カリフォルニアドリーム

前にも書きましたが　IVY、Stanford, Dukeなどは　２０％が　有名人のコネ
２０％がアジア人以外のマイノリティ、10％がスポーツ選手、２０％が
一芸に優れた人（チェスのチャンピオン、数学世界大会上位）残りの３０％が　
成績優秀者となります。

授業はレベルが低く卒業率は　ほぼ95％です。

（５％から９％は卒業できない学生がいますがこれはスポーツ選手が中退、または
異常性格者を考慮するとほぼ１００％です。）

これは州立大学　UCLA,Michigan,Berkeley、UNCなどが　60％しか
卒業できないのと比べると全く対照的です。

また　IVY＋Stanford、Dukeは成績のインフレが起こっています。

ハーバード大学の　マンスフィールド教授が就職向けと大学向けで２つの成績を
学生に渡したことで有名になりました。

州立大学の連中は逆にいくら頑張ってもB－しかとれないということも起こっています。

問題は　就職側、またMedical,Law、Business School側からみるとHarvardで何も勉強しなかった学生が成績優勝となり社会から認められ、州立で頑張った生徒が　成績が悪いということで不当な扱いを受けることになります。

大学院のうち　医学部、Law,　Businessは 職業スクールといわれ将来の金持ちに
なるエリートコースであるだけに　どこの大学を出たかという　ことがテストと共に
重要になります。　つまり有名人の子息は父親のコネでハーバードに行き
そこで遊びまくります。　成績は甘いのでそれでもB以上がとれ後はテスト対策の
予備校に通うことになります。
上記３つ以外の大学院は生徒の質の方が重要で　Harvard等は自分の大学生より州立大学の
学生を　評価し合格させる傾向があります。
（科学、工学など業績を上げる必用があるため。）

従って　世界で有名な発明はHarvard、Stanford学部出身者から出ていないはずです。

下記はStanford卒業生の告白です。　長いですが。。。（私も家内もSにはお世話に
なったのでコメントをすることは無駄ではないはずです。）

I went to Stanford as an Undergraduate in the late 1980's, majoring in one of the engineering departments...

And it wasn't worth it. I view my diploma as a receipt, but nothing more. It's not as marketable as some propagandists would like you to believe. In fact, during this past summer's graduation ceremony, a number of students actually spelled out the word "Unemployed!" with pillows laid down on the football field, visible for all to see.

Let me give you another example. For those of you who don't know, Donald Knuth is known in the academic community as the "Father of Computer Science," and has been at Stanford since the late 1960's. He's well known for writing the "Bible" of computer science, "The Art of Computer Programming".

Yet even though I took over half-a-dozen core courses in Computer Science at Stanford, I never ONCE heard the name Donald Knuth, I never SAW the guy in person (or even in a photograph until I looked on his website many years after I graduated), and I have never read his books. "The Art of Computer Programming" books were never part of the curriculum.

But that's typical of Stanford: Pay a bunch of professors a lot of money to do very little teaching. In fact, professors generally have to teach only one-quarter (10 weeks total) of classes a year, and that's not even a full ten week period, because the lectures last all of 3 hours TOTAL in the week, and usually a couple of office hours placed at the most inconvenient times. This means that students are paying professors to devote 20% of a typical 40-hour work week to undergraduate matters, with the remaining 80% left to their own discretion. And for many professors, this schedule is in effect for only about 20% of the year (10 weeks out of 52 weeks in a year); the remaining 80% of the year is left to their discretion, such as doing research, consulting to other companies, doing lectures at other campuses, or running their own companies. (A rare handful of professors do teach for two quarters.) To add insult to injury, I had professors who skipped out on their office hours.

Most professors don't grade papers, and leave it to the Teaching Assistants. This is like writing code without a computer in front of you, and never bothering to run the program on ANY computer. How do you know if your program works? How do the professors know if their teaching is any good? How many of Stanford's Nobel Prize winning faculty attended Stanford as an undergraduate? I don't think a single one.

Most of the techie-Teaching Assistants didn't go to Stanford either. I had guys from Purdue, UCLA, Dartmouth, Amherst, U. of Maryland, U. of Texas, and of course, the ubiquitous University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Several profs got their undergrad degrees from Berkeley. I recently found out that the Staff instructor for an important core class, spanning two-quarters (20 weeks), had not even earned a Master's degree at the time he was teaching! He was a graduate student who only had a Bachelor's degree. He had practically zero teaching experience, and it showed. The poor quality of that class wasn't just my imagination, as that class has since been discontinued and is no longer offered, and that guy doesn't teach anymore anywhere in the world. But such vindication is small consolation. It was a waste of money and time that can never be recovered. Other core classes have even been taught by currently-matriculated UNDER-graduates. It amazes me that Stanford gets away with it, especially when most HIGH SCHOOLS require that their teachers have a master's degree and have passed state licensing exams.

In fact, some classes are so bad that Stanford undergraduates actually take courses at the nearby De Anza Community College and Foothill Community College. That's right: Community Colleges. Don't laugh -- if you read the book on the history of the Apple Macintosh, "Insanely Great", you'll find that the hardware engineer attended one of those community colleges (I don't remember which). And in my Freshman year, I knew a political science major who transferred from a California junior college into Stanford. As an out-of-stater, I was shocked, although I have learned that California's junior colleges have a higher standard than the rest of the nation. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder: Why am I paying so much money?