like yeah some charters are good, presumably including yours, and it’s awesome that you got to have that experience
but it should just be the case that every student should get a comparable experience and that’s only possible through proper funding of public education
i guess i’m not saying it’s not better but I’d be surprised if it was actually twice as good (assuming there was a way to actually quantify that). it’s one of these things where we have cultural mythology about prestigious institutions being inherently better schools and all these people in power graduated from them, and because of the clout essentially these schools get both more ambitious and better performing students to apply who then graduate, use those connections to people in power to also become people in power, and perpetuate the myth of superiority. none of that necessarily means the schools are better, but that we believe them to be and our society structurally reinforces it. it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy
Very funny, Atlas
I would be utterly shocked if it wasn’t
And Michigan Tech was my preferred fallback school
they also just have so so so much more money which can be directly invested back into education tbh.
Looking back on my time at UMich there is so much I got to do that just does not exist at a school like Michigan Tech that it’s genuinely hard to imagine I wouldn’t have found it to be worth half as much at best
I’m sure there’s diminishing returns as you go higher but you can also go lower and if you compare my time in college to if I went to, for example, a local community college, I don’t know if I could even put a numeric multiple on the difference
It’s actually just worlds apart
Okay, but it’s not like they’re using secret textbooks or anything right? Classes are generally teaching out of the same books and covering the same materials, and the teachers probably care about students getting a good education to a similar degree on average. Why is the May who went to Harvard better than the May who went to a non-Ivy school in terms of what he actually knows and the skills he’s acquired in the same amount of time? The former’s resume will look better, surely, that’s why you go to a place like Harvard, but how is May all that different in the long run?
im also outright not in favor of going for more presitigious schools vs cheaper less prestigious ones but atleast with ivies I kinda think the difference is super quantifiable
i also think big fish in small pond is a good argument but also think it depends on major pretty heavily (like cs for example vs. business)
nah bro my profs wrote our textbooks
Now granted this isn’t true for every field - I’m in electrical engineering, which genuinely requires a pretty rigorous and thorough understanding of a lot of deep and complex math and physics, and of course a school like UMich also means I got a pretty well-rounded education, with deep and rich courses in humanities and arts and all that as well
And this isn’t to say that community colleges and the like are bad or worthless - they really aren’t
But although expensive, high-level colleges certainly aren’t valuable for everybody, they are certainly high in potential value
The May at Harvard is straight up learning more in the same amount of time.
idk about your school district but in the three school districts that I have Any amount of experience with, the district has to take everyone [subject to conditions] but individual schools within the district don’t? like, if a school has the capacity to educate 600 students, and 1200 people want to go to that school, then regardless of whether it’s district or charter not everyone who wants to go there is going to get to go there
this varies heavily based on state, in Minnesota the only factors they can consider by default are (a) whether you live in Minnesota (b) whether you already have a sibling there (c) whether you’re the kid of a staff member, + a handful of extra qualifications relating to schools designed to serve specific minority groups (like, if you have a charter school targeted towards supporting deaf students, they’re allowed to prioritize deaf students)
(contrast with normal district schools in Minnesota where individual schools are explicitly allowed to give preference based on how you do on an admissions test, as long as there’s still some school in the district you can attend)
again this does vary by state, some states allow charter schools to be more selective (I think this is generally bad)
I just straightforwardly have no objections to this (for either district or charter schools)
this can maybe be true for things with, like, economies of scale, but I (perhaps excessively optimistically) expect that a typical district school has already bitten off the low-hanging fruit there and that the remaining opportunities for more money to lead to more students helped are the sorts of things that are more expensive the more students you have (e.g. additional student support staff)
right, but they also … don’t have to educate the students who are now attending charter schools? which Theoretically means they don’t have to spend as much money (though ofc you can run into edge cases w.r.t. fixed costs)
i took a class by a guy who wrote the textbook in the class he was teaching, and it sucked shit. he was notorious for being an absurdly hard professor where if you didn’t bust your ass to make sure you understood everything at a deep level, you were fucked. I dropped his class because, yeah, I wasn’t learning all that much because he wasn’t doing a really good job of teaching the material. He just assumed everyone got his highly technical explanations, and moved on. I took it with a different teacher over the summer, and got an A. I think about that class a lot and specifically how much I learned. Do I understand computational theory marginally less than I do if I fucking busted my ass in the first class? Idk, maybe, but it’s not like what I know isn’t useful for the actual practical purposes of working in my field. It’s really hard for me to see how knowing that particular subject slightly deeper would actually help.
seeing stuff like this makes me feel better about being rejected from colleges bc i still got considered and I didnt eve have egregious shit like this i was real af, too real even
I wholeheartedly agree with this!!! Like, don’t get me wrong, if our current district-school system were actually providing every student a high-quality education that would be awesome, I’d be all for that, I’m just unconvinced that it’s actually equipped to do that (or that it would be equipped to do that even if you shuttered every private or charter school and redistributed the funding)
tbf as someone who goes to a very non prestigious university I will also say that the quality of education is, in many scenarios, outright low on, like, a base level?
like if you really wanted to go here and not learn very much and still pass classes you kinda could lol.
Obviously someone very motivated can attain good education through outside resources but atleast the classes themselves really dont teach much lol.
This depends on major a lot (like, I am taking a textile science class and am learning a ton that I wouldn’t learn elsewhere because my school has an arguably top 10-20 textile science program in the country lol)
I still think its a great place that can set me up well for a career but tbf if I didn’t want to know more things I really wouldn’t have to
I don’t think that would be a magic silver bullet either, to be clear, but it would at least give us one target to aim for
