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> Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige. I can't explain why you hav

> Better by what metric? It has not been my experience that instructional quality is in any way correlated with budget or prestige. I can't explain why you haven't seen it, but it's quite prevalent due to the economy of educational resources. Let's dispense with qualitative arguments and just talk about availability. For example, try to find a class for learning Farsi/Persian in Fullerton, CA. Community colleges don't offer them and the 2 professors that do have curriculum are either at a UC or part time (specific semester + year) at various State schools while they also teach, the more popular, Arabic. How many of each resource are allocated to how many of each school? There are limits and those limits are influenced by tangibles like salary, accomodations, etc.

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importantbrian 3y ago
Cal State Fullerton literally offers Persian. They have 9 different course offerings for Persian. My grad school alma mater has 5 and it looks like the availability is pretty sketchy. From a quick look at it you'd actually be better off going to Cal State Fullerton than that particular elite institution if you want to learn Persian. I'm not sure why you think elite institutions aren't also subject to resource constraints for those kinds of classes. Remember schools like that devote most of their massive resources to things other than classroom instruction. They generally have much smaller pools of faculty who are actually teaching undergrads than a big state school will have. When I was in grad school I missed out on taking a course I really wanted to take because it was offered by 1 professor 1 semester every other year, and I'm fairly confident he taught no other courses. Which is really common at elite universities. If you want to learn a specific subject like that with a truly limited number of professors the best thing to do is target a specific program. But you very rarely need to go to an elite school to get it. If you want to maximize your chances to be able to take whatever course you want you're actually much better going to a massive state school with 10k faculty than an elite school with 1-2k faculty many of whom rarely if ever teach undergrads.
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importantbrian 3y ago

Cal State Fullerton literally offers Persian. They have 9 different course offerings for Persian. My grad school alma mater has 5 and it looks like the availability is pretty sketchy. From a quick look at it you'd actually be better off going to Cal State Fullerton than that particular elite institution if you want to learn Persian. I'm not sure why you think elite institutions aren't also subject to resource constraints for those kinds of classes. Remember schools like that devote most of their massive resources to things other than classroom instruction. They generally have much smaller pools of faculty who are actually teaching undergrads than a big state school will have. When I was in grad school I missed out on taking a course I really wanted to take because it was offered by 1 professor 1 semester every other year, and I'm fairly confident he taught no other courses. Which is really common at elite universities. If you want to learn a specific subject like that with a truly limited number of professors the best thing to do is target a specific program. But you very rarely need to go to an elite school to get it. If you want to maximize your chances to be able to take whatever course you want you're actually much better going to a massive state school with 10k faculty than an elite school with 1-2k faculty many of whom rarely if ever teach undergrads.

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