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Comment by hodwik | Hacker News Reader

Judging from what I've seen on MIT's OCW and Berkeley's webcasts, students at the best schools are getting a considerably better education in the sciences than I did at a small state university, and students at St.John's are getting a much better humanities education than we got.

What matters even more though is the student body. Hanging out with a bunch of really smart and dedicated young people for 4+ years gives one a huge leg up intellectually.

At my small school there were very few smart people to talk to, it was very lonely and insular. By comparison, time I spent hanging out around Berkeley and PENN were very exciting intellectually.

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I transferred from a state school to a top school and the difference was night and day. There was suddenly a much larger variety of advanced courses to choose from. There were faculty who were experts in more esoteric niches. Coursework was harder, expectations higher. And, perhaps most importantly, my new peers were incredibly accomplished, and I could learn as much from them as I could the professors.

At the state school, if you were really, really good at your coursework or were taking advanced classes earlier than normal, you stood out so much that there was actually a sense of isolation. It made me feel fairly uncomfortable in a few cases, which is one of the things that led me to transfer away.

Yep. I completely understand and agree with your sentiment. I am in the same position now and when I leave the state school to visit friends at "elite schools" the entire vibe is changed. There is an incentive to be the best and constantly learn there, will at a large university it's more about just passing through the system.

Yup. Going from ucsd undergrad to mit Phd was a big contrast in the ambition level of the students. When everyone around you has a higher bar, you push your own up as well.

Is UCB "elite"? It has a student population the size of the whole Ivy League combined.

Berkeley is hard to cluster... the undergrad population has a much more diverse demographic profile (hugely more first-generation college students & more nonwhite students). I'd say the students have more raw talent, but generally less economic and cultural capital than typical students at top-tier private universities. The faculty is Ivy-class (though larger!) but the university itself suffers from periodic shortfalls in the state budget.

Enrollment at UCB is 37k, which only puts it slightly above Harvard (21k), Columbia (22k), Cornell (20k), and UPENN (20k).

Also, UCB outranks most of the ivyleague in the sciences, engineering and computer science on most measures --

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-uni...

http://www.shanghairanking.com/FieldSCI2015.html

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ran...

After viewing an EE course from MIT and UCB, turns out it was the same I took in lesser known school, saving $ in the process.

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