Quote:
Originally Posted by Fighting Banana Slug
I was involved in a similar discussion regarding "elite" law schools in Canada in another thread, and am of the view that most of the schools in Canada are roughly equivalent. Definitely with MattC on that one.
The top Ivy league schools are clearly top-notch, by attracting excellent professors as well as highly qualified students. However, there isn't a giant chasm of quality of instruction between these "top" schools and the average.
The analogy for me would be NHL players. The top players aren't 10x the skill of the average NHLer, perhaps only incrementally better, but they might be paid 10x more. Same would go for Hollywood actors, CEOs, etc.
This is all my opinion, of course. I didn't go to an Ivy League school, so I must not be that smart.  |
It's not just a question of smart. I had the LSAT to go to Ivy League, but I am sure I would have failed. The way I look at it, to go to Harvard Law you have to have the IQ, the drive, and the work ethic. When I recall my classmates at U of C, we didn't have anyone who had it all - we had smart people, we had the A personalities and we had the plough horses, but we were all "flawed" - the smart people were lazy, the workers weren't smart enough, or some such... It reminds me of my previous abortive attempt at applied sciences. I was somewhat of a math wizard (like finished 2nd in Alberta in the math olympiad) and went to U of T Engineering Science, which was widely accepted as THE place where you went if you were a math/science nerd. It was a whole different level than I had ever seen - people who did high level calculus for fun while taking the bus to school, people who stepped on fellow classmates to get ahead (we were told 1/3 of us would have be dropped after year 1)... I was not interested in the subject nearly enough and had no work ethic to speak of to be able to compete with people like that, and was eventually asked to leave.
I was certainly smart enough, but didn't have IT. I would say Harvard Law vs U of C Law is something like that...