Gisteren, daagde EphBlog me en andere Yalies uit om Yale tegen Williams en andere kleine liberale kunstenuniversiteiten te verdedigen. Wij voerden aan de plaat op en toonden de verdiensten van heel wat Yale aan die aan het heel wat publiek EphBlog eerder onbekend waren; eveneens leerde ik meer over enkele voordelen van Williams in groter detail.

Mijn definitieve conclusie was dat meer onderwijs en begrip beter zouden zijn voor iedereen, aangezien het duidelijk werd dat beide scholen groot waren en aan te bieden partijen hadden en dat het in de beste belangen van studenten was om de plaats te vinden die het beste geschikt voor hen is. (Ook, schenen de problemen van heel wat David om uit zijn veronderstelling dat te stammen Harvard = Yale, een gemeenschappelijke fout!)

EphBlog is een grote gemeenschap die, zoals ik voordien heb geschreven, me overtuigde om Williams op mijn universiteitslijst voor veel langere tijd te houden dan een andere kleine Lak en veel langer dan werkelijk gemaakte gegeven betekenis wat ik eigenlijk in een school zocht. Ik vind me in een positie waar ik werkelijk de heel wat voordelen van kleinere liberale kunsten school-vertrouwelijke gemeenschappen, veel faculteitsinteractie, taxeer en veel meer-maar tezelfdertijd een dwingende behoefte aan de middelen van een grotere school heb. Dat is waarom ik vooral aan yale-I werd getrokken dacht het me zou helpen de waterscheiding tussen grote en kleine scholen overbruggen, iets van een gelukkig compromis.

Zo, in de geest van het bevorderen van bespreking en mededeling, ga ik een reeks beginnen waar ik wat bespreek van wat Yale moet aanbieden specifiek vergeleken bij kleinere scholen, en hoe het sommige van zijn potentiële tekortkomingen met betrekking tot hen compenseert. Overweeg dit deel één, de inleiding. Hieronder is het eerste deel van de originele post die ik in antwoord op David en anderen in EphBlog schreef; het werd niet zeer, zeer lang voltooid en zou geweest zijn maar u kunt de volledige bespreking in EphBlog zien.

Tweede post/eerst echte post is beschikbaar hier: Yale versus De kleine Liberale Universiteiten van Kunsten: deel 2 (de Kwesties van het Geld)

David Kane van EphBlog wierp onderaan de kaphandschoen gisteren, erop aandringend dat Williams beter is dan Yale. David says that of the “scores of students that were accepted at both Yale and Williams” a majority of those choosing Yale are making a mistake, and that “most of them would be better off if they chose Williams.” Are students as misinformed as David thinks about what life is like at Yale vs. an excellent, small liberal arts school like Williams? How does Yale compare when looking at the advantages and disadvantages of its size and institutional character?

I am not as quick to David to insist that any school–be it Yale, or anywhere else–is necessarily better for a given student. It’s very important to consider which school is the best fit for a specific individual, and I think that approaching any one applying or matriculating population as homogeneous enough to just be relocated and have across the board better experiences is naive or worse. It smacks of the higher education marketing attitudes that I try so hard to attack here on my blog. I will do my best to demonstrate in this post ways in which for many–not necessarily all but many–a school like Yale can offer more than a small liberal arts college (like Williams) could. I will aim to deconstruct the claims made by David against Yale and also to a certain extent his criticism of Harvard where it overlaps. I am not trying to directly respond to the baiting (trolling?) of some Williams folks–just responding more in general, comparing Yale (FAIRLY) to small liberal arts colleges.

UPDATE: The debate at EphBlog seems to have been largely resolved, obviating much of the need for this post. David Kane, after extensive discussion, revised his original position based on a newfound understanding of life at Yale.

I stand corrected! My mistake was to assume that the Yale I did not know was similar to the Harvard that I know so well. It isn’t, at least in terms of average class size and faculty interaction. My mistake. And thanks to Sam/Anna/DHD/Yalie for the education.

Conclusions:

1) If you are choosing between Yale and Harvard, choose Yale. You will be happier and get a better education.

