Bill73

"I saw a WSJ article that had many big state schools as tops in recruitment. "

At the large state schools, the type of firms that recruit there are usually the Big Four firms, Fortune 500 companies, and technology consulting companies like Accenture. It's not uncommon for a firm like Deloitte to hire 200 CPAs for one single office from a school like Illinois or Texas.

However, if you really want to land a job at Goldman or McKinsey, I think attending an Ivy league school will help you in that regard. I know someone from a state school that was an analyst at Goldman, and he told me that most of the people in his analyst class were from the Ivy league schools.

kayakmom

lynn o'shaughnessy from the college solution has a great blog on this

kayakmom

the blog title is the 3 degrees of college prestige

Hunt

Perhaps the analogy would be more like the research U is the big buffet with everything, while the LAC is a nice restaurant with table service, but fewer choices on the menu. Both can be very nice, depending on what you prefer.

PAGRok

^That's implying the experience is greater at a LAC. Some research U's, especially top end ones like the Ivies do offer lots of academic guidance (waiters?) and many other luxuries in the form of clubs, professional school guidance, etc. If you want to adapt the buffet analogy then the LAC would mean less people at the table so you have a closer/more personal environment.

Pizzagirl

As a parent with twins at each, I think it's stupid to even make it a competition. Smaller schools and larger schools each have pros and cons. And LAC 1 and LAC 2 each have pros and cons. And Univ A and Univ B each have pros and cons. Now what? Decide between schools, not categories.

tk21769

^ If you're not first deciding between these categories (LAC v. university), that suggests you don't care too much about issues such as overall size, average class size, class variety and selection, undergraduate focus, or research opportunities. In each of these features (some more than others), there is typically a significant difference between LACs and universities. Other fairly typical differences include location/setting (LACs tend to be set in rural locations or small towns), the sports scene (LACs often cannot support a variety of large D1 sports programs), or specific program offerings (for example, LACs usually don't offer ABET-certified engineering programs).

So, for many students, it does make sense to prefer one or the other. If you don't care about the above issues at all, then what is your basis for deciding between schools?

If your most important criteria by far are academic quality and net costs, or maybe distance from home, and you are a prospective liberal arts major, then it might make sense to include both LACs and universities on your application list.

sally305

An interesting perspective on Harvard posted this morning--long but worth a read.

So You Want Veritas? (Truths from a Harvard Student)

Pizzagirl

Shrug. My S's list included a mix of unis (Northwestern, Gtown, Tufts) and LACs (Kenyon, Grinnell, Haverford, Macalester). He ED'd at NU but would have EDIi'd at Kenyon if not accepted. So he would have had a different experience. So what? He would have had a different experience at every single one of these schools, because they re all different schools. Why couldn't he have equally liked lots of different places? I find it odd that you "have" to draw a line in the sand and only pick from one side.

edited to add - yes, we cared more about academic quality but also about simply liking a place. If you met my son, you could easily see why he'd like both NU and Kenyon for example. Some decisions have to be made on intuition and heart, too, not just a straight "what % of classes have fewer than x students" metric.

sally305

Pizzagirl, I see your point, and can imagine my younger child having a list like your son's. For my son, the realization that he wanted an intimate environment with predominately small classes, personal interaction with faculty, and a compact, self-contained campus was a good starting point for our search. This is a kid who often felt bored or "checked out" in high school, especially in the many big classes where he was lectured at and not personally engaged. We live in a university town, so he has a very good sense of what a giant campus is like and does not think it is for him. It was by choice that he focused his college search on institutions smaller than his high school, and helped us refine what otherwise would have been an overwhelming list of options.

Pizzagirl

Right - my D, on the other hand, liked smaller schools. But she didn't explicitly choose LAC over university on philosophical grounds; she just preferred smaller schools.

tk21769

Some people are going to be more sensitive than others to these differences.
I'd imagine that many people, if not most, could adapt to either one. (Frank Costello in The Departed: "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.")

For some students, having an ABET-certified engineering program will be a fairly firm requirement. That rules out nearly every LAC. A few young women simply want to get away from male classmates for 4 years. That limits the choice to a small handful of women's colleges (LACs).

If you want to base your choices largely on hunches and intuitions, that's fine. However, if you truly cared more about academic quality, then did you not have some mental rules-of-thumb (at least) for identifying what you thought were high-quality schools? Or was the process pretty much serendipitous? ("I'm going to Philly next week on business. Jane's daughter goes to Bryn Mawr. Want to check it out?")

phantasmagoric

bclintonk, thanks for the extensive info. I admit that it was pure assumption that there was overlap between Bryn Mawr's and Haverford's course offerings (that's why I said "probably," so that I didn't have to expend the effort investigating how different they are ). It does appear that the two have worked hard to coordinate and complement each other's offerings.

I notice that you are referencing only Princeton, and only its undergraduate courses. True, it's a bit of a pain to compare with all the Ivies, which I wouldn't expect you to. But I'll throw the rhetorical questions out there: what