25 Hottest Colleges/Universities

Here's the 2007 issue of the 25 Hottest Colleges and Universities from *gasp* one of our competitors and Newsweek.

A few comments:

- I only keep up with these lists to stay "informed"... and find myself falling into the trap of discussing the lists, both because they cause debate and because people want to hear about these lists. However, I know they're generally subjective (and often wrong) when I see that Georgia Tech isn't the hottest school for science and engineering. Tsk tsk. Who else has our combination of academics and athletics in a hip, cool urban atmosphere?

- The hottest school for rejecting you is Harvard... no surprise there. But I want to know what schools gets the least amount of people to whom the school extends admission towards. That would be interesting!

- The hottest school for business is Babson - why had I never heard of it until a year or two ago? Was it my fault? My college advisor's fault? A quote:

"Just as violinists know why they're at Juilliard, and physicists at Caltech, the 1,700 students attending Babson understand what made them choose this small campus. They are entrepreneurs, and no school does a better job than Babson in teaching how to start businesses."

I wonder if this sort of environment would also be a negative - being around so many entrepreneurs might not give you the wide ranging experiences of meeting people with other interests. For example, at Georgia Tech I met people who studied all sorts of engineering disciplines, different sciences, some business students, some liberal arts students, and some (yikes!) architecture students. I consider that a strong positive compared to just being around entrepreneurial students, but that could just be me.

The Cost of (Your) Classes

Dear Blog Readers In College,

This might become a trend that will have an impact on you in the future. And it sort of makes sense that some classes (majors) should cost more to students than others. For example, I know (and you can look it up in Ga. public records) that some of the finance/management professors make A LOT more than some liberal arts professors at GT. So if it costs on average 2-3 times more for those business professors, and assuming other things being equal, shouldn't management students pay a bit more for their classes?

Of course, there are other factors at work - and they're mentioned in the article I link to, so check it out and get back here with your opinion!

Linking Back: College Admissions, Donations, Graduations, and more

- The Freakonomics Blog pointed out the recent increased volume of articles and reporting in the NY Times talking about the difficulty of getting into college.

- CNN reports that a donor gave $100 million to UChicago... anonymously.

- Here's a good article from the WSJ on sleep (or lack thereof) having an influence on performance.

- A dad, son, and granddaughter are graduating together.

- Here's a great post on special ed. students and the honor roll. A sampling: I think it would be nice if we could find a way to reward people... without pretending that her performance is on par with kids who are taking much tougher classes.

- Joanne Jacobs touches on the 5 year plans... in high schools. I have many friends who are graduating Georgia Tech and other schools in 5 years, but I'd never heard of such high amounts of high schoolers doing the same.

- Here's a new set of wealthy investors getting involved in education as reported in Whitney Tilson's School Reform Blog.

Apples to Apples

I've always wondered if I sacrificed any future opportunities by having gone to Georgia Tech instead of a "more prestigious" school that I had gotten accepted at, like Williams College. I've come to believe that I didn't sacrifice any future successes, as I feel I made the most of my time at Georgia Tech. This article by Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point", confirms that belief. I strongly recommend reading this piece to get a better idea of the differences (or lack thereof) that a "prestigious" school can have on one's life.

I recommend skipping section 2, as it's long and a bit slow. Section 3 is the heart of the matter and here's an excerpt from that section:

To assess the effect of the Ivies, it makes more sense to compare the student who got into a top school with the student who got into that same school but chose to go to a less selective one. Three years ago, the economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale published just such a study. And they found that when you compare apples and apples the income bonus from selective schools disappears.

"As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between," Krueger said. "One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let's look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn't seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don't."