Is there any clear evidence that private universities tend to be better than public ones?

Question

I keep hearing from Americans that on average, private universities tend to be better than public ones.

This study by Klafke et al. concludes:

A recurrent problem reported by the students, especially by the public undergraduate, is the disconnect between what is taught and the practical reality of the job market. This can happen because students from private colleges are eyeing the market. If they wanted to enter the academic life, they would have to migrate to the public tuition, where research is encouraged.

Public undergraduates consider some professors lazy, self-centred, and selfish, as they are very rarely fired. This damages not only the quality of the learning-teaching process, but their relationship itself.

On the other hand, this study points in a different direction.

This study compared the efficiency of Italian public and private universities, and found that private ones are more efficient.

Here's one of the results: table

Despite the fact that in Italy (like in Europe and East Asia) the best universities are public, whereas America has both private and public top universities.

Is there any other metric we could use for comparison? What do you think?

Answer 1

Different strokes for different folks. It depends on what you mean by "better". Different students have different desires and the US provides a wide range of possibilities. This answer applies to the US, only so far as I know.

Most public research universities are very good. Many private universities are very good. But they are different. The research possibilities are probably better, in general, at public universities, but the undergraduate classes tend to be very large with not a lot of contact with professors (more with TAs). Private universities tend to have smaller classes, maybe 30 or so, with more contact and personal attention possible.

At any university, the education is what you make of it. Yes, you can get a wonderful undergraduate education at Yale, but not everyone does. There are some very foolish US politicians who spew garbage but have degrees from Ivy League universities. It has been said (apocryphal, perhaps) that there is no one dumber than a C student from Yale. And, BTW, The Ivy League is an athletic conference.

The excellent private research universities are often old and have "deep pockets" provided in part by contributions from wealthy alumni over the many many years. They can afford to hire great faculty, and often do. And, due their age, a reputation can build on past accomplishments. But public universities have the backing of state taxpayers who, at least in the more enlightened states, value an educated populace - for many reasons.

At public research universities, in the final year or two, students have more opportunity for close contact with a research focused faculty member. This can be important for some, but not all, students.

My undergraduate years were at a very good private place that, at the time, had only about 2000 students. Classes were small. Faculty was focused on teaching. I never thought a lot about research in those years so it didn't matter to me that my professors weren't primarily researchers.

My graduate years were at good public universities where I was a TA. Classes were large and I, as a TA, handled most of the student contact, rather than the professor. Graduate classes, however, were small.

The fact that some might consider faculty at a public to be "lazy, etc." doesn't make it true. They are busy, but with research, not with student contact, for the most part.

Note, however, that the US also has a lot of smaller public universities that value teaching over research. The university systems in both New York and Minnesota, for example, have smaller teaching focused colleges, much like the typical private university. Costs are a bit less (for residents) than private places.

I live in a town with a public teaching-focused university. My neighbor told me that the expectations for faculty advancement there depended on contributions to teaching, research, and service at a 60/30/10 ratio IIRC (or close to that). Reverse the first two numbers, more or less, for a research university.

The US has thousands of colleges and universities. They range in quality from terrible to excellent.

Answer 2

I keep hearing from Americans that on average, private universities tend to better than public.

I am surprised to hear this. Rather than judging the assertion itself, it may be helpful to understand the likely causes of the assertion:

• The most famous, very top undergraduate programs are indeed private. For example: the entire Ivy League (which includes Harvard, Yale, Princeton), MIT, CalTech, Stanford. Of the public schools, only Berkeley regularly appears in the top 10.
• At the secondary level (high school), private schools are widely considered better (in reality, this is certainly true in some areas, dubious in others).

Given these two things, it is easy to assume that private is better than public as a general rule. But it is hard to make general statements. Berkeley (public) is in an entirely different class than Hillsdale College (private). To do an apples-to-apples comparison, you have to control for many different variables. It's probably more productive to consider your personal options and goals rather than trying to get a general answer.

Answer 3

For that type of analysis, one should probably group universities into three categories, rather than two:

1. Public universities.
2. Private not-for-profit universities.
3. Private for-profit universities.

I would strongly advocate that the results for private not-for-profit and for-profit organizations would differ a lot for many reasonable "efficiency metrics" (maybe relevant).

Regarding metrics themselves. I believe that there cannot be a universal approach. And some aspects of university "effectiveness" are more quantifiable than others, and it is hard to put the weights on different contributing factors (like what is more important: average salary of graduates after 2 years/10 years or number of papers published or satisfaction of students measured by surveys).

There are multiple schools of thought on how to measure it (and whether to measure it at all), and I would start with "Performance measurement in universities" by J. Higgins, following the references of this paper and other papers that cite it. Ultimately, in my opinion, the value of finding a perfect metric is essentially flawed due to Goodhart's law:

Every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure.

...but that does not mean that we should not try to evaluate and measure things, constantly changing the methodology and goals (while still retaining as much raw data as possible).

Answer 4

Here's the situation in my contry (Mexico); a lot of people brag when their children (aged from 6 to 15 years old) attend a private school instead of a public one, arguing that private education is of higher quality, that they teach English and other language, and that kids on the public system are "poor and nacos" (yes, it is a shameful, racist, but sadly widespread belief), but we all know that studying in a private college is way worst than attending a public one. Even the kids from private institutions take the admission exams to attend a public college (the spaces available to study there are limited, so usually a high percentage of students fail to find a place). The problem with private colleges is that their fees are ridiculously high, and the courses they give are a joke compared to the ones offered by public ones (see for example the weird curriculum of a data science bachelor's offered by Tec de Monterrey, the most expensive Mexican college. They don't even have calculus nor probability courses. Contrast it with the curriculum offered by UNAM). You can check out this ranking of universities in Mexico; as you can see, most of them are "autonomas" (that usually mean they are public). So, in general, a private college is the second, less attractive option.

Talking about how valuable is the degree obtained to get a job in real life, of course the graduates from the expensive places (like Tec de Monterrey) have it easier to get the administrative/managerial job posts (remember the nasty "poor and naco" stigma), but they are generally not well prepared for jobs relating to health sciences or STEM (indeed, you can see that private colleges focus on careers like law, business administration or accounting, it is rare to see careers like chemistry or physics).

Personally, I attended public schools all my life, I can't deny it has a lot of deficiencies, but I can also say that my peers that were before in a private place were in general slower for learning stuff by themselves, wanted the exams to be an exact copy of the homework, prioritized memorizing over understanding, and think that the teacher/professor is one of their daddy's employees, so they tend to be dismissive and insolent.