BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

In all seriousness, who cares about a colleges ranking? Theyre based heavily on research and if you're an undergrad and you go to a research university it means you sit in a 500 person lecture hall being taught by a grad student for half of your classes. I can't believe people think they're getting a quality education in an environment like that.

Jay wrote:

Theyre based heavily on research and if you're an undergrad and you go to a research university it means you sit in a 500 person lecture hall being taught by a grad student for half of your classes. I can't believe people think they're getting a quality education in an environment like that.

not in oxbridge uni's. they have a strong 'tutor' program that most people taught with 2 people at a time.

law school in unsw in aus is a seminar based program and we have around 30 people per class anyway. it depends on the uni and how much they focus on teaching staff.

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

Mac, the philosophy you adhere to claims that you should submit to your intellectual and cultural superiors who, due to their superior intellect, are better able to make decisions for you than you yourself are capable of. I'm an engineer with an IQ that qualifies me for MENSA if I wanted to join (zero desire to join that wankfest). You disagree with me on the regular, yes? Why would you want to submit to my whims and social experiments? How could you possibly know better than I?

Frankly, libertarianism boils down to the belief that people are smart enough to make their own decisions and run their own lives. Everything else is just window dressing and rhetoric.

You went to a naval college on government aid. You can do math but your school wasn't a high society center of learning. Reading about Hegel in history books doesn't make you anyone's intellectual and cultural superior.

You went to New Jersey State University, a college most famous for being the STD capital of the US, and still failed at getting laid.

Rutgers is a colonial college and a top 15 research university. We have 10 times the amount of grad students than you have any students. Some of my history professors were New York Times writers and authors. Personally got to know them too.

It ain't NYU, I know. But I got accepted there too anyway

uziq wrote:

Jay wrote:

Cybargs wrote:

so a university's weight is based on what people have heard of? lol.

im sure most americans havent heard about kings or imperial either.

Nope. If you didn't go to Cambridge or Oxford you might as well have gone to community college.

you don't know what you're talking about. the university of London is massively respected the world over (that's UCL, Kings, holloway, queen Mary, the LSE; loosely imperial etc.). as are about 10-15 other British institutions. Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, etc. all are significant just as Berkeley, Stanford, Colombia etc. punch their own weight. also a lot of those top universities have a tutorial or seminar based teaching model. you get to spend hours a week with the top talent. i was taught in small groups by royal fellows and even the poet laureate of the United Kingdom. not quite being bored by an overworked ABD in a giant lecture hall. I'm sure you have first hand experience of this though, like most things you pontificate about on here (or is it more of the 'I heard from a guy on the subway' type reasoning?)

Rutgers and Roho are about equal in terms of academic prestige, and both are within the world's top 1%. both are known globally. Roho is ranked 3rd in the world for international outreach. just because you only know Oxbridge and Harvard-Yale, doesn't mean there are no elite institutions outside of that. even the world top 250 matters a lot nowadays, with so many Asian institutions coming up. there are a helluva lot of colleges and college educations to be had (such as yours, from buttfuck nowhere), and the competition is now truly global.

I can't help but feel this would matter to you if you actually went to a good college. you take a rude and moronic pride in much lesser things (such as being able to join MENSA, rofl).

plus my college just appeared in the avengers movie. that means even the dumbest blue collar fucks that you hang around with from your poor person background would recognise it. no dice fuckaaaa

TLDR

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

You went to a naval college on government aid. You can do math but your school wasn't a high society center of learning. Reading about Hegel in history books doesn't make you anyone's intellectual and cultural superior.

You went to New Jersey State University, a college most famous for being the STD capital of the US, and still failed at getting laid.

Rutgers is a colonial college and a top 15 research university. We have 10 times the amount of grad students than you have any students. Some of my history professors were New York Times writers and authors. Personally got to know them too.

It ain't NYU, I know. But I got accepted there too anyway

and yet with your common as toilet paper degree the highest you can aspire is being the guy who rifles through people's luggage at the airport :lol;

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Jay wrote:

Cybargs wrote:

so a university's weight is based on what people have heard of? lol.

im sure most americans havent heard about kings or imperial either.

Nope. If you didn't go to Cambridge or Oxford you might as well have gone to community college.

I would say the exact opposite is true. Americans are obsessede with Europe. They love to talk about how their great great grandfather couldn't grow a potato or was bulldozed by a Bolshevik.

Most people would be really impressed if you told them you were educated at the university of Venice, the royal academy of arts in Norway, the college of Berlin, etc.

