Stanford
or Duke is not thinking with their head, given that I am the fixed variable in the equation.

Teacher - everything you say is true about a student's own approach to education being the single most relevant issue in the quality of education they receive. But there is also another truth which is the more academically rigorous an environment is the better the 'average' results are. And that is not just the school requirements but also the peer environment in which students find themselves. If you take an average student and put them in a slacker environment they will perform worse than if you put them in a dedicated environment. And if you demand 50 units of the quality for an A from an average student, they will do 40 units and accept a B, but if you demand 75 units of quality they will give you 60 units for the same B.
A lot of 'ratings' on Universities are full of meaningless measures, but the ones that I think matter most are the ones that identify the quality of the students that make up the population and the ones that attempt to monitor the rigorousness of the academic requirements for graduation.
I agree that Uconn is a fine academic institution and any student that goes there has the chance to receive an absolutely top of the line education. And there are a lot of more expensive private schools that do not provide a better peer environment nor a more rigorous educational demand, simply a wealthier or more in debt group of students. But there are also some state schools and some private schools that do provide both a more rigorous academic demand and a more academically challenging peer environment. Duke, Stanford, Cal - Berkeley, U of Chicago, Princeton, etc. fall into that category. A student going to any one of those can get through four years doing less and learning less than a dedicated student at Uconn, but the 'average' student graduating from them if you could figure out a way to accurately measure would come out ahead of the 'average' student from Uconn. The measures that do get used are usually based on five or ten year career paths, which may be somewhat bogus, but they also point to another advantage and one I benefitted from personally - the networking that happens during the four years of college does matter, and the more successful the people you become friends with, the better your connection are in whatever your career path is. And the better the 'average' education of those connections are, the better their 'average' careers will turn out.

The interesting parallel to this is with women's college basketball teams - the Uconn program is the MIT or Yale of women's college basketball. It has the best teachers, the most rigorous demands of its 'students', and accepts only the top of the quality pool of 'applicants' and through four years its 'students' make the most progress on average of any program in the country, and its graduates when measured five and ten years down the line have a measurable advantage in their chosen profession. Anyone can argue that the top end of the intake of the program would have excelled at any lesser program (EDD for example) and it is difficult to prove that one way or another, but I think it is the 'average' intake that does prove the point. It is not the Mayas and DTs, but the Jessica Moores, Ketia Swaniers, Ashley Battles, and even Meghan Gardlers and Kaili McClarens that prove the value of the education they received at Geno's IOB (Institute of Basketball. (And you hear from the graduates - 'they demanded something of me that I did not know I had it in me to give.' or as Stef is just quoted as saying 'I never believed I could be an All American when I arrived at Uconn')

I'll take it to another level as well - by most international comparative measures the US has a less well educated population than it did 50 years ago because both the educational environment and the academic rigor of our education system has slipped (some say 'is broken.') That does not mean that the top end of our output is not brilliant, nor that the inflow into the system has become less worthy, but the 'average' output is not as good comparatively to the countries where the population truly reveres education (and does not 'distrust it') and where the academic institutions demand more rigorous standards.

Sorry - this is a long winded reply, but it is actually something I feel strongly about. And I grew up in Storrs as a faculty brat of a Uconn professor who taught there for 50 years and he loved the university and I do as well. He was actually a Princeton graduate, but when it came to his will, he left money to Uconn and not his alma mater.

 

[BigBird]

Good posts all, and thank you for them. Let me throw in another element if I may. Simply, the best schools are not often "best" in every department or major. I am aware of a top school with a first-rate engineering school that also has a rather sorry college of education.

We are forced to discuss not just the school, but the program within the school, no?

 

[pvdoggy]

Good posts all, and thank you for them. Let me throw in another element if I may. Simply, the best schools are not often "best" in every department or major. I am aware of a top school with a first-rate engineering school that also has a rather sorry college of education.

We are forced to discuss not just the school, but the program within the school, no?

Agreed, but if I was going to go to engineering school, I could care less what the liberal arts
program is like, especially since most engineering curriculum is jam packed with pre-selected
courses, mostly in math/science/engineering already. Your point is valid though, some
engineering department is better than others, except at elite schools like the College of
Engineering at Stanford for example, where they tend to be good across the board.

Another example, Duke has a very good medical school and Elizabeth Williams and Halley Peters
are both pre-med at Duke (I believe), and I would think they get better exposure to their
field than if they had gone to say Tennessee

 

[BigBird]

True. Mostly though, I was referring to the questionable practice of ranking colleges and universities. One should look at it a little more microscopically.

My favorite story (condensed) concerned a student who proudly announced in my class that she was going to a certain school to major in telecommunications. I asked her why she chose that school, and she replied that "It is a top university!" She was not happy with me when I told her later that her school of choice had discontinued its program in telecommunications about 20 years ago.

 

[UcMiami]

PV and BigBird - agree - like I said there are so many different considerations involved in making a college choice including academic major and one, simple happiness, is often discounted but may be the most important - a depressed student is a bad student.
The one advantage a scholarship athlete has is that the financial consideration is removed, to bring it back to the OP, and that is a huge consideration for even upper middle-class families with the costs of both out of state and private college's tuition/room/board.

