0rthodontist said:
Well, what I would think it is is the students. Classes at the top schools can and do cover more because the students are more capable of handling it. Courses at lesser schools feel kind of like used hand-me-downs. For example, one course I took last semester was the equivalent of a course taught five or ten years ago at MIT, except we only went 2/3 as far in the book and probably didn't go into as much depth on what we did do.
I suppose that is true. I took a differential equations course last summer, which was supposedly equivalent to MIT's DE course and while my class covered almost all of the same material, many topics were covered in much more depth in MIT's course. (I watched the video lecture on MIT's site). For example, concepts like convolution at my school were just explanations of what convolution is, whereas the MIT course covered some very interesting applications of convolution. Also, MIT's DE course covered some concepts that weren't covered until I took adv. eng. math (the next class beyond DE) at my school. This could possibly be due to my DE course being in the summer, so it was a bit condensed, and the fact that I had a professor that moved a bit slower than the other DE professors (still a great professor though.)
I will agree though, that a more prestigious school will have students that are more focused and interested in learning what they are studying and enagaging in interesting conversations about academic subject matter outside of class, whereas students at a lesser school might only be there because they are forced to be there, or because they simply want a "good job." I could be wrong about this though, too.
Sometimes I feel like I chose the wrong school to study electrical engineering, because most people don't seem to care at all about engineering and are just going to school to get a high paying job. I was hoping for there to be more students genuinely interested in the subject matter, and less people gonig solely for the purpose of getting a job. I considered for a brief while transferring to UM - ann arbor (#5 EE program in the country...I am from Michigan, so UM - ann arbor was a natural choice) and was under the impression that students there would have a different attitude, but after talking to some people there that are in the EE program, it seems that UM students are no different. They perform in class, but they are not genuinely interested in the subject matter enough to have insightful and thought provoking conversations outside of class about the subject. This is all somewhat depressing to me, really. It seems people studying physics have a different attitude than engineers, however. I am beginning to feel like the issue for me is the major I chose, and not as much the students. Don't get me wrong, EE is extremely interesting to me, but I was hoping for my classmates to be equally interested.
All in all, I think the major affects the quality of the student more than the institution...in addition, for ugrad, I believe a smaller teaching-centric atmospheere is more beneficial...however, for grad school a bigger, more prestigious research school is a much better choice.