Re: The Ivy League Schools -- Talking Circle Alternative

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Date Posted: Sat, 11/23/02 8:19am
Author: Steve Russell
Subject: Re: The Ivy League Schools
In reply to: lagirl55 's message, "The Ivy League Schools" on Fri, 11/22/02 10:35pm

>Prior to seeing this with my son, I would have been
>arguing that state schools were just as good. Now I
>know why all those rich people push their kids into
>the top-ranked schools. It's because they are BETTER.

Well, in some very expansive sense that's true. Rich people do want the best for their kids just like we do.

But that's where it get complicated. An Ivy school either hires top people or does not offer program X. Princeton, contrary to popular belief, does not have a law school, but they have a hell of a law & society program, graduate level.

Anyway, state research universities can't do that, so they have a few outstanding programs and a bunch of OK programs and if you are, like me, first generation college, it is hard to know the difference.

Example: My first year at Texas I was highly impressed by the number of my profs who wrote the textbook we used. It took me a long time to figure out that profs don't even get research credit for writing textbooks at research schools.

(For those who don't know, all universities pay lip service to three duties and claim to evaluate their professors on research, teaching, and service. Writing a textbook is service, the lowest category. In my department here, the multiplication factors in annual reports are research 5, teaching 3, and service 2. One of my pals said the other day "Before I got tenured, I was a closet teacher.")

Anyway, if you pick a state research university you have to pick the people, not the program, and that is awfully hard to do if you don't already know the lay of the land, as I did not. I was just, gotta admit, LUCKY. A little talent and a LOT of luck.

The kids I steer don't have to guess. I tell them. Sometimes I can work around what they want, but I tell them so. Example, I could cobble them a PhD program on justice systems in Indian Country, but what I cobbled would not be in the league of what, say UCLA and Arizona and Arizona State already have on the ground. Among the Ivies, Harvard would be the place.

You got to send them to fish where the fish are. Nobody did that for me and, looking back, that is really scary. I wound up in one of the top ten undergrad schools for what I was studying by sheer luck.

When I applied to law school, I was not very smart about it but I had a 3.8 from a top school and excellent LSAT scores, which will make up for lack of strategy.

I got accepted at Texas and Yale, which brings us back to what you were talking about.

I chose Texas because of money and location.

At the time, depending on the ranking agency, Yale was 1-3 and Texas was 5-7. What was the difference? At Texas, my classmates became major players in state government. At Yale, my classmates would become players in national government. Would I be a better lawyer? Nah.

Steve

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Re: The Ivy League Schools -- skin, Sat, 11/23/02 10:41am