 

[ctdad]

Do not underestimate the amount of money a private school will give a student coming out of high school; they are markedly more generous in their aid packages. I am decidedly middle class and live in Illinois. My older son wanted to study Engineering and decided on out-of-state Purdue, which did give him about a 1/4 scholarship. It still would have cost me more to send him to Illinois. He didn't apply to Champaign, but the valedictorian of his high school class got nothing but loans. My younger son opted for almost all private schools, and all came with extremely generous aid packages. He opted for Notre Dame and we will pay less for 4 years there than it will cost me for 2 years for my older son at Purdue (and I did check to see what the cost would be after the older one graduates).

Stanford, if I remember correctly, is basically tuition-free if you make under $100K. All you would pay is room and board.

 

[UcMiami]

CTDAD - good point especially for the highly endowed private schools, but too many students do end up in that student loan trap. And as you say, the costs can vary dramatically from school to school with little regard to the actual published 'full fare' numbers of the schools. And state schools used to be a source of pride and were almost free to in-state residents - they are still cheaper than private schools, but the tuition figures have skyrocketed as state revenues have been squeezed.

 

[hjoerring]

Another example, Duke has a very good medical school and Elizabeth Williams and Halley Peters
are both pre-med at Duke (I believe), and I would think they get better exposure to their
field than if they had gone to say Tennessee [/quote]

This is precisely where you fall off the tracks. Duke has a premier med.school but what that have to do with an undergraduate student- even if they are pre-med? The medical faculty has absolutely nothing to do with the schools of Art/Sciences. And, is an undergraduate student going to work in the medical lab at the med.school doing recomb.genetics? Cut it out. In fact, a pre-med student at Tenn might have more exposure to the biomed.world then their counterpart at Duke. It is also about 'teaching'. This is why the small liberal Art Schools are expensive, etc. There is a big diff. if your classes are all 10 students and not 50-90. State Schools have the mission of educating the populous and this will always be a mixed bag. Systems as the Cal, TX, MI, NC and CT (only the usual suspects) create campuses and deliberately create a higherarchy by raising the entrance requirements for the top schools. Uconn is tricky because the state and the New England Region is surrounded/filled with small private institutions. Families with a long history of post-secondary educ and money were willing to send their kids to those places. Also, a lot of the less fortunates (and in my view- not very bright ones) ran off to BU and even Umass. Yale and the other surrounding schools in- and out of CT could provide a steady soure of brain power. No interest in building up a competitive univ when you already have some. This is what Uconn has been doing for a short time- catching up. Will it really become an 'elite' state U as Berkely/Wis/MI/UTAustin, etc? The current President is pushing hard, but others before her did the same and in the end left for greener pastures. It just might happen this time around with some luck-- but, where is the money?

 

[ctdad]

CTDAD - good point especially for the highly endowed private schools, but too many students do end up in that student loan trap. And as you say, the costs can vary dramatically from school to school with little regard to the actual published 'full fare' numbers of the schools. And state schools used to be a source of pride and were almost free to in-state residents - they are still cheaper than private schools, but the tuition figures have skyrocketed as state revenues have been squeezed.

I will give Purdue credit, they have frozen tuition the past 2 years (and into next year as well).

What I learned from the college search experience over the 2 kids is NEVER discount a school (public or private) ahead of time due to cost. Apply, see what they offer and then decide. You may be surprised (we were).

 

[UcMiami]

hjoerring - good point about the separations between the main college and its associated 'schools' that are often post-graduate and separated by level and in some cases by geography. And true also about the large states where very distinct campuses have completely different admissions policies and strengths. I think California is probably the most varied and the most clearly defined because the two largest are both major D1 athletic powers as well - UCLA and Cal-Berkeley.
Uconn really doesn't try to equate the satellite campuses to the main campus. And I think that is true of the other state university systems as well.
An interesting point about Uconn and really all the NE state school systems and the alternatives available in the private sector. But I think you underestimate the level and the time frame of Uconn's pursuit of excellence by decades.
And ... the quality of teachers which I think you are pointing to as well is important, but in a strange dichotomy, the pay scale for university professors is generally based on the quality of their scholarship and not actually related to their ability to teach. That matters at a graduate school level and in terms of research grants especially in the sciences, but mostly does not translate to the experience of undergraduates. Some of the worst classes I ever had in college were taught by great scholars who had no clue how to relate to, interest, or impart knowledge to their undergraduate students.

On the first point - two things:
1. While specific schools may be fire-walled within a university that does not mean that synergies do not exist. Duke's School or Medicine may not have any direct bearing on undergraduate students, but that does not mean that research studies for example do not need warm bodies to tabulate results or manage logistics and that undergraduates willing to do grunt work cannot find something that gives them some exposure. And most people within a community can be quite generous with their time in response to undergraduates who have a genuine thirst for knowledge, so the people within the Duke community can become another source of information for a motivated student. (Einstein I believe never taught an undergraduate course at Princeton, but some undergraduates did seek him out and a few got to spend a few hours talking to him. A few others probably helped him file papers or watered his plants.)
2. For those students whose career path involves post graduate degrees in highly competitive fields and medicine is right up there - the name on the undergraduate degree really does matter. And a Duke pre-med applying to Duke or any other medical school will be more likely to receive a place than someone with equivalent grades from a state school or a less prestigious private school. It may not be fair but it is true.