Universities As Brand Names

This debate overlooks the most important factor wrt brand name universities. The friendships one makes at these universities increases your odds of doing well(whatever that means) in your chosen career. Odds are that someone you`ve befriended at such a university will end up running Mckinsey or as the Finance minister of Mexico. These folks will not necessarily help you in your career but make you want to do better. Its difficult to envision oneself as a CEO when most people around you want a simple paycheck.

aloudsky:

If your twins really want to go and you can afford it, its well worth it.

later
-sac

US education is affordable for most Americans one way or the other. Calling it expensive is not right. It sounds expensive because of poor standard of living in Pakistan and lower value of Pakistani currency. It takes lakhs of rupees to pay for one year expensive for an undergrad because it takes 60 rupees to buy one dollar. Blame it on Pakistan rather than USA for costing more than one million rupees to convert into 20 thousand dollars. The perceptiion of getting education worth more than one million rupees is quite different than getting education worth 20 thousand dollars for an American. A freshman coming from Pakistan and taking 100 level couses such as basic algebra, American History and swimming or Tennis for a cool million rupees does sound very expensive. Try raising the value of rupee because USA is not going to make it cheap for the sake of foreign students. Amercian schooling is meant for American students first.

No matter what you say, a bacheolar degree holder from USA is lot more confident than a bacheolar or Masters degree holder from Pakistan although in bookish knowledge both might be the same. Hardly any job requires full application of diverse and detailed education one gets. The education is acquiring knowlege specific whereas job is productivity specific. There is only one area where two equally qualified individuals, one Ph.D. from USA and another from Pakistan could perform equally and that is teaching. Outside teaching almost all jobs require various other kind of skills, which are learned through association, experience and environment rather than learning in class.

I don`t plan to discuss biases here as this story started when I found your comments extremey biased in your first post.

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Carlie, Your first post reflects your biases. If all was so well, why the hell has India 1990 onwards overtaken us fair and square in all fields?

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India started overtaking us very long ago. At the time, when indians started going abroad for higher studies. They settled themselves, they got good position in best universities and best comapnies of silicon valley. Afer 30/35 years , when they had won a lot of influence there, they started bringing projects to their homeland.

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As regards Dr. Ata, well thanks to him for his IT begins and ends with the internet bandwitdhs.
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and all other questions?

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So, you want to get up one day early in the morning and want to be surprised to know that we have become the best in the world within a single night. :)

Do you want to see the difference?
Didn`t S& T budget incxreased many times.
Aren`t we producinging more and more PhD`s every year?
What about those a dozen type of scholarships announced by the MoST and HEC on which thousands of students are going abroadfor studies?
What about bringing the foreign qualified faculty inside the coiuntry by offering them goiod salaray packages? Visit and see HEC. You will come to know a lot of new projects being launched.
What about updation and creation of newer labs in each university. I know atleast 10 new labs being established at UET and a big national library being formed there alongwith an autonomous software house which plans to generate its own revenues.

Atleast being a student and directly concerned with the opportunities for science and technoogy student, i have a lot of confidence in whathe has been doing. It is not only me but all of y batch felows , seniors and juniors are satisfied. I remember the sitation of 4/5 years before when due to laziness of clerks at MoST office, most of the scholarships used to remain un-utilised.

Imagine, The people (Almost one thousand till now) who are doing PhD abroad and will come back within next few years according to the bonds they have signed, willn`t it bring a positive change in te environment here.

Being pessimist and crying over spilt milk is useless. There is no magic stick to solve our problems. everything takes time.

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I am involved with a private sector University at the highest level and striving to make it amongst the best

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Oh! I understand. I hope you prove yourself capable enough of breaking stereotypes. If atta is declared failed because he was unable to make every university of pakistan as good as harvard in last five years, let me see how succesful you prove to be makingyour university among the best ones in the world after let`s say five years. :)


lastly,
Whenever, I got bad marks in matric or FSc or engineering, I always wept a lot and always declared that it was the teachers who marked the paper so bad or it is our ``ratta system`` for which me: the great genius is not suitable. Buss kia karaian jee! Sara system he kharab hay.
Now It seems funny to me. Everybody who is not capable enough to comete always claims that game is not fair or system is bad or I am superior than the system. After all it is difficult to accept own faults.

