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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

I suspect it's not true. I've had several courses where the instructors had to slow down because students were complaining that things were moving too fast or they were too difficult.

I can't say I know for sure but I imagine if this were MIT or Caltech, the students would not be complaining and instead study harder to make sure they could keep up. On the other hand, they probably wouldn't have trouble keeping up.

I didn't go to a top 10 school but a top 15 CS program for what it's worth.

At the elite universities in Britain, the students would be expected to raise this in a session with their tutor. That's in a group if 2-4, and generally only exists at the best places.

Presumably the tutors discuss this, and if everyone is having trouble it's raised with the lecturer. I think it happened once, and a couple if extra lectures / whole class tutorials were set.

You should really be worried when the students aren't complaining that things are going too fast.

I guess it depends on where you go. My assessment has come from interviewing people and getting into a discussion about what they learned in school and finding out they used the same textbook and exercises as other people I interviewed who went to elite schools. So my assessment is admittedly anecdotal.

It's pretty common for "elite" colleges and universities to use the same course materials as state or community colleges, but to get further into it. So the textbooks would be the same, the exercises would be the same, but students at a top school would go through them faster and have an extra 2-3 weeks at the end of the course to study material at the back of a textbook. Or the professor would interject some of his own research at points within the course, taking a week out of the "standard" syllabus to learn something cutting-edge.

It's quite rare for a course anywhere to get through all of the textbook - regardless of where you go, there will still be material left unlearned. (This is why one of my favorite learning strategies is to buy the textbook and then self-teach my way through it at my own pace.)

Also, the very exam could be the same (unlikely), but the grading standards could be much higher at one school compared to another. The class discussions could also be very different, even if they're on the same material technically. The nature of the interactions in student study groups could be completely different. At one school, the student sitting next to you just got named a Putnam Fellow for the second time. At another school, no student has ever, in all history, been named a Putnam Fellow.

It's quite hard to get a sense for what a course is truly like just from glancing at the syllabus.

Not true in my school either. My school's CS program is very laid back and easy, at the cost of not learning much. I'm a senior with almost a 4.0 in the major and I couldn't do some freshman level homework from MIT OCW for the theoretical classes.

It really depends (especially based on area of study). But this is something every future student should research in depth before making a decision.