I absolutely agree that peer effects are really important, but I’d suggest that some of the vibe difference being observed here may come from the particular way that Union (and some similar colleges) builds its class. I’m currently at a slightly lower ranked liberal arts college with a significantly higher racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity than Union (having attended a similar school to Williams and taught at both HYP and top-tier public R1). We’ve got a lot of less-well prepared students from weak public high schools, but they are much hungrier for higher ed than my HYP students, and without the tendency to start partying on Thursday night that I saw at HYP or the propensity for trying to cheat their way through pre-med physics. The average HYP or top-tier SLAC student does better than our students after graduation, but on average they started half a lap ahead. I think that advantage would be reversed when corrected for family income, education, and first-gen status — and the reason is that our students are challenging each other, and not hanging out with wealthy goof-offs. Real DEI is a net benefit for the academic vibe — but it doesn’t work if you’re not willing to also give up chasing full pay students who didn’t get into HYP or Williams and trying to optimize test scores for US News, and instead commit to building a class out of people who really want the opportunity for education.
Teaching at Robberbaron Bloodmoney University (which is very elite in some fields like CS and statistics, and, weirdly, drama, but only middling in the conventional liberal arts), I see a benefit which isn't quite the same as just raising the median with the same content, but closer to what DinoNerd says about his (?) experience at Harvard. I can teach serious courses and expect the typical student to keep up. I teach a required course for juniors and seniors who in my department's major which covers stuff that at most schools is for MS students or first-year PhDs. We have class sizes of 100 and they _get it_, most of them. If I tried to do that at Big State Flagship where I did my Ph.D., I could probably find either 10 students a year who are as good as my current ones - or 100 who think they want the course but can't handle the material (yet, at that speed). For scale, my alma mater has six times as many undergrads as my current school. OTOH, my wife teaches in one of our humanities departments (after going through elite liberal arts schools) and that is very much not her experience of our students.
There is, I think, some real value for the most capable students of giving them an education matched to their capacities, like training athletes separately from gym classes for ordinary schlubs. There is even some social value to doing this, at least if you think the disciplines we're introducing our majors to are socially useful. It's probably not as much social value as the Directional States, but frankly we're a rich society and can afford both.
(Obscuring some identifying details to speak frankly about students.)
As faculty, I never had the problem with plagiarism at a non-HYP that I had at a HYP. I also don't find that the serious students differ in their seriousness or that 'games are upped' that much among top students. The gulf between what people believe about graduates of elite schools and the qualities of those graduates seems much larger than it should be. There's a distortion field that comes with those degrees. It's true that the graduates of elite schools are incredibly nose to the grindstone as a cohort. Yet, I started to feel sorry for them in a way because getting into that school was already an accomplishment that defined them; they did not have as much of an opportunity to define themselves as a young person should have. And it seemed like the credential forced their path. If they were at the top thus far--where could they go? Only to the top, usually to a high earning career--so more grindstone, more conformity, more hoops. This seemed less of a burden for certain students who wanted to go into graduate school or for students who were probably already going to be doctors or lawyers. But students with a more creative or quirky bent would end up in extremely boring jobs somehow. I have no idea how to reduce or dispel the illusion that college admissions and attendance are as significant as some seem to think but it might be better for everyone even the students themselves if this illusion were dispelled.
I'm 65 years old, and attended Harvard as not *quite* the first member of my family to attend college, but probably the first one to attend immediately after high school. (My mother got a bachelor's degree when I was in high school; an aunt got a degree at a similar age.)
At the time, there was no real question about educating the elite, defined in part as the smartest/most academically competent, and in part by class background (legacy students, pots of money). Harvard favored diversity of enrollment in part for the benefit of their less diverse (rich, legacy, American) students - I was there in part to give them some slight contact with the wrong side of the tracks, and it farther helped that I was foreign as well as the child of a factory worker - and very very academically talented.
This was, of course, near the most bottom of US inequality, measured by income or wealth. I believed in equality of opportunity (not outcomes), and that any poor child with talent and determination could do better than their parents. (And I was more or less right, though mine was the last generation for which this was true, and it was less true for racial minorities.) I'd have favored changing Harvard's enrollment to have a lower proportion of legacy students that wouldn't otherwise have made the cut, but of course they did have to pay the bills somehow. (Need-based financial aid paid almost all of my bills; I could see that they also needed paying students.)
Now things have changed. The average American child does less well than their parents at a similar age. I still believe in equality of opportunity, but we move farther away from it every year.
Meanwhile, we argue about giving the more talented extra chances. It's common to claim that we should hand out places at publicly funded elite institutions by lottery. (Meanwhile, the rich will arrange something still better for *their* children.) An elite institution will stay elite even with a wide range of enrollees, or so we are told.
