kitchen table math, the sequel: the competition

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Anonymous said...: If C *had* to go to Stanford, or his life would be over, competition like this would be terrifying.

There are, however, schools other than Stanford at which one can get quite a fine undergraduate education. I suspect that there are tens of thousands of slots at these schools.

There probably aren't tens of thousands of high school students like the one in this post. So ... which schools are acceptable?

My list would probably start with these:

Stanford
Cal Tech
MIT
Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Brown
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
UPenn
Cal
UCLA
Michigan
Vanderbuilt
Duke
Notre Dame
CMU
Georgetown
USC
Tufts
Boston College
UTA

I actually am not convinced that one gets a better *undergraduate* education at the Ivys than at many other schools that are more focused on teaching and less on research.

To the list above can certainly be added less well known colleges like UCSB (my alma mater) and UC Davis and University of Santa Clara. I suspect that there are another 100 or so colleges where one can get a quite fine undergraduate education.

Is getting into *one* of these such a problem?

-Mark Roulo; July 30, 2008 at 7:26 PM

kitchen table math, the sequel