Nobel Laureates by undergraduate institution

Same ****, second verse. We're not even on this list, actually (although it might only include schools with 3 or more). Who is? The only "surprise" in the top ten might be Swathmore, 1800 students and all, probably because its too small for many folks to know its a thing.

Harvard
Columbia
MIT
Berkeley
Chicago
Yale
NYU
Cal Tech
Cornell
Swathmore

High achievers tend to go to certain schools over others. I'd be so bold to say that is a FACT.

I do know we have two Nobel Laureates on our faculty. One has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and the other from Harvard and Connecticut.

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Why do some Aggies treat "academic elite" like it's undesirable?

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Thanks Cecil. My thought exactly. Academic elite got there by being good in their field, whether teaching or research. I was brought up to value both. Why so many Ags cannot see that is beyond me. Actually, i suppose it is the academic elite bogeyman again.

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I put the academic elite in quotes because if those professors really were any good in their field they wouldn't have been afraid of Bonfire.

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I hear what you're saying and I do value the extracurricular experience I had at Texas A&M.

If anything, I think A&M has one thing going for it- location. No matter our student population, our entrance standards- we are in a college town and I think that does a university a lot of good as far as being able to more fully mold its students into well-rounded citizens.

I hope that simple fact can forever help A&M keep up much of that school pride you and I treasure.

But a little anecdote of my own- I'm in an elite graduate program with some academic elites- and one of the top GPAs in our class wears his Walton Loads t-shirt half the week. I also consider myself to have quite a bit of Aggie spirit.

I think there are a lot of Duke basketball fans out there that would say you can be smart and go act a little, um, "Crazy" about your school.

We're out there. A&M has to corner the market on us, though.

Now, maybe we can't be Harvard and keep up the school spirit as is, but we're also probably never going to be Harvard and that's OK. There is probably a happy balance out there that'd meet a lot of our wants for Texas A&M.

I don't think we have to trade academic rigor for tradition. A&M just has to make sure they sell both together.

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I will concede that growth without adequate infrastructure or proportional staff increases is dumb. But if people were up in arms over staffing shortages, I'm sure there would be a thread for that.

Oh, and gratz on the grad school Ranger. Seriously, go read the Bell Curve. The fact Baylor didn't send anyone to the interviews with you has as much to do with your high level accomplishments and the smaller population size of their school ( and the correspondingly shorter tails on their distribution curve ).

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I think part of the reason people don't like the growth is the fact that there will be staffing shortages. It wouldn't be ideal, but if the admin wanted a huge enrollment burst and was feeding money into infrastructure and tenure-track faculty, that would be a different story.

Also thanks, I'll give it a read. I will say that larger state schools discussed elsewhere on this thread had significantly higher representation on my upper tier grad school visits: at MIT there was one of us from each of Rice, tu and A&M (me), but that was the whole representation of Texas. UVA had about 4 people, Berkeley maybe 5, and then of course Caltech, etc had 5+. My experience has been that upper tier students at TAMU are world class, but the spread is huge.

Also happy to answer any other questions if people want perspective from a recent graduate.

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the name of a school means less than you think.

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At the top end, that's not correct. And, as has been mentioned, in many professional fields, that's not correct.

We either want "Texas A&M University" to mean something academically, or we don't.

If "the name of the school means less than you think" why do we care about where we go to school at all? Why is there any such thing as school pride or school spirit? Surely rooting for athletic teams isn't the foundation for all school loyalty? I truly wish Aggies cared as much about this sort of thing as they do football. Really, I truly do.

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Nobel Laureates by undergraduate institution

Same ****, second verse. We're not even on this list, actually (although it might only include schools with 3 or more). Who is? The only "surprise" in the top ten might be Swathmore, 1800 students and all, probably because its too small for many folks to know its a thing.

Harvard
Columbia
MIT
Berkeley
Chicago
Yale
NYU
Cal Tech
Cornell
Swathmore

High achievers tend to go to certain schools over others. I'd be so bold to say that is a FACT.

I do know we have two Nobel Laureates on our faculty. One has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and the other from Harvard and Connecticut.

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Im in the vilified by the govt top 1%, but I'm not a "high achiever" by your definition. Guess I should have gone to tu.

Jeff, that's not his point. But you know that.

A&M has been on the list that some "high achievers" choose to attend. I'd like to keep it that way, or improve it.

Cecil - this thread has no valid point. It's full of bogeymen, strawmen, and name calling.