I don't think it will. I think the quality of the student body matters. When attending a relatively decent public school, I was taught new material for perhaps 1/4 of each school year. The rest was review. Most of my peers forgot everything over summer break, so the period up to the Christmas vacation was review of the previous year. Alternate years (even numbered grades) were review and consolidation of the prior year; I skipped one of them (just one subject) and noticed no new-to-me material being presumed in the next grade. This was necessary, even in a relatively good suburb, because some of the students needed all that review, and the local civic religion forbade tracking.
Later, I compared my experience at Harvard, with friends' experiences at less selective schools. My instructors presumed I could learn the material. They didn't quadruple check and enforce prerequisites I didn't actually require. They rarely dumbed things down, except to some extent math adjacent subjects being presented to non-STEM students. It was relatively easy to talk my way into graduate level classes. Meanwhile, my friends had 4 more years of something a lot like high school. They came out with a degree. I came out having, for the first time in my life, learned as much as I was capable of as fast as I was capable of learning it.
I also picked up a whole pile of resume points - people doubtless sometimes chose to interview or even to hire me largely because of the education line at the bottom of my resume. That's unfortunate, because people want equal access to those resume points, not realizing they'd go away if we picked random people and allowed only them to claim a Harvard degree. (A few would do very well, before those hiring realized that things had changed.)
I don't know for sure that any of J Random, J Stupid, and J Brilliant would be more capable in the work force if they had attended Harvard, even defining "more capable" as "likely to be paid more in the current economic climate". I rather doubt that J Stupid, from Harvard, would do better than J Brilliant, from the school of Hard Knocks - unless JS also had plentiful family money, which JB notably lacked.
I do know that if the average class at an "elite" institution needs to accommodate J Stupid, J Brilliant will be bored out of their skull, and may never learn to work hard, let alone at their full capacity. Short of the "elite" institution implementing some kind of tracking, its results will probably look much the same as those from any other institution. At the very least, the top will be squashed down, compared to what it could have been.
I'm sorry to ask the obvious question, but how long has it been since you were at Williams? Can you disaggregate the change in institution from the passage of time?
I think a major upside to elite education comes after graduation; certain names just open doors and grab attention. And what I think is more important is that generally speaking the alum network is stronger the more site the school—you drop into any major city as a Williams alum and you have an instant network, a meaningful group of people who want to see you succeed and will gladly help you do that just because you went to the same school.
I absolutely agree that peer effects are really important, but I’d suggest that some of the vibe difference being observed here may come from the particular way that Union (and some similar colleges) builds its class. I’m currently at a slightly lower ranked liberal arts college with a significantly higher racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity than Union (having attended a similar school to Williams and taught at both HYP and top-tier public R1). We’ve got a lot of less-well prepared students from weak public high schools, but they are much hungrier for higher ed than my HYP students, and without the tendency to start partying on Thursday night that I saw at HYP or the propensity for trying to cheat their way through pre-med physics. The average HYP or top-tier SLAC student does better than our students after graduation, but on average they started half a lap ahead. I think that advantage would be reversed when corrected for family income, education, and first-gen status — and the reason is that our students are challenging each other, and not hanging out with wealthy goof-offs. Real DEI is a net benefit for the academic vibe — but it doesn’t work if you’re not willing to also give up chasing full pay students who didn’t get into HYP or Williams and trying to optimize test scores for US News, and instead commit to building a class out of people who really want the opportunity for education.
Teaching at Robberbaron Bloodmoney University (which is very elite in some fields like CS and statistics, and, weirdly, drama, but only middling in the conventional liberal arts), I see a benefit which isn't quite the same as just raising the median with the same content, but closer to what DinoNerd says about his (?) experience at Harvard. I can teach serious courses and expect the typical student to keep up. I teach a required course for juniors and seniors who in my department's major which covers stuff that at most schools is for MS students or first-year PhDs. We have class sizes of 100 and they _get it_, most of them. If I tried to do that at Big State Flagship where I did my Ph.D., I could probably find either 10 students a year who are as good as my current ones - or 100 who think they want the course but can't handle the material (yet, at that speed). For scale, my alma mater has six times as many undergrads as my current school. OTOH, my wife teaches in one of our humanities departments (after going through elite liberal arts schools) and that is very much not her experience of our students.
There is, I think, some real value for the most capable students of giving them an education matched to their capacities, like training athletes separately from gym classes for ordinary schlubs. There is even some social value to doing this, at least if you think the disciplines we're introducing our majors to are socially useful. It's probably not as much social value as the Directional States, but frankly we're a rich society and can afford both.
(Obscuring some identifying details to speak frankly about students.)
