Makes Me Sick At My Stomach

[ponyboy]

If you went to either, you wouldn't complain. Success beyond that is up to the individual and it doesn't matter where the [deleted] they studied. These arguments are so arbitrary.

Said in another way, the kid makes the school. The school does not make the kid.

[tristatecoog]

If you went to either, you wouldn't complain. Success beyond that is up to the individual and it doesn't matter where the [deleted] they studied. These arguments are so arbitrary.

Said in another way, the kid makes the school. The school does not make the kid.

Along those lines, I spoke with a senior recruiter who argued that there was better talent at UT-Arlington and UNT than TCU and SMU. He argued they are "diamonds in the rough" and work harder than the rich kids at the expensive private schools.

[gostangs]

well sorry but that recruiter would be in a very tiny minority. Work harder - even if true which i doubt - can only overcome so much - most of it is "wattage" - and those kids are at the better schools. Plus i was surrounded by almost 100% kids who worked hard at SMU - found very few slackers whether rich or otherwise. Our company will only look at kids from top schools - just much less risky.

And i think the scholastic environment can most definitely make the kid. It did me. Had i gone to a different school than SMU i think i would be waaaaay less successful in the things that matter in life.

[blackoutpony]

If you went to either, you wouldn't complain. Success beyond that is up to the individual and it doesn't matter where the [deleted] they studied. These arguments are so arbitrary.

Said in another way, the kid makes the school. The school does not make the kid.

Along those lines, I spoke with a senior recruiter who argued that there was better talent at UT-Arlington and UNT than TCU and SMU. He argued they are "diamonds in the rough" and work harder than the rich kids at the expensive private schools.

Was that recruiter June?

[tristatecoog]

A finance and accounting recruiter in Ft Worth. I disagreed, we argued a bit and I never went back to visit him. I'm all for the joy of finding diamonds in the rough or coaching up people but I've recruited at a lot of schools and generally the higher you go up the rankings, the higher the quality and the lower the variability. I also said I attended a public undergrad and well regarded private grad school, so I have a decent perspective that SMU/TCU folks are going to be more ambitious and have more wattage on average.

[Mustangs_Maroons]

I would never group tcu with SMU academically. Just like I wouldn't group us with Rice. It's about the same differences in student quality.

[tristatecoog]

According to collegedata stats, TCU is 100 pts lower in mid-50% SAT than SMU and SMU is 165 pts lower than Rice. Actually, UTD is closer stat-wise to SMU than TCU is.

Of course, the recruiter is based in crazy Ft Worth, so he hears about TCU quite a bit. From my recruiting at Cox and Neeley (BBA/MBA), TCU has less to choose from and is what you'd expect from a smaller, lower rated school. Less to choose from, less firepower on average and more variability in a full day's interviewing but some decent picks.

[rodrod5]

the higher US News ranking is basically everything. It is what the education community values. It helps you recruit better professors and students, which lead to everything else. US News is the metric - not AAU or anything else.

US News is a joke pretty much every one of their metrics is meaningless or easily manipulated and they HAVE BEEN successfully manipulated

the higher US News ranking is basically everything. It is what the education community values. It helps you recruit better professors and students, which lead to everything else. US News is the metric - not AAU or anything else.

I predict a long rodrod5 rebuttal to this post -- coming soon

sorry I was baited in tristatecoog is an instigator

Because you learn more around smart people. So the schools with best student quality are where you want to be.

so true anyone that has been to even a decent university and interacted with others realizes you learn a great deal outside the classroom as well as in the classroom

Speaking of UNT:

The University of North Texas has potentially overstated its financial position by $23 million since 2012 due to misreporting, according to documents released by the university. . . .

It’s the latest financial problem to affect UNT. The campus may also have to repay the state millions of dollars in a separate matter for misusing state funds to pay some employee benefits. . . .

The Deloitte report also says the university overstated how much cash it had by $5.9 million. Smith found that particularly troubling.

“What happened to the money?” he asked. The report didn’t explain, he said. . . .