People would think you are smarter and more sophisticated than someone who went to the state university of New York

Some people would, yes.

mines top 15 for law so yeh sucked in cunts.

Grasmaaier wrote:

Wait, I shouldn't argue against rankings. They tell me I went to the best uni out of all of you

bow to your overlord

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Americans are obsessed with Europe

you are smarter and more sophisticated

TRUTH





damn this 30 mins post limit

I've never used rankings as absolute and eternal truths. but they pinpoint a top 100 or too 250 fine enough. sure, there will be the top10-20 'super brands' that are the world's shorthand for the college experience. but, depending on your subject or particular research interest, there does exist an elite level of world-class or world-leading institutions. is there that much difference between 35 and 72? 80 and 110? probably not. it's vastly complex and depends on so many factors – academic as well as individual. but what jay is saying is that there aren't any good schools outside of the 5 that joe bloggs could name if stopped in the street. categorically untrue.

people move around the top level of universities throughout their education and academic careers. plenty of people with undergrad degrees from Harvard or Oxford go to a 'lower ranked' college for their PhD. that's because a better tutor or a more reputable expert could be sat with tenure at the still very elite 60th in the world, or whatever. an elite education is an elite education. you can basically tell who has one, because they can argue and articulate their ideas, as well as critically appraise (take OR leave) the stuff they read. jay hoovers up and parrots whatever bullshit he reads. he's impressed by learning – any learning – and interested only insofar as it makes him look smarts in front of his drinking buddies down at Budweiser bar. resolutely plebeian.

Grasmaaier wrote:

That's true. I've been taught by several top scoring oxford grads doing their phd's at my uni. Just to note one of them was the absolute worst teacher I ever encountered and I dropped the course immediately. Shit subject, shit lectures. Undoubtedly a smart woman but I suspect she was granted her position simply because of her nr1 uni credentials.

It's disappointing how unis sometimes try to artificially inflate the rankings though. Fighting over world renowned academics to take a seat in their faculties, who then spend 0 of their time teaching. We had a few of those, formally part of the department but most of the time they would be out of the country and only appeared for some select lectures. I doubt any of them even tutored postgrad students, maybe a phd student here and there. Who I would then consider unlucky because it'd be nigh impossible to get a hold of these people.


Not to say that there's merit to stating that you get bad teaching at top unis. We always had small working groups and individual tutelage on writing projects. Only followed one or two courses that were exclusively lectures with some 1-200 students, that was early in my undergrad tho and on easy subjects.

The top research universities are largely a scam. They HAVE to do everything they can to attract the brightest undergrads because with the big lecture hall teaching model the students need to be self motivated to learn anything. For grad school, top notch, for undergrad most people are much better off going to a small teaching college where they will actually be taught by a professor rather than by their peer study group.

im sure zique can correct me, but doesnt oxbridge run on a small tutorage system of two students per tutor for courses?

Cybargs wrote:

im sure zique can correct me, but doesnt oxbridge run on a small tutorage system of two students per tutor for courses?

most of the top universities in the UK run on tutorials and seminars as well as lectures. Oxbridge and UCL from the university of London have 2-3 person or even individual tutoring. a few other unis structure themselves around smaller colleges, so department numbers are kept (very) low and staff:student ratios are high. there's also a pastoral ethos in these institutions, with students normally boarding in the same building as, or near to, their professors' offices. it's what you'd call properly 'collegiate'. same deal with universities built around small quadrangles: it creates common spaces, as well as interior common rooms adjacent to, where students from all disciplines and their teachers mix. not just Oxbridge, but York, Durham, London, St. Andrews etc. All have this small 'college' model that's attached to the larger university body.

for every hour or two hour long lecture id have, I'd get 3-4 hours of seminars with classes of 10 or so, discussing things with 'the talent', not some beleaguered grad student (PhD's take 3 years here instead of the US's 7-9; it takes so long in the U.S. because grad students are forced to teach undergrad electives to make their stipend agreement). I would also spend an hour or two a week in a personal tutorial with an academic. not mandatory, but every academic in our (intimate) department made time for this, open office hours, for 2-3 hours a day. this was an extremely enriching process for me. as I alluded to before, even the poet laureate of the UK, and many other prestigious academics, all knew me by first name and knew what I was working on. they considered it a good, stimulating use of their time too. it may even further their own research.

or just listen to jay rambling on when he never attended an elite research institution. lol. what I have to stress is this ISNT just Oxbridge.

sounds exactly the same as aussieland.

i think the benefit of a top end university is that you're surrounded a lot more by similarly motivated cohort and renowned professors in their field. you get all dem good networking too.