As faculty, I never had the problem with plagiarism at a non-HYP that I had at a HYP. I also don't find that the serious students differ in their seriousness or that 'games are upped' that much among top students. The gulf between what people believe about graduates of elite schools and the qualities of those graduates seems much larger than it should be. There's a distortion field that comes with those degrees. It's true that the graduates of elite schools are incredibly nose to the grindstone as a cohort. Yet, I started to feel sorry for them in a way because getting into that school was already an accomplishment that defined them; they did not have as much of an opportunity to define themselves as a young person should have. And it seemed like the credential forced their path. If they were at the top thus far--where could they go? Only to the top, usually to a high earning career--so more grindstone, more conformity, more hoops. This seemed less of a burden for certain students who wanted to go into graduate school or for students who were probably already going to be doctors or lawyers. But students with a more creative or quirky bent would end up in extremely boring jobs somehow. I have no idea how to reduce or dispel the illusion that college admissions and attendance are as significant as some seem to think but it might be better for everyone even the students themselves if this illusion were dispelled.
I'm 65 years old, and attended Harvard as not *quite* the first member of my family to attend college, but probably the first one to attend immediately after high school. (My mother got a bachelor's degree when I was in high school; an aunt got a degree at a similar age.)
At the time, there was no real question about educating the elite, defined in part as the smartest/most academically competent, and in part by class background (legacy students, pots of money). Harvard favored diversity of enrollment in part for the benefit of their less diverse (rich, legacy, American) students - I was there in part to give them some slight contact with the wrong side of the tracks, and it farther helped that I was foreign as well as the child of a factory worker - and very very academically talented.
This was, of course, near the most bottom of US inequality, measured by income or wealth. I believed in equality of opportunity (not outcomes), and that any poor child with talent and determination could do better than their parents. (And I was more or less right, though mine was the last generation for which this was true, and it was less true for racial minorities.) I'd have favored changing Harvard's enrollment to have a lower proportion of legacy students that wouldn't otherwise have made the cut, but of course they did have to pay the bills somehow. (Need-based financial aid paid almost all of my bills; I could see that they also needed paying students.)
Now things have changed. The average American child does less well than their parents at a similar age. I still believe in equality of opportunity, but we move farther away from it every year.
Meanwhile, we argue about giving the more talented extra chances. It's common to claim that we should hand out places at publicly funded elite institutions by lottery. (Meanwhile, the rich will arrange something still better for *their* children.) An elite institution will stay elite even with a wide range of enrollees, or so we are told.
I don't think it will. I think the quality of the student body matters. When attending a relatively decent public school, I was taught new material for perhaps 1/4 of each school year. The rest was review. Most of my peers forgot everything over summer break, so the period up to the Christmas vacation was review of the previous year. Alternate years (even numbered grades) were review and consolidation of the prior year; I skipped one of them (just one subject) and noticed no new-to-me material being presumed in the next grade. This was necessary, even in a relatively good suburb, because some of the students needed all that review, and the local civic religion forbade tracking.
Later, I compared my experience at Harvard, with friends' experiences at less selective schools. My instructors presumed I could learn the material. They didn't quadruple check and enforce prerequisites I didn't actually require. They rarely dumbed things down, except to some extent math adjacent subjects being presented to non-STEM students. It was relatively easy to talk my way into graduate level classes. Meanwhile, my friends had 4 more years of something a lot like high school. They came out with a degree. I came out having, for the first time in my life, learned as much as I was capable of as fast as I was capable of learning it.
I also picked up a whole pile of resume points - people doubtless sometimes chose to interview or even to hire me largely because of the education line at the bottom of my resume. That's unfortunate, because people want equal access to those resume points, not realizing they'd go away if we picked random people and allowed only them to claim a Harvard degree. (A few would do very well, before those hiring realized that things had changed.)
I don't know for sure that any of J Random, J Stupid, and J Brilliant would be more capable in the work force if they had attended Harvard, even defining "more capable" as "likely to be paid more in the current economic climate". I rather doubt that J Stupid, from Harvard, would do better than J Brilliant, from the school of Hard Knocks - unless JS also had plentiful family money, which JB notably lacked.
I do know that if the average class at an "elite" institution needs to accommodate J Stupid, J Brilliant will be bored out of their skull, and may never learn to work hard, let alone at their full capacity. Short of the "elite" institution implementing some kind of tracking, its results will probably look much the same as those from any other institution. At the very least, the top will be squashed down, compared to what it could have been.
I'm sorry to ask the obvious question, but how long has it been since you were at Williams? Can you disaggregate the change in institution from the passage of time?
I think a major upside to elite education comes after graduation; certain names just open doors and grab attention. And what I think is more important is that generally speaking the alum network is stronger the more site the school—you drop into any major city as a Williams alum and you have an instant network, a meaningful group of people who want to see you succeed and will gladly help you do that just because you went to the same school.