I got my degree in Petroleum Engineering. I do not understand the hatred by some here for the "trades". In some respects almost everything is a trade. I know lots of people who are in the 1% who are in a trade. To call us hayseeds because we are not sucking off taxpayer dollars doing "research" (and I use that term research loosely) .....well I'm just SMH. It doesn't make you a bigger person when you look down on others.

The only person who has been right on this thread is the one who said that someone needs to porn blast this thread into oblivion.

I expect you guys will continue to posts your bogeymen, strawmen and name calling. I will continue to donate money every year as I've done for the past 33 years. We will see which path makes a difference for Texas A&M.

I'm done with this thread.

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Cecil - this thread has no valid point. It's full of bogeymen, strawmen, and name calling.

I got my degree in Petroleum Engineering. I do not understand the hatred by some here for the "trades". In some respects almost everything is a trade. I know lots of people who are in the 1% who are in a trade. To call us hayseeds because we are not sucking off taxpayer dollars doing "research" (and I use that term research loosely) .....well I'm just SMH. It doesn't make you a bigger person when you look down on others.

The only person who has been right on this thread is the one who said that someone needs to porn blast this thread into oblivion.

I expect you guys will continue to posts your bogeymen, strawmen and name calling. I will continue to donate money every year as I've done for the past 33 years. We will see which path makes a difference for Texas A&M.

I'm done with this thread.

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Jeff,

Nobody is looking down their nose at you, you seem like an intelligent guy. We just want to make A&M the very best it can be. As was pointed out to us in our senior ethics class, engineering is a profession, not a trade. I have the utmost respect for people in trades (and know some incredibly wealthy plumbers and builders), and I actually think that more people need to skip a 4 year university and learn to be an electrician or a mechanic. But with that said, there's no reason to come to A&M and pay $80-100k to be an electrician when cheaper and more tailored options are out there which afford you a good income.

As for research, I know there are some people who think it's a waste. But lots of inventions and businesses are spawned in University labs, and for every $1 invested in scientific research, the economy gets back $7. Research is an investment in the future, and I promise there is considerable concern by most researchers about not wasting taxpayer dollars on silly projects.

I respect your opinions, so if you would like to discuss anything else, I would be more than happy to.

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It doesn't make you a bigger person when you look down on others.

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I agree.

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. To call us hayseeds because we are not sucking off taxpayer dollars doing "research" (and I use that term research loosely) .....well I'm just SMH.

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Well, except researchers. I guess it's OK to look down on them...

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Cecil - this thread has no valid point. It's full of bogeymen, strawmen, and name calling.

I got my degree in Petroleum Engineering. I do not understand the hatred by some here for the "trades". In some respects almost everything is a trade. I know lots of people who are in the 1% who are in a trade. To call us hayseeds because we are not sucking off taxpayer dollars doing "research" (and I use that term research loosely) .....well I'm just SMH. It doesn't make you a bigger person when you look down on others.

The only person who has been right on this thread is the one who said that someone needs to porn blast this thread into oblivion.

I expect you guys will continue to posts your bogeymen, strawmen and name calling. I will continue to donate money every year as I've done for the past 33 years. We will see which path makes a difference for Texas A&M.

I'm done with this thread.

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What's ironic about this post is that it contains both strawman and boogeyman arguments in the second paragraph, and it "looks down on others" doing research

It is quite common that field guys don't understand or appreciate the academics that keep them alive and working.

All of the people on here arguing that the name of the school doesn't mean anything, and it's all about intelligence and work ethic...

I would love to see the look on their faces if their son or daughter got accepted to both Harvard and Texas Tech, and told them they were going to Texas Tech.

"Well gosh dad, lots of my friends are going there, and it's like you said, name doesn't matter!"

Yeah, I would like to see that, too!

What I don't understand is the number of Aggies who seem to be either afraid of or jealous of or look down upon elite education. It's almost a "reverse snootiness".

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elite
[ih-leet, ey-leet]

noun
1. (often used with a plural verb) the choice or best of anything considered collectively, as of a group or class of persons.

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Nobody is saying that you can't be successful without a name brand degree on your resume. Of course intelligence and work ethic will be good predictors of success.

But a person with the name brand degree from MIT probably has an easier road to the top than a Southwest Waco State grad with similar intelligence and work ethic.

Why wouldn't you want to go to a school that is known for admitting and graduating intelligent, hard working, high achievers?