Three top finance officials all resigned Feb. 13. Andrew Harris, vice president for finance and administration and Jean Bush, senior vice president for finance, resigned from the Denton campus. Carlos Hernandez, who was serving as vice president of finance at UNT Dallas but was previously controller and associate vice president for UNT Denton, also resigned that day.

http://www.dentonrc.com/local-news/local-news-headlines/20140417-unt-finances-off-by-23-million.ece

I would imagine they are in for a 50 million+ hit when it is all said and done

they are at 23 million + 5.9 million now and then there was 1.7 million the library was short when all this first started and that was just the library and there is a possibility other auxiliary enterprises like housing and dining are in the same situation

the 23 million in unaccounted for "receivables" that will never materialize and the 5.9 million in mystery "reserves" is in addition to the improper allocation of state funding towards ineligible employees that will have to be paid back along with the co-issue of in the future getting less state funding when those employees are no longer improperly counted as eligible for state funding and so state funding will be reduced

this is what happens when "city of dallas" "leadership" gets their hands on something

not too long actually. The ACT score next year will move up a point on both ends for SMU. Pretty dang close. to Emory.

Our admitted percentage will also drop below 50% - a pretty dramatic one year drop (which is a very good thing).

The California kids will tell you that all the Cali kids apply to both SMU and TCU, and everyone knows you go to SMU if you can and TCU if you have to.

acceptance % is a totally and completely meaningless and useless statistic and it says nothing and shows nothing about the type or quality of a student or students that are admitted to a university

If you went to either, you wouldn't complain. Success beyond that is up to the individual and it doesn't matter where the [deleted] they studied. These arguments are so arbitrary.

Said in another way, the kid makes the school. The school does not make the kid.

Along those lines, I spoke with a senior recruiter who argued that there was better talent at UT-Arlington and UNT than TCU and SMU. He argued they are "diamonds in the rough" and work harder than the rich kids at the expensive private schools.

stop talking to idiots

I am not saying that any university including one like UTA can't have very good students, but as I have explained in other threads it is simply stupid to believe that people that are successful in life and business would look back and say "my time at university X was completely and totally meaningless to my success and it was a total waste of my time other than having fun and partying".....and then "I think I will give university X a large sum of my money anyway so other students can waste time and effort and brain cells on my dime at university X and then after they do so I will hire them to work for me"

that just makes zero sense unless one likes to just waste money and place their livelihood into the control of incapable people based on the fact that they just like a university that they found was meaningless in their success and in their life other than having fun for 4-5-7 years

there is a reason that successful people often hire out of the universities they went to and give those schools lots of money and it is not because they found their time there useless and a waste, but they want to keep "appearances" up

[ponyboy]

What's the purpose of university? To land you a job? A lifetime of employment? Or is it to gain an education that may or not ever benefit you financially?

To me, this goes to the heart of the education versus trade school debate. I got an excellent *education* at SMU -- one that would not have been as readily available at UTD or UNT or UTA.

[rodrod5]

What's the purpose of university? To land you a job? A lifetime of employment? Or is it to gain an education that may or not ever benefit you financially?

To me, this goes to the heart of the education versus trade school debate. I got an excellent *education* at SMU -- one that would not have been as readily available at UTD or UNT or UTA.

always an interesting debate and I think that varies for the individual, but I think those that are strictly looking for "getting a job" are short changing themselves

on the flip side it is amazing the number of people that are looking at a degree to "get a job" and yet they choose the majors that are the least in demand and the least likely to have a clear path to employment upon obtainment of that particular degree

in the past (and still somewhat today) top liberal arts schools ran students through a rigorous series of aligned and semi-aligned courses that exposed them to a broad based education yet tied all of that together so they could use a broader perspective to solve real world issues

many universities today have a liberal arts degree plan that is nothing but a series of indoctrinations that only serves to see how willing and able a student is to fall in line often with stupid and failed utopian ideals that never stand the test of time in the real world.....yet there are so many liberal arts majors that are getting a degree to "help get a job" and so many of them that will be LESS capable in the real world after they get that degree than before they got it because now they are "educated" yet incapable of thinking or reasoning beyond what they are told much less that they have a very weak exposure to anything that challenges thought

and that is not to pick on all liberal arts majors because again there are universities that still offer quality liberal arts degrees and I will be the first to say that a broad exposure to a large number of areas (always including the hard sciences and math which is where many liberal arts degrees fail right from the start) can help one in the real world especially if they have been allowed to study those areas of exposure critically instead of having them indoctrinated into you

and I will also be the first to say that engineering and computer science and other degrees that have a pretty clear job path upon graduation still do not prepare you to go right out into the world and "be an engineer" especially if you only know how to regurgitate a calculus book and you have no clue about interpersonal interactions or the real world in general and even more so if you are language challenged or totally socially inept

and it will generally be larger schools that will allow the social ineptness and the language difficulties and the total lack of real world understanding to go ignored while they produce a semi-literate walking and talking calculus book