for malik99:
I believe that what Zainub is describing applies very well to the biomedical departments at several US universities. As I understand, you are not familiar with biomedical research. The educational environment for physical or engineering sciences as well as business and law are entirely different from that of health sciences.
Several peers of mine are postdocing at Whitehead MIT, Cornell, Northwestern, Mayo Rochester, etc. And the situation for an average graduate student there is not very educationally beneficial. Post docs benefit from the name of the lab, but sometimes that is not enough. Many very well funded labs do not want their postdocs to write for grants or design experiments, and eventually the postdoc ends up working as a technician. On the other hand, medium sized to smaller labs encourage their postdocs to write grant proposals etc, which is one of the most valuable skills a researcher can have. However, you cannot generalize this to all universities.

Charlie,

I guess the problem with the education is more systemic than anything. The
system in Pakistan (I assume, going by the Indian system ) does not encourage
critical thinking and innovation. The way the exams are set up, all one needs to
do is study by rote. The overall system in the US is unquestionably better.

Of course, this does not preclude motivated individuals from Pakistan to do
very well.

malik99 #16,

You have chosen incompatible extremes to prove your point. A more realistic
comparison would be one where you pitch, let`s say, an MIT graduate against
one from a good Engineering state school (say, University of Michigan). The brand
name disparity, even though present, wouldn`t dictate the choice there. Even
for MBA recruitments, I would assume that the there are lots of second-tier
business schools that don`t look so bad when compared to the big names.

I think the genius of the North American system is not so much that it has the
Harvards and the MITs, but that there are scores of universities that carry
out perfectly respectable research and turn out solid students.

Dear Anila, your article is too generalized to be taken seriously. I currently am studying at an undergraduate level at the University of Houston. What I will tell you is that the professors here are always very eager to try out their research on the students. Our mathematics professor would always bring in elements of his research into the lectures. Far from being uninterested in teaching, the professors are reluctant to let us go at the end of class!
This being the situation in a second tier university, I would assume that the Ivy League schools do way much better for their students. I would also think that the best test of the credibilty of anything is time. Most US schools, the better ones, have been at the top consistently. Would`nt one think that if the students were getting a rotten deal, as you say, out of these schools year after year after year, they would learn better than to go there?
And the point of college is to apply more of yourself rather than relying mostly on faculty. The libraries filled with sixty to eighty thousand books is for you, the student, to look through. Case in point is the library at UH. If one refuses to think by themselves, or refuse to apply themselves, than critical thinking is a distant dream far from reachable.
One last thing. About the high paying jobs and all. Hate to burst your bubble, but most of the students out there choose to spend a tenth or so of their lives in college is with the hope that after graduating, they will have a good job, a secure lifestyle and food on the table. Very few people go to school to be better people. And it is not the learning institutions fault that a graduate can not find a job. Atleast not to the extents you say. When an economy goes down people lose jobs, but if you look at it carefully, the most educated go the last. And I hope you are not implying that just because the economy is cyclical we might as well just sit tight and not put ourselves through the trouble of college. I dont think you are though.
The second rate MBA`s and BBA`s you are talking about come out of these make shift schools we find nowadays in Pakistan. All those little IT schools with no other intention than to make money are the ones that have created the glut in the Pakistani IT industry. If only the government had stricter standards of education, these little schools wouldnt have come up, which would have meant that an IT degree would hold more value and command a higher pay. And please dont give me this crao about the point of school being more than a better paying job. If people really believed that, religious schools and schools of thought would be the craze and not technical colleges and Ivy League busness programs.
Although I do think that your article is too generalized and lacking research and evidence, I won`t say you`re downright lying. You must have had the worst college experience. I feel for you. But all I know is after I am done with my education and I am standing at a Ferrari dealership looking at the 360 Coupe and the 360 Convertible, debating which one I wanna buy, I can just say, `hey Ahmed, you`re filthy rich bro, buy both of em`. Therefore, I pray that I can get into Stanford for my Masters degree.

#12 tahmed32
#18 sac,

i dont have twins!!
was trying to see if that sort of query would put anila zanuib to the test.
guess she doesn`t care too much about the validity of her arguments, hence no replies were made.
so apparently all she cared about was putting her views forth and bas, running away.

