(11-13-2018 10:22 AM)Bogg Wrote: (11-13-2018 09:52 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: Schools choose their mission based on their quality.
Yea, that's not the case. It's almost like the people who do this sort of thing professionally recognized as such and broke different categories out for exactly this reason.
I'm guessing that you think quality means "a quality undergraduate education." But that is only a small part of being a quality university.
A university is a triangle of undergraduate education, graduate education, and research. Each side reinforces the others. Research lets you put cutting-edge experts in front of the students. Grad students provide cheap skilled labor. Undergraduates are how research results are passed on to society at large.
A teaching-only institution has professors whose knowledge is 2-3 decades out of date. Students may like their professors, but they don't even realize that the information they're given in their senior year electives is hopelessly outdated.
The primary function of teaching-only institutions is to verify to employers that this student was smart enough to get into college and hard working enough to pass classes. The actual material learned in those classes is irrelevant. Goldman Sachs will hire a 4.0 history major from Dartmouth because Dartmouth only lets smart people in, not because that person learned anything from their university.
High-quality teaching schools are just really high-quality admissions departments.
True, some schools stress different legs of the triangle more than others.
For example: Notre Dame chooses to spend more resources on undergraduate education. Nevertheless, Notre Dame produces high level research, ranking just ahead of Ohio State and Michigan State in the Leiden Rankings (which measures # of highly cited papers published) when adjusting for size. It also ranks 90th in number of doctorates awarded, just ahead of Rice and Case Western.