EDIT: Die Thread

They play an important role in their communities.  Not to say that another public university in those locations couldn't do the same, but UM-D and UM-F are what's there.

Amusing anecdote:  a government agency audited some part of Flint's operations, and it wasn't until after the fact that they admitted that they were mistaken, and had intended to audit the flagship campus in Ann Arbor.  Ha ha.  Somebody at the agnecy got the address/contact information for Flint instead of AA, and that dopey error spared UM-AA a boatload of work. 

who i didn't find out for months were UM-F grads and had chimed in on weak MSU academics repeatedly. i had a similar reaction.

TIA.

The equation isn't exact and probably doesn't make that much sense.  Anyway, in the end, I'm pretty sure it's all about making money.  While making money is the bottom line, it also doesn't hurt that they have been given land grants, and these satellite campuses help these communities they are located in.  They help others that couldn't otherwise get a degree from AA (either because of cost or academics) to get a Michigan degree, though it may not be perceived as equivalent.  U of M isn't the only one doing it.  On a much different way, even MSU has a satellite campus in Dubai.  It is a way for both schools to spread their name, help communities, and in the end, hopefully make money.  If the schools become better recognized, then the more power to them, in the end, IME, it probably all comes down to the dollar amount, the perceived value (ie helping communities and people get degrees) and overall perception for the main campus though.

I'm a little in the dark about our relation to those two campuses as well.  Are UM-Flint and UM-Dearborn actually more closely tied to UM-Ann Arbor than the other public universities in the state?  Are they members of the CIC (the academic wing of the Big Ten) as well? 

I regret my mediocre UM-D education almost every day.  It's not a horrible school, but I could have aimed much higher.  The majority of my classes were not challenging, and I think it might be literally impossible to fail a course there.  The small class sizes are nice, though.  I can't stand the huge lecture hall-type classes.

FTR, I live in Boston and always tell people I went to "University of Michigan-Dearborn." Without fail, their eyes immediately glaze over in confusion.  So, hopefully I'm not "tarnishing" the good Michigan name for those of you who are concerned...

Why does anyone even care?  I don't think my Michigan degree (from AA...OMG, I'm so special) is lessened by someone else being in the school family.  I mean, I'm sure there's obnoxious examples of someone trying to equate the two, and bragging about his degree...but man, coming from a Michigan grad, that would be some kettle/pot stuff to complain about. I don't see how it's harming your oh so valuable reputation to have someone saying they went to U-M  (small print...Dearborn, Flint).  I mean, if you got passed up for a job for someone from one of those schools, I'm guessing it's because they were better, and not because they fooled some employer into thinking that they REALLY went to that school in Ann Arbor.

I am from Flint, went to UMF, and I'm very proud of that.  Is it ok for me to be a Michigan fan?

In the mean time I will bow down to ye superior graduates of AA and hold my head up high as a "Walmart Wolverine".

Also I'm sorry for using any tickets I've recieved to see "you're" team play.

Went to UM-D for two years, UM-AA for two. Ann Arbor is so much better that it's really not up for debate, but Dearborn is great for what it is and serves its purpose extremely well. I don't see the harm in the campuses existing just like they do now. It's not hurting anyone, a few UM-D kids going to football games isn't the end of the universe. And, frankly, I think the idea that a UM degree is SO VALUABLE that it GUARANTEES you a job is laughable. A 4.0 from UM-D will get you a better job than a 2.5 from AA, and this is true across the board. A college degree is only worth what you put into it. To tell the truth, I'd like to see the University build a third campus in the Grand Rapids area. Extend the brand to the rest of the state, why not?

I spent 3 semesters at Dearborn before transferring to Ann Arbor my sophomore year.   My full intention from the start was to transfer and I was actually denied admission fall semester soph year after I had already signed a lease in a2.  Surprisingly, I encountered very, very few other students who attended UM-D with the intention of transferring.  Literally, the ONLY reason I attended UM-D was that I thought it gave me the best opportunity to get into AA.  But to my surprise the wasn't the case with the vast majority of students on the UM-D campus.  Most of the students went there because it was easy to commute to and was a 4-year university with shades of the UM brand.  The courses, and more specifically the competetion, in my experience were without question less challenging than the A2 counterparts. 

I can understand the argument for not letting UM-D, UM-F students have FB tix, but I seriously doubt they take up a significant portion of the total student allotment.  To boot, any Dearborn or Flint student making the trek to Ann Arbor (where they probably don't know a whole lot of people anyway) on Saturday's is probably a more hardcore M fan than some random sorostitute who is going to show up during the 2nd possession and leave at halftime.   

Haha, this thread is the worst thing ever to appear on MGoBlog, and that's including the UFR of The Horror.

This ended up being a ridiculously long post for a topic that's already old by mgoboard standards and probably has already been seen by anyone will look at it, but oh well.

