Research mentees at average state schools are 10x better than at Ivys

Having taught & mentored in both places, & being currently at an Ivy, I'm constantly jealous of the students my colleagues at state schools get. I'm about to stop taking grad students here altogether, because the academic contract is so severely out of whack. Mentoring them is by far the biggest time suck of anything I do, and I consistently have to pour 30 hours of work into each of them for every 1 hour they give back in productivity to my group's work. The students here generally don't seem hungry to learn at all. They don't seem genuinely curious, even about the things they say they're interested in. Getting them to read anything at all is a massive chore. They almost never go out on their own and find papers they're interested in themselves & get excited about them. I swear, you can learn 95% of what you need to know about doing academic research from just reading papers; everything from how to structure a manuscript to how to style statistical notation to how to identify research gaps, etc. But, because they won't read any papers, I have to try to help them learn these things via feedback on their work, shaping every one of these conventions one by one, and often several times apiece. All because they refuse to read a paper and are too busy fucking around on their laptops during meetings and class to listen.

They also seem wholly uninterested in producing work that is of good quality. If I tell them "this isn't where this needs to be, and here's why," they're always completely shocked and devastated. Their first reaction is "you're wrong" or "there must be some mistake." If something isn't immediately acceptable and they have to go through more than one draft, they get frustrated & start trying to nudge me into saying it's acceptable so they can be done with it & go play ("Here's my draft, I trust it is now ready to submit."). They return drafts of their writing I've commented on with comments deleted and nothing addressed. I offer them chances to be on papers that are mostly done, and they whine about it. They just don't seem to be oriented toward learning at all, much less learning to do something well.

And this bullshit happens even among mentees who want to do research themselves and want academic careers. I remind them all the time, doing academic research is 90% reading and writing, so you'd better want to do that every day for most of your career. How the hell can they expect me to attest that they're good at this if they won't even read? If they hate writing?

Of course, I've had a handful of good students here, too, and not all students are good wherever you are. But on average, I thought the students I worked with at a state R1 school were hungrier. They didn't seem to walk in the door thinking they already knew what there was to know, and actually listened. I felt like I worked with more students who were genuinely curious about their interests, and that made mentoring a lot more fun. And when I'd give them honest feedback, they'd say things like "ok, how can I improve? What do I need to get better at?" I've never once heard that from any of my mentees at any level in my 10 years of working at an Ivy.

For those who have worked at both, what do you think? Or do I just suck at deciding who to work with?

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