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The more common something is, the less prestigious it is.

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Good thing we didn't have this attitude when I went to A&M or else most of you never would have been admitted. Explain to me why 29,000 students in 1982 was ok and 58,000 students in 2015 (double in size in 33 years) is ok, but 80,000 students (a 40% increase) is absolute doom for us if it occurs in 2030? What if we slow that to 2040, would that be acceptable?

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If Harvard, founded in 1636, had kept increasing in size proportionally to the growth of the country around it, it would now have hundreds of thousands of students and look more like a giant military base than a college campus.

A university reaches a certain point where size overweighs the quality of student experience, even if you do hire faculty to keep up with enrollment (which the goons running A&M are not doing). We've already had to give up graduation speeches, which should be a huge wake-up call. This is why most school districts started out with one high school and then built other high schools - it just didn't make for a nice campus to keep making the original high school bigger.

At what point will we have to start tearing down the small, historic classroom buildings like Nagle or Bolton to built more giant behemoths like Harrington or O&M? Or send more and more students to West Campus or some new, farther-flung campus we haven't even built yet? How many of our future students will ever have the experience of a class in the Academic Building? When does the MSC get overrun, or has it already? (It already looks more like a high school commons than it used to.) And get ready for ever-more-massive parking lots and parking garages around campus, worsening traffic in College Station, more freeways, etc., etc.

When your alumni are demanding that the school's athletic teams be elite but calling you a snob if you say the education should be elite, you're in trouble....

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Amen. And amen.

The High school expansion vs building of additional high schools in an ISD as an excellent analogy for how population growth should be handled.

So what if the population has grown exponentially in Texas over the last 100 years, how many colleges have been founded in that same time period?

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When your alumni are demanding that the school's athletic teams be elite but calling you a snob if you say the education should be elite, you're in trouble....

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Nobody is saying we shouldn't have a rigorous and challenging academic environment.

But when current students or recent grads with little or no experience producing results in a capitalist economy start advocating for policies that would never admit the majority of our hardworking and successful living alumni, we're also in trouble.

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There are plenty of wealthy and highly successful Aggies who never could have handled a rigorous and challenging academic environment, starting with Rick Perry and his low 2's GPA. That doesn't mean we should make their college experience the paradigm for future university education in our state.

Some of the richest Texans of the last century had no education at all. People like H.L. Hunt and Hugh Roy Cullen just went out and dug oil wells until they struck it rich, and had an inborn knack for running a business. So what does that tell us, that we don't need higher education at all? More is taught at a university than how to make money, and society benefits from other skills besides running a successful oil business.

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But when current students or recent grads with little or no experience producing results in a capitalist economy start advocating for policies that would never admit the majority of our hardworking and successful living alumni, we're also in trouble.

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How about when an Aggie approaching his 40th reunion who's been in business for 35 years advocates for those policies?

Some of yall sound like Baylor alums. Texas A&M is not now and never has been elite. Its a great school, but if you think its elite you are cherry picking where you pull your information from.

Even at current standards, or standards 10 years ago, most people who want to attend Texas A&M can. There's nothing elite about that.

Yes, A&M has absurd research grants, but that really doesn't improve the quality of education undergrads receive.

In fact, the only elite school I can think of off the top of my head is Virginia.

Go ahead and tell me why I'm stupid.

Good point. No one wants to make A&M into Stanford.

However there is no reason whatsoever we can't approach the academics of Virginia or Berkeley.

None.

And to make it football related, we've never been elite in football either. Does that mean we shouldn't aspire to that?

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Good point. No one wants to make A&M into Stanford.

However there is no reason whatsoever we can't approach the academics of Virginia or Berkeley.

None.

And to make it football related, we've never been elite in football either. Does that mean we shouldn't aspire to that?

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Good point.

25x25 is the academic version of Coach Fran.

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Some of yall sound like Baylor alums. Texas A&M is not now and never has been elite. Its a great school, but if you think its elite you are cherry picking where you pull your information from.

Even at current standards, or standards 10 years ago, most people who want to attend Texas A&M can. There's nothing elite about that.

Yes, A&M has absurd research grants, but that really doesn't improve the quality of education undergrads receive.

In fact, the only elite school I can think of off the top of my head is Virginia.

Go ahead and tell me why I'm stupid.