[couch 'em]

The number of people going to college for "education" and not "job skills" varies in proportion to how much money dad has to pay your tuition and buy you a nice house

[ponyboy]

You have to be intellectually curious to want an education. Most college students these day are not, a byproduct of the idea that everybody needs to go to college. The problem with "job skills" is that a great proportion of what you study in trade school is no longer useful five minutes after you graduate.

I like what rodrod has to say. It's damned hard to find a true liberal education. I had to fight many of my professors tooth and nail just to avoid indoctrination. In the end all you need is the Bible and Socrates. Throw in a little Shakespeare for variety. And Milton sums everything up nicely.

[SMU2007]

The problem today is no one bothers to consider potential jobs when they become a history (or other similar major). What exactly are you going to do with that degree to help society? Let me guess- maybe go to law school?? And please don't tell me that you "learn how to think" if you are a solid C lib arts student. Maybe the ones at the very top of the pack, but not your average person

[ponyboy]

Your first sentence is absolutely true for me. I was Philosophy and English, left SMU with a 3.0 GPA because I goofed off and drank a lot of beer, and as a result waited tables for three years after graduation. It took me forever to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Law school for one year, SMU MBA for a year, Masters in Information Engineering at SMU for a year -- and completed none of them. I ended up with a Series 7 and 63 and on the phones selling securities at Fidelity Investments in Las Colinas. From there to the corporate training department and then finally into IT, my career for the last 19 years. I've done well and live in UP and all -- a great deal of which has to do with accidental great timing in the real estate market a dozen years ago. But you gotta have a better career plan than that.

Ideally, I'd done liberal arts in exactly the same way. But then I'd done better research on life after undergrad rather than flitting from one graduate program to another. There's a lot more help out there now in that regard, I think.

I wouldn't trade my liberal arts experience for *anything* though. I'd just as soon live under a bridge than not know Paradise Lost, John Donne, Descartes, Pascal. Not a day goes by that Professor Serge Kapler isn't right beside me asking me yet another of his unanswerable questions. My SMU undergrad experience has colored and enriched my life on a daily basis, even if it might not always bring me obvious monetary or career value. There's a lot more to life than debits and credits. The liberal arts as I experienced them at SMU teach you how to live, how to use your brain and how to care for your soul. I see an enormous dearth of that in many who focused strictly on a career-based education in undergrad.

[StallionsModelT]

Good discussion. Sorry I've been bogged down and work and haven't been able to chime in.

- Any serious college advisor that tells you there is comparable talent at UNT and UTA to SMU and TCU shouldn't be allowed to call themselves an advisor. The talent gap between a school like UTA and SMU (even TCU) is enormous.

- The university is expecting to see a 15-20% increase in apps this upcoming year with the acceptance percentage around 47%. Average SAT is expected to be bumped up to 1315 as well.

- Based on early returns you can expect the number of out of state incoming students to increase yet again. We are not far from the day when SMU will be 65% or more out of state. The number of quality applicants from California, Illinois, and Florida (3 states we recruit very well in) has continued to climb.

- The only school in the state with a better median SAT/ACT will be Rice (by a pretty wide margin). We are above UT, A&M, and the rest. Eventually the hierarchy will be ELITE: Rice/SMU VERY GOOD: UT/A&M GOOD: BU/TCU/UT-D

- Our U.S. News ranking, whether a quality metric or not, is the end-all be-all for universities around the nation. Through clever marketing it has become the "go-to" for prospective parents/students/advisors when looking at schools. It is just the way it is. SMU knows this and has been vigorously working to move into the Top 50. We hope to be move up to 52-50 in this next publication.

- Research. Research. Research. Get used to hearing about it b/c SMU is throwing some serious resources (both financial and otherwise) into making SMU a premiere research institution. It won't happen overnight but its the #1 priority of the university after the Unbridled Campaign wraps up in 2015.

Hope this helps.