2) I agree with Rory that Williams still provides more of the sort of faculty interaction that is the meat of a good undergraduate education then Yale does. But if Yale students really average two faculty-led seminars per semester, then the difference is much smaller than I ever imagined. Kudos to Yale!

3) I agree with current eph that we really need to know about class sizes. But, my main assumption was wrong, so I’ll save the detailed debate for another day.

4) Time for Williams to step up! Besides ending all lectures, we need to increase the number of tutorials, decrease the size of other classes, and so on.

I thank our friends from Yale for participating in this interesting discussion. If any find themselves in Cambridge, lunch is on me.

What follows are the remains of my post responding to David and others–I will salvage more of it and turn it into a post about Yale vs. Small Liberal Arts Colleges in general. David, Anna and I will see you when I’m back in Boston when school gets out ; )

Aside: In a National Bureau of Economic Research study on revealed preference for college admissions, showing a weighting of colleges based on how likely high-achieving applicants were likely to choose a given college given an array of other options, Yale ranks 2nd while Williams ranks 18th (Paper is from 2004 and you should read it). Increasing selectivity may have changed things slightly overall since then, but it gives us a reasonable baseline understanding of how likely someone is to go to Yale over other schools. Specific data for Yale vs. small LACs is available elsewhere, but I just want to establish that in general, people are in most cases highly drawn to Yale over other schools. This was given in the discussion, just wanted to provide data for it quantitatively for our hypothetical high-achieving student group.

The one other point I just want to frame here is the nature of this debate. It is NOT about whether college X is better than college Y for reasons ABC–that is College Confidential talk, that’s not what I want to address. It’s not constructive. What is the case is that one college may be better suited to certain individuals, pursuits, or fields of study. I will try to talk about both my own reasons for coming to Yale, typical reasons, and instances where Yale might not be the best choice compared to say Williams, Amherst, Wesleyan, Haverford, Swarthmore, etc. On to the comparisons..

Let’s start with academics. David Kane insists that the quality of education can be measured based on how much direct tenured faculty interaction there is for a student over his/her career. He breaks this down into three points.

How many professors know by name the typical student? By “professors,� I mean tenured or tenure track faculty. I think that, for the average first year at Williams, this is at least 4 if not 6. At Yale, I predict 1 or 2.

How much written feedback does the typical student receive on his papers from professors? At Williams, this must be in the thousands of words. At Yale, very little. Most/all of the written feedback is from poorly-paid and harried graduate students. Some is from lecturers and adjuncts of various sorts. I bet Sam has received written feedback from no more than two professors in his first year.

How much one-on-one conversation does the typical student have with professors? At Williams, this varies dramatically by student and does depend on how often you seek out faculty members outside of class. The same is true at Yale. But the average Eph gets around 10 times more direct interaction with faculty. The average Williams student in a single tutorial exchanges more words with that one professor in a semester than Sam Jackson will exchange with all his professors put together over the course of four years.

The market failure is that the typical high school student has no idea about this reality. She thinks that her interactions with professors at Yale would be, more or less, just like her interactions with professors at Williams, the only difference being that the Williams professors assign the books written by the Yale professors. If students really knew what they were getting, more would choose Williams.

Re: 1. How many professors know Yalies’ names? I have taken 9 courses this year, 3 lectures last term. Anna Ershova answers for herself:

I took 4 classes last term and I am taking 5 classes this term; since I took German both terms with the same professor, there are only 8 professors total. Out of these 8 classes, 4 are lectures (by the way, I could have had more seminars, but chose to attend these truly amazing lectures instead). Three of my professors in these lecture classes *know* my name and *know* who I am (not just what my name is, but where I am from and what my academic interests are; furthermore, they say Hi when I run into them on the street).

My other 4 classes are seminars and my professors know me really well. The professors from last semester sometimes e-mail me personally to let me know if there is something going on/if they came across an article or a book that may pertain to my ethnic background/academic interests. For instance, I just received an e-mail from my Politics of South and North Korea seminar from last term informing me there was an event coming up that is related to the topic of my final paper.