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Umm...so...I'm going to avoid the troll bait aspects of your comment. A&M limits admissions to roughly top 10% of any high school that ranks plus top 25% (or equivalent) who also have an SAT Critical Reading score of 600 above, a Math score of 600 or above, and a combined minimum of 1300. That 1300 is roughly 89th percentile (which means 89% scored lower or equal) which means roughly 1 in 10 students qualify for A&M either by ranking OR by SAT/ACT. Note that those are MINIMUM requirements and many students exceed those minimums.

There are other pathways including the auto-admit from various community colleges based on curriculum, transferability of credits (must qualify for transferring 24 hours TO A&M) and GPA of 3.0 or better. Those are being admitted because they've demonstrated the ability to succeed at the college level (I'll accept that it's not the same as A&M and they still have to complete roughly three years of coursework in their major to graduate.)

The most interesting effect of the change in admission policy is that Old Army Ags are now having a tougher time getting their offspring in. Which is kind of the opposite of some of the private "elite" colleges where politically connected parents and wealthy alumni (old or new money) often receive preferential admission treatment. (And perhaps Texas until they seated their new president??) So in many ways A&M is now a stronger academic institution with respect to requirements for entry to the point that "legacy" admits are based solely on academics.

As far as the rest of the claim? A&M gets referred to as a "cult" by many of my friends that chose to go to other schools. I understand why they say that and I can understand why from the outside looking in it's difficult to understand and from the inside looking out it's difficult to explain. But there is one thing I assure you is elite about A&M: our network of former students.

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But there is one thing I assure you is elite about A&M: our network of former students.

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Precisely. So why are some so scared of approaching the "elite" of public school academics?

How about when an Aggie approaching his 40th reunion who's been in business for 35 years advocates for those policies?


I am saddened upon reading of your advocacy......yet I respect that we have stumbled thru the years in our own shoes, and our opinions could differ.

Well, we Nuclear Engineers always were the snooty ones to the C.E.s, right?

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The most interesting effect of the change in admission policy is that Old Army Ags are now having a tougher time getting their offspring in. Which is kind of the opposite of some of the private "elite" colleges where politically connected parents and wealthy alumni (old or new money) often receive preferential admission treatment. (And perhaps Texas until they seated their new president??) So in many ways A&M is now a stronger academic institution with respect to requirements for entry to the point that "legacy" admits are based solely on academics.

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What do you think of A&M closing the door on "legacy" admits? I have heard a lot of stories of kids that are (would be) 4th generation Ags that have good grades and good ACT/SAT scores but do not get in. Usually these same kids are just on the outside of the auto 10%.

I have another story where friend's kids who made near perfect scores on the ACT and SAT and were admitted. Their High School grades were average to a little above average. One was an A&M legacy the other was not.

All of these kids ended up at Alabama, LSU, South Carolina, Kentucky, Auburn.

I wonder how much A&M takes in on an annual basis on the $75 application fee?

Just because freshman admissions are limited (im not sure about your top 10% number, because that's a farce) there's plenty of ways into A&M for people who want in. Its... not hard.

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Yes, A&M has absurd research grants, but that really doesn't improve the quality of education undergrads receive.

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I guess the parents and alums who have told me over the years about the value of their (or their kids') undergrad research experiences on my NSF and NIH-funded projects must all be wrong.

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The most interesting effect of the change in admission policy is that Old Army Ags are now having a tougher time getting their offspring in. Which is kind of the opposite of some of the private "elite" colleges where politically connected parents and wealthy alumni (old or new money) often receive preferential admission treatment. (And perhaps Texas until they seated their new president??) So in many ways A&M is now a stronger academic institution with respect to requirements for entry to the point that "legacy" admits are based solely on academics.

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What do you think of A&M closing the door on "legacy" admits? I have heard a lot of stories of kids that are (would be) 4th generation Ags that have good grades and good ACT/SAT scores but do not get in. Usually these same kids are just on the outside of the auto 10%.

I have another story where friend's kids who made near perfect scores on the ACT and SAT and were admitted. Their High School grades were average to a little above average. One was an A&M legacy the other was not.

All of these kids ended up at Alabama, LSU, South Carolina, Kentucky, Auburn.

I wonder how much A&M takes in on an annual basis on the $75 application fee?

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Legacy inherently discriminates against underserved populations. It isn't really up for discussion. We started out with a skewed population and that leads the legacy to be skewed in that direction.

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But there is one thing I assure you is elite about A&M: our network of former students.

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Precisely. So why are some so scared of approaching the "elite" of public school academics?

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