Sandwichman: >> What some (who I won't bother replying to) may rudely label a "rhetorical >> trick" is actually observation from experience of attending a doctoral >> program at an ivy league school where "bait and switch" was the order of the >> day from administration and faculty...
raghu: > So speak for yourself. There are lots of other people, many on this > list, who went to Ivy League institutions and got an excellent > education out of them. And there are hundreds of excellent scholars on > the faculty of these institutions. The usual critique of the ivies (and I went to one, BTW) is not that they produce graduates who are merely equal to (or even worse than) their competitors but rather that their "value added" isn't as good as advertised. They _start_ with good students, in this theory, and then don't add to their knowledge or wisdom as much as (say) a good public university does. The ivies' relatively tight criteria for admission are seen as a better signal to prospective employers than the actual education provided. That is, it may be true that a Harvard BA is a sign of the educational hoops jumped through during undergraduate years but those those required to get into Harvard these days are even more important. Harvard's admission office thus plays a major role in vetting prospective employees for employers, with the BA being merely the icing on the cake. I don't know if that theory is true or not. It's quite possible that the relatively high admission standards mean that students often educate each other (often just by having bull sessions about foreign policy, philosophy, etc. rather than about sports, etc.) High standards make the professors' jobs easier and more interesting, which also adds to the education actually received. My impression is that there's a big difference nowadays from when George #2 Bush got into Yale (in 1962?), when affirmative action for "legacy" students and old wealth ruled the show, or when there were quotas limiting the number of Jews admitted, etc. Even then, Harvard and its ilk were filtering candidates for corporations. Old wealth, preppies, and the like were part of the general corporate culture. -- Jim Devine / "In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
