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mwengler comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion
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I attended Rutgers part time when I was a full time employee of bell labs. The graduate physics classes were excellent, rigorous, well taught, well designed, and hard. I have no particular recollection of any parking fees or atheletic activity. Since that time, I proceeded to get a PhD from Caltech and teach for 8 years at University of Rochester. In my opinion, informed by my experience, Rutgers is categorically NOT an educational scam.
The company I work for has hired many engineers who have been educated at Rutgers. There is no evidence that Rutgers is a scam, either in the interview process for these engineers, or their subsequent performance on the job.
The quality of undergraduate and graduate experiences at the same university can be dramatically different, since their funding sources (and thus their incentive structures) are separate. It's possible that Rutgers is broken as an undergrad institution, but not as a graduate one.
(Rutgers also has a good reputation as a graduate math department.)
It's also possible that there's a division between STEM and everything else. Especially, there aren't many term papers or essays being written for math-heavy courses, and so I can safely assume the Shadow Scholar wouldn't have run across their students.
Thanks. When did you attend Rutgers?
One data point of modest value-- a friend of mine graduated from Rutgers as a history major, probably in the 80s. She didn't know that life could be very hard for civilians in war zones. She isn't my smartest friend, but she isn't stupid and she's pretty conscientious.
I attended in 1979. I did not matriculate, but I did take regular graduate Physics courses that I had to leave work during the day to attend.
My other exposure to Rutgers is through a very good friend who was a Bell Labs department head for years, who was then Professor at Rutgers for seems about 10 years until probably 2000. He started the Wireless Information Lab which has a superb national reputation for research, graduate, and postgraduate work. I visited him and Lab events many times over the years, and find it implausible that if the undergrad education was a scam he wouldn't have mentioned it.
In fact I'll email him about this, and if he answers post something here.