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Comment by edraferi | Hacker News Reader

It seems like there’s a gap in the market for a hard-nosed, teaching-first university. A place full of passionate professors with high standards. A place where high school valedictorians work their ass off for a B. A place where you feel your best will never be good enough because the standards are impossible... until, one day, you get an A. And that grade MEANS something. And after four years, the students walk out into the wide world and kick ass up and down the street.

Somebody get $100M and start recruiting all these great professors academia can’t handle....

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I went to a top school and my observations in hindsight:

1. brilliant professors and peers were inspirational and encouraged ambitious and creative thinking

2. >90% of education is self-education

3. very little of what I learned in class prepared me for the real world and among my classmates there has been relatively little correlation between academic success and real world success

I don't know how to say this without it sounding like a brag, but here goes anyway: this is University of Waterloo in a nutshell. I'm entering third year, studying math, and every single one of my friends has gone from high 90s in high school (multiple valedictorians) to struggling to keep an average in the 70s-80s range.

Anecdotally, one of my friends did a work term for the Dean of Science (and pure mathematics professor) at another university (which shall remain nameless) and she said the stuff we've been doing in first year isn't covered until 3rd/4th year at that school. Heck, her old high school AP calculus teacher couldn't do assignment 1 from our first year calc 1 course.

Admittedly struggling to find the exception[1] that you speak of. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong course?

The experience is effectively the same at any tier 1 university in the US. Some even have special names[2].

[1] https://www.studocu.com/en/course/university-of-waterloo/cal...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditions_of_the_Georgia_Inst...

I only looked at a few of the assignments from your first link but they are much easier than the one I wrote [1]. Perhaps my term was an outlier. Have a look for yourself.

[1] https://docdro.id/khG8VN7

I'd be interested in seeing that assignment, if you can lay your hands on it. I teach university maths.

I posted a link to it in reply to the other person.

Aaaand you are shooting yourself in the foot. Those Harvard/Stanford/MIT graduates will have both higher GPA and prestige, which is all that matters in the beginning (and via networking) throughout your career. You might feel good about getting an A in some impossible class, but nevertheless you are already seriously disadvantaged when competing for high-end jobs comparing to grade-inflated schools. Nobody cares that only 2 persons in your class got A in a given semester and most happily accepted just some passing grade, or that half of the students had to retake a particular class.

Waterloo has 5 times the number of undergrads as Harvard. Heck, it has twice as many as Harvard, Stanford, and MIT combined. This, in a country with 1/10th the population of the United States, should give you some perspective. I doubt there are many, if any, at my school who turned down offers from Harvard/Stanford/MIT.

Anyone who can get into Harvard/Stanford/MIT is already in the tiniest elite of the elite in this hemisphere. That's all anyone that goes to those schools is signalling to their future employers.

I understand that, I did my undergrad at a super demanding university that was always scoring high in ACM ICPC competitions, beating top 10 often, but average GPA was under 2.5 due to no grade inflation, super demanding classes (A grades were singularities, most grades clustered around the lowest passing ones), and that didn't do anyone any favor when applying to prestigious schools or jobs afterwards unless one had a gold medal from olympiad or similar (even when rocking FAANG interviews, the "unknown" factor was too strong). Then doing top 10 masters was much easier and much more rewarding job-wise. I know Waterloo is top 2 in Canada, but when top schools go through grade inflation, the hard, honest universities without grade inflation put their graduates at a disadvantage.

The math faculty at Waterloo has a number of crusaders against grade inflation. They track the high school of every person who applies and see how their grades correlate between high school and university. Schools that consistently show large drops get penalized in future applications.

I am learning a lot and enjoying the challenging course work so far. As I get closer to graduation, I'll see whether my GPA improves enough to consider grad school. Otherwise, I'll be relying on Waterloo's excellent co-op program to get my foot in the door with employers.

These places already exist outside of the US, and that type of repeated stunts from Duke, Brown, Reeds, etc, is probably a boon to them. I believe the current climate is a deterrent for foreign students, who in the US are caught between anti-immigrant sentiments on the right, and reactionary identity politics on the left (such as African and Indian students being called race traitors at Reeds). International students represent a significant source of income in higher ed and their enrollment has nose-dived in the US in the last few years. If this continues this will benefit non-US international universities who will manage to attract that population, not just in terms of revenue but also in standing.

So my guess is the places you describe already exist and they're about to be better known within a few years as trust in US universities erodes.

Sounds like my low ranked public school...

https://www.ncsu.edu/

I’d recommend if only for the convenience and price!

Again I feel like a lot of people on HN are privileged by a childhood of high achievement..I didn’t have that and could never get into a Duke-like institution (or Duke either for that matter).

What do you think students do all day? I went from working as a programmer to going to university because I wanted to. I've found the world of university far more taxing and difficult than I ever found working.

Many, many people on my course dropped out in the first year. Over half! I really do feel like it's 'hard-nosed', as you say. Not only that, but I feel like it's not even uncommon.

Some people have suggested, and it might be true, that this is related to studying STEM subjects at uni, with a much easier sense of right or wrong. However, anecdotally, I know many people who are spending many many late nights and long weeks working on art or writing reports in other subjects as well.

In universities, you are encouraged to take work home, to practically be working all the time. Leisure time of course exists, but fully expect to feel or be made to feel guilty for taking that friday evening off to enjoy yourself, even far from any important deadline.

This isn't to say that you're wrong, but "one day, you get an A. And that grade MEANS something. And after four years, the students walk out into the wide world and kick ass up and down the street." seems like a pretty apt description of the way higher education works. I haven't seen anybody just cruising through life getting good grades in university in the way one might at high school, because unlike high school you literally don't get handed the majority of the learning required. You actually have to put in the hours for success, right now.

Williams, Harvey-Mudd, Reed...These places exist. But more people would like to go to Duke, Harvard, Berkeley,... Why is that, I am not sure but the market values the latter better.

There's something like that at K-12 level

https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2016/03/15/there-fear-...

...and after four years, the students walk out into the wide world and find that employers often think someone with A's from some random easy state college is better than someone with B's from the hard high standards school.

This might be Minerva (https://www.minerva.kgi.edu/)

Wow, sounds like any top 30 university in the US...

Does there exist a "teaching-first university" at all? If so, not many.

The "polytechnic" class of higher education institution?

The problem is that people seem to believe that research is osmotic: that students in the same institution as some research is happening will learn more. Hence the most prestigious universities are those with high-status research programmes.

This is what a liberal arts college is.

United States Military Academy

Scotland?

Scotland has a number of universities with very different styles and backgrounds?

And those universities differ wildly in how good the courses and departments are... like everywhere I suspect!

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