First, for clarification, students at satellite campuses get student tickets for football and so forth. We used to be on par with AA students in regard to student tickets. A couple years ago, all AA students were given priority. Second, amen about real fans travelling from Flint or Dearborn for all the home games vs. some drunk sorority girls leaving at halftime. Third, the poster(s) who talked about satellite students going to those schools because of the student tickets aren’t thinking very clearly. Nobody is actually going to choose a school because they can get the student deal on tickets and get up early on a few Saturdays with plenty of traffic ahead.

Moving on, can someone give me a good argument for buying into school rankings? I seriously doubt anyone has much of an understanding of the methodology. Surely one criterion is researchers at the top of their respective fields, but what does this matter to the students and their education? I've had classes with a professor who is one of the two or three big names you would mention. But taking his class, we learned to next to nothing. He was just awful at explaining things to those weren't fellow experts and was completely disorganized. USNEWS certainly doesn't sit in on classes and evaluate the learning environment. It didn't help me that the professor just gave some lecture for a prominent academic group, or that he has a long and impressive CV writing papers. He's certainly contributing to the school's ranking. On the other hand, there's a fellow graduate student I graded for (and attended the class) about a year ago who is one of the best teachers I've seen. Yet, he's not contributing at all to the rankings. Further, if he were hired, he'd actually bring down the rankings because he has a shorter, less impressive CV and isn't well-known. The idea that you can give a simple score to an entire school of tens of thousands of students and thousands of faculty is absurd anyway. There are good and bad teachers in every department at every university in the country. Speaking of conflation, one should be careful not to conflate how much shit one had to do for a test or class that was forgotten as soon as it was done vs. how much one actually learned and became a more intelligent, thoughtful person.

I'm not saying that, on the whole, one isn't more likely to receive a better education at AA than at the satellites, but there's not some tremendous gulf between the schools. I graduated from UM-Flint (and yes, I tell people it was the Flint campus, as does everyone else I know, and the idea that everyone basically claims they went to AA is likely little more than hearsay) and am now a master's student at Carnegie Mellon University, which is right up there with AA in school rankings (though not for all subjects since it's a much smaller, more tech-oriented school that doesn't offer degrees in nearly so many fields). The "Michigan" name likely helped. No, I haven't been way in over my head because UM-Flint is "tier" whatever-the-hell-it-is or "behind Northern Iowa". Despite my inferior undergraduate degree, I managed to score in the top 97th percentile on the qualitative section of the GRE and 86th on the quantitative, which is better than the average student trying to attend grad school for math despite the fact that I basically had none in my undergraduate studies. I’m not saying that to brag, as I have concerns about the importance of standardized testing (AA students aren’t far and away superior to satellite students because they get a few more points on their ACTs) but to serve as an example. My classmates seemed to do well getting jobs or into grad schools as well. The same experience goes for my brother who went there, including a friend of his who's now a professor at Emory. The main reason I went to UM-Flint because it was much cheaper, and my family was basically fucked financially at the time. I bet one would find very little difference in the mode and median regarding the quality of students between any two universities. I certainly haven't been blow away by the genius student body at CMU. For the most part, they're college kids just like anywhere else (except nerdier and less attractive, unfortunately). A few commented on how much better AA was after transferring. I wonder how much of it is true though, especially since they talked about pining for AA from the beginning. For example, the American Chemical Society, or whatever the name is, has the same test for all students after the first year, so UM-Flint has to teach the same stuff. Also, Tom from AA talked about how AA actually required a "full lab report" in his science class. Uh, we had lab reports. I had to write a final paper for the science classes I had on top of lab reports for the individual experiments. What did you do in the lab then at Flint? Mixed some shit together and left? Really, the only thing that I feel hurt me at UM-Flint simply had to do with the size of the school and having less options to explore. For some subjects, this doesn't matter much. You'll learn the same stuff in physics wherever you go. But it sucked not having a wide variety of classes to choose in something like history, which was one of my degrees.

There's obviously a lot of arrogance in some of the posters, which is too bad. It's funny that they talk about what a great PUBLIC school AA is. Just as making a big deal about the satellites and AA is mostly baseless, I hope they don't apply the same misguided reasoning to themselves relative to Harvard. I remember checking out some Ivy League syllabi online before and found that they were set up almost identically to mine. You might say the competition's just much tougher, but there was actually a bit of a brouhaha a few years back because all the students were getting A's. I don't think their grades were inflated. Instead, eveyrone has the same idea of what's an A paper or not, and Harvard's not accepting kids on the margins. I found this out with the last few years of incoming graduate students at CMU. They're all given the same papers and asked to grade them, and there's nearly unanimous agreement about the grades.

Basically, this lengthy post can be simply summarized. You reap what you sow. Harvard has a lot of prominent alumni because kids who are smart, driven, wealthy, and well-connected attend it, not because Harvard has some amazing ability to turn morons into geniuses.