I graduated from Dartmouth in the 1990s so my info may be old. I also have taken several classes in both the sciences and humanities at public state schools such UC Berkeley, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and my local California State University. The main difference as many answers here have noted is not so much the materials, instructors or professors, but the students’ abilities. Rather than giving statistics which you can google, here are my personal undergraduate experiences.
I took an undergraduate chemistry class at Berkeley and I found the professor, teaching assistants and students to be quite comparable to those at Dartmouth. The material was challenging and the pace was fast and rigorous. Except for the larger class size and less posh buildings at UCB, I saw no real difference. Recently, about 9 students at my daughter’s high school’s graduating class are going to Berkeley. They are mostly in the top 5%. So basically, a top public university like Berkeley is pretty close academically to an Ivy League and its student body has similar capabilities.
The first time I noticed the difference between an Ivy League and a state school was when I took several undergraduate history courses at the University of Minnesota (a fairly good state school). I took a European History course that had several hundred students in a lecture hall. The class were then divided into smaller discussion sections of about 15 students each led by a Teaching Assistant (TA). We were assigned primary source reading materials to discuss. I don’t think I was ever assigned to read more than 100 pages a week. As a comparison, I remember reading 500 pages/week in some of my history courses at Dartmouth. After a couple of lectures, I noticed that the professor at the U of MN did not cover anything beyond the reading assignments, so I stopped coming to lectures and still passed with flying colors.
I also took a smaller class of maybe 40 students in urban geography at the University of Minnesota. Here I got to interact with the professor a bit. He was just as competent as any professor at Dartmouth. He gave me extremely good and insightful comments on my papers and really knew his stuff. However, the difference is the student body. Although there were a few top students in this U of MN class, the lower performing students had gaps in basic knowledge such as longitudes and latitudes. At the University of Minnesota, I did not find the teaching or the materials wanting in relation to Dartmouth. However, because of the students’ abilities (I think), it was easier, much slower paced and less in-depth. I simply learned a lot less.
A couple years later I took an English literature class at the local Cal State in my hometown. The class was fairly small so the professor actually graded all of our writing assignments. I thought the class was uninteresting so I became the bored student in the back who tuned out. I was getting really good grades on my assignments with very few comments until one day I got an assignment back with a comment to the effect that it was “so good, it could have been professionally written”. I think she thought I plagiarized because I could write relatively well as compared to others in her experience.
So in short, there is a definite difference in education level between my Ivy League school and the state schools I had experience with. A undergraduate education is not just learning from professors and materials, it is also learning from your student peers. Higher ability student peers allow for better discussions, in-depth thinking, more intricate assignments, more research and the ability to simply learn more. I think a few public state schools like Berkeley do have higher ability students similar to the Ivy League. However, except for a small percentage, most students at most state schools in my experience are not comparable to those of elite schools. For my own children, I am encouraging them to go to the best school they can get into because I want them to learn as much as possible.
– Alexander Khuu
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.