DailyDirt: Who Cares if You Went To A Good School?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Sep 30th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The field of education seems ripe for disruption -- with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online classes. However, it's difficult to judge the quality of these online programs and compare them to the traditional classroom experience. The conventional wisdom has ranked prestigious universities in roughly the same order for decades, so it'll be interesting to see how online courses and degrees might factor into these lists. Here are just a few interesting links on the quality of higher education.

The college/university rankings from US News & World Report is not as meaningful as most people assume, according to Malcolm Gladwell. Any ranked list generated by weighting multiple variables depends greatly on those weights -- and a simple, single score may be too simple to capture the most important characteristics of a diverse set of schools. [url]
The US News college rankings don't heavily weight the value (or "bang for the buck") of the schools it covers, but the Washington Monthly ranking does. In 2013, Amherst College is listed as the "best bang for the buck" school, and Harvard/Princeton don't seem to be in the top ten.... [url]
Northwestern University was once known as a horrible football school, setting a 34 consecutive game losing streak record in 1981, but its football team has turned itself around recently. Unfortunately, there's no special recognition for schools that simultaneously have good academic and athletic performance. [url]
Newsweek and the Daily Beast have ranked 2,000 US high schools according to their effectiveness to produce college-ready graduates. But after going to college, how much does high school matter? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: certification, class, college, degree, education, high school, mooc, ranking, school, university

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out_of_the_blue, 30 Sep 2013 @ 5:21pm

The 1% like Mike who went to the Ivy League care.
If you didn't go to one of those, you are d�class�, simply shut out.

A high portion go into politics; for example, look up Harvard's "Skull and Bones" secret fraternity -- members include George Bush and John Kerry -- and you'll find an astounding high percentage end up in top offices; in 2004 it was certain that one of their frat boys would become prez. That's not coincidence. The Ivy League is not about what you know, but who you know.
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- Andrew F (profile), 30 Sep 2013 @ 6:26pm
  
  Re: The 1% like Mike who went to the Ivy League care.
  Skull and Bones is Yale.
  
  Sorry, couldn't help myself.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Sep 2013 @ 5:42pm

Norhtwestern
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- Michael Ho (profile), 30 Sep 2013 @ 7:18pm
  
  Re: Oops
  Typo fixed. Thanks.
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Anonymous Coward, 30 Sep 2013 @ 11:23pm

Learning is an always will be for me the capacity to acquire knowledge to do something, how you do that is secondary, some may feel the need to get to a good school to leverage that schools name but then it is not really learning that people are after is the prestige.

The great disruption for education I believe will come when someone comes up with the equivalent of the GUI for learning, we are after all visual creatures we observe, copy and learn.
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