Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

I’m back from the almost all-Ivy tour of colleges in the Northeast with my son Max. We started in Boston and ended up in Philadelphia, visiting BU, MIT, Harvard, Yale, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, and Penn along the way.

It was interesting being on the consumer end–as opposed to the professor end–of the university business, but it wasn’t a pretty picture. All of the tours and admission sessions were impersonal, with crowds of 100 or more people in each session. Only Penn provided an adequate number of tour guides for the size of the group, marching out an impressive army of almost 20 tour guides. MIT tried to cover a group of a 100 or so people with a single student. Most of the tours went to 4 or 5 sites and filled up the time with material that repeated the repetitious info sessions (Penn was a notable exception with a thoughtful tour that covered the length and breadth of campus). The information sessions were uniformly tedious, providing essentially the same information as all the other info sessions (need blind admissions, need-based financial aid, faculty have office hours, most classes taught by faculty, etc.).

One interesting thing I learned was that the Ivies use a system of credit “units” or “half courses” in place of semester or quarter hours, and this system appears to mask a significant amount of degree duration deflation compared to degree duration at most public universities. For example, Harvard’s system requires 32 half-courses for graduation. Math half courses meet three times a week for an hour over the course of a 13 week semester. English and history courses meet between two and three times a week for an hour. Doing the arithmetic, a Harvard undergrad in the liberal arts takes somewhere between 832 and 1248 contact hours of instruction over the course of his or her four years. Yale boasts that its students take 36 units to graduate, but Yale’s academic calendar is somewhat shorter; moreover, a quick sampling reveals that many Yale course meet only two hours a week.

Comparing these figures to a public university such as the University of Illinois is instructive. A liberal arts major at the UIUC is required to take 120 credit hours, which roughly correspond to 120 contact hours, over the course of a 14.5-week semester. This totals 1740 contact hours. In other words, the Harvard grad, if my calculation is correct, is supposed to be in class only 48-72% of the total of the UIUC grad. Perhaps the Harvard student is so much better that he or she can learn 40 to 100 percent faster than the UIUC student to make up for the difference.

Harvard charges tuition and student fees totaling roughly $30k (the other Ivies are comparable), and lets assume that the average student has 1000 contact hours of coursework. The average Harvard student is paying $120 per contact hour of instruction. At that rate, a Harvard student could hire a personal tutor at an equivalent annual salary of nearly $250k/year.

Nonetheless, these elite institutions become more and more popular and selective each year, although if the duration deflation continues, it would be more appropriate to call them labeling clubs than schools. And which schools top Max’s current list? Yale and Penn.