If the average time to graduation ran more than 10 semesters I would be concerned, but when it is less, I don’t think there’s much anyone can do.

As per the U and Y – I’ve taught at the U law school and I’ve reviewed a lot of resumes from both schools – and worked with a lot of externs at both places – and I can’t find any qualitative difference. But, again, that is anecdotal (although Chris Grant hates anonymous internet identities from his previous post, so for the record my last name is Young).

One issue I’ve seen, and I think both schools need to address, is the time it takes to graduate from both the Y and the U (undergrad). Of course, the mission skews things, but it is still generally taking a LOT of students five years of school to graduate, rather than four. That comes from raising a family, working full-time and so forth (I think the stats are worse at the U than the Y, especially because the U is known more as a commuter school), but I think both schools can definitely improve on this. How do we encourage students to graduate sooner, rather than staying in school longer? Any thoughts? This might be a dead posting by now, but it is something I know the U is definitely trying to work on and possibly something that the Y should be slightly concerned about as well.

Of course both questions hinge on what “quality� means. If quality in the first question is defined in terms of GPAs, ACT scores, or other correlating factors that deal with the way we usually view intelligence, then I believe the answer is, “It’s about the same�. In other words, both places have a large number of intelligent people. But if we expand “quality� to refer to other capitals such as social capital, economic capital, and cultural capital, then I think the Ivies have us beat. And in some respects there’s only so much we can do to compete with that. In my experience the main difference between BYU undergrads (take even the most intelligent 20%) and Ivy undergrads is the amount of resources at their disposal. The mindset of most Ivy undergrads tends to be more global than those of BYU. I think this stems from the family environments they are often raised in—places where these other capitals tend to coincide with intellect.

I’m not as interested in the second question, but I would merely point out here that much of the same theory applies. You can label the Ivies “smoke and mirrors�, but in the end you have to admit that there are benefits in going to the Ivies that extend beyond intellectual cultivation. Social capital is increased because of the perceived value of the Ivies, economic capital is increased (assuming you don’t rack up a massive debt, which is difficult to avoid) due to the higher earning potential by having an Ivy degree; and I’m going to have to say that cultural capital is increased as well by meeting some of the most interesting (and non-Mormon) minds in the world.

I’m not bashing Utah students. I was one myself (PhD, 1991). What I was doing was presenting the statistics that paint a different picture than your anecdotes. What stock should be placed in the anecdotes of anonymous Internet entities anyway?

On the low-end, maybe, but on the high-end, definitely not. Having clerked with both Y and L grads, I can guarantee that the vast majority of incoming Y students are not, on average, “brighter” than their counterparts at the U. Anecdotally, that is definitely true – talking with profs who have taught at both places, they have said that both groups have been extremely comparable. And talking to one prof who taught at Yale, Columbia, and GW, who now teaches at the U law school – he states that the U students as a group acquitted themselves quite comparably with the students he taught at other schools. So before you start bashing U students as “not as bright,” get your facts a little bit straighter.

BYU’s median GPA is 3.3; Utah’s is 3.15.
BYU’s median LSAT is 164; Utah’s is 160. (161 is the 25th percentile at BYU; 162 is the 75th percentile at Utah.)

Thus, grades are higher at the Y, but their incoming students are also brighter.

What do ya’ll think about the US News rankings that just came out?

And, as per Kool Aid Drinker’s post – I’ll actually second his discussion about the grade inflation. I work for a federal judge and have generally been stunned at the higher GPAs from Y law students than U law students – within the same percentile (I don’t know if the U law curve is just lower or what, but it is really interesting to view these resumes). We generally get around the top 50-60 resumes from both Y law and U law and the Y is generally more inflated. But, that might be purely anecdotal (of course, my judge comments on it every time we see it, and he has been a judge for quite a while).

An aside for any law students – once you are in law school, don’t put your LSAT score on your resume, unless the employer or judge asks for it – no one wants to see that anymore and it is absolutely worthless to have it on there (and actually might ding you).

BYU does a reasonably good job of educating people. Why on earth can’t it convince them to do something other than fund PhD programs, most of which probably shouldn’t exist in the first place?

Jim, of course you are right that BYU admits a wider range of students than some of the elite schools we have been comparing it with. One of the weird things about the way we usually compare schools is that we compare student achievements, but we don’t ask how much the students would have achieved if they had gone somewhere else. So it is usually not clear how much the school is actually doing to boost student achievement, or if they are just good at getting people to attend who would achieve a lot anyway. It would be really interesting to know how many students who would not have been admitted, or would not have had the cash to go to Yale or Swarthmore, go to BYU and then go on to top grad programs.

On the gender issues I am a little anxious since this is my thread, but I think I may have escaped the brunt of Kristine’s criticism? Certainly when I said it is hard to combine family and grad school I had in mind women and men both. At Notre Dame though I knew perhaps four women in the PhD program who were married when they started, and three of them became mothers about the time they finished coursework, as per Rosalynde’s formula. I was impressed!

I see two big differences between how hard it is to start a family while in grad school in humanities versus sciences. One is the money you get while in school (at ND friends in science seemed to get about 150% of my stipend from philosophy), and the other, bigger in my view, is the prospects after you finish. Yeah, having a family in grad school is easy if one parent stays home and you aren’t worried about money. But if you take on debt because the non-student stays with the kids rather than earning $, and then you really don’t know if you will get a job, let alone when . . . that strategy starts to seem very dicey! I think it is fair to say that PhDs in science, engineering, etc. can pretty well rest assured of a job that will pay the bills comfortably, and PhDs in humanities cannot.

Rosalynde, how is this for a scenario: Husband gets philosophy PhD while wife is home with kids. After six years of this, he goes on the job market, comes up empty, and they realize if he tries again in a year and gets one, it probably will be somewhere they don’t want to live. They decide rather than keep fighting that battle, she will go to med school because by the time she is done, she will be much more employable (and the debt incurred for his schooling will presumably be dwarfed by hers). Med school as the improvised solution to a humanities track turned south! Yikes! Suddenly those pleasant years living the contemplative life in grad school start to seem a lot less cushy. For most people I knew, of course, the abort path was law school (much shorter), and many of them took it before finishing the degree, let alone spending a stressful year being disappointed on the job market. Less painful, but in order to avoid that, they came away without a PhD, or without having even tried to make a career of it. I’m elated, of course, that your experience was better!