Part of the Pakistani mindset is that a degree entitles you to a job or a position - Consequently a degree from a prestigious institution should guarntee you a better job or a better position - Normally this is held true in countries dominated by the government culture ie ROI is never computed in evaluating an individual`s worth - rather it is
connections, impressions etc etc etc.....

In a free market economy results matter - and results matter on a ongoing basis - one is assessed based on one`s recent contributions to the bottom line not what one has accomplished in academia.... - Consequently there is great upward mobility for those who produce results .... On an average basis, the caliber of a Standford graduate is generally better ( not necessarily all the time ) than that of state uniuversity graduate... since the standford graduate had a more rigorous ciricullum, more facilities & resources and intense competition and a network of better accomplished individuals...... - Nonetheless once they enter industry they are on par ( a stanford vs a non stanford) in terms of resource availability and consequently it is up to their individual drive and resourcefulness and attitude ( thiis drives the above two) to succeed in their professional endeavors....

Therefore with an experienced individual accomplishments ( and to a certain degree networks) matter far more than academic accomplishments..... There is no value add in hiring a Stanford graduate if he produces less tha a state university graduate even if he is a fellow alumnus ..... People and companies are always attracted to star performers not star graduates.... and the two do not necessarily correlate.....

The bottom line to professional success is always a ``value add`` proposition - if one adds greater value to the tangible bottom line of an organization than he/she takes in -she/he will rise far ... if not you will end up in the garbage heap reardless of where you graduate from..... so the moral of the story is that better institutions give you a leg up competitively when entering the work force but the rest is up to you......

Anila,

Having studied at a North American University, i would have to agree with alot of what you say..indeed ``Research`` is what sets universities apart and makes one better than the other; tenure decisions are based on how many papers/books a professor has published more so than on how they teach.
Yet, research is a very important part of the university. I think the level of research a univ conducts has a link to its goals etc. Having said that, I do find it strange that Professors are not required to have a BEd or other training in the field of education itself - and yet theyre teaching at such high levels of academia

Indeed there is this ``brand``ness attached to universities. Obviously if you go to an Ivy league school, there`s nothing more ``impressive`` and if your school is God forbid a liberal arts college or univ, then youre way down there. Nonetheless these IvyLeague schools arent as bad as you paint them out to be..

Personally, when i was enrolled in a business degree, none of my professors ``engaged`` me and now that im in the education/social science faculty, most of my teachers have some sort of education-related background, i find it does make a difference.
thats a personal view though..

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Bat,

Could you elaborate? How do your social science profs. engage you as compared to your business teachers? Any observations on methodology would be helpful.

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i hope the writer wont mind my going on a tangent..

Saminasha to answer your question, for one they actually know my name! I mean when i was in a class of 100 students in Intro to accounting, i was just another number..there was no personal contact with the prof or a sense of ``belonging`` (for lack of a better word) I think to a very large extent its also the material being covered. Marxism, feminism, sociology are way more intense for me than learning how to crunch numbers and since the socialscience professors are engaged in research themselves, they offer alot of neat views. ALso they invite criticism, questioning, personal views (my first prof told me how social science borrows from feminism in that the ``personal`` becomes an important voice eg using ``I`` in research papers is ok etc) and are more accessible somehow. In business subjects, its all about logic and rationality and following steps, comprehending . Somehow socialscience subjects allow for more opinion, and introspection even, you look around and you can see stuff happening around the world that you study about - how great is that?!
But my biggest points would be - the emphases on approachability of prof, critical thinking, how they dont talk down, and they actually care about what you have to say.

Ref 12-Head #26

[I am an Indian Muslim .Since my birth , I always lived under non
muslim rulers.]

Thank Allah for your lucky stars. Would you have wanted to be an East Pakistani from 1947 thru 1972? Would you like to be a Bangladeshi under Zia-ur-Rahman, Sheikh Hasina, Khaleda Zia, etc.? Jyoti Basu starts looking good when you compare him to those turkeys.

[Like good old foreign rule with brand name religion and institution
such as st Xaviers,St Paul ,St James ,Don Bosco to go with it ...]

Again, that led you to your grad school and to the West as an honorable professional. You avoided enrolling in flight school! Aren`t you the lucky one!