Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries? Only for Some Professions

Re:Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries? Only for Some ... by nostrademons on Monday February 01, 2016 @02:43PM (#11014764)

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.)

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Re:Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries? Only for Some ... by nilkn on Monday February 01, 2016 @11:18PM (#11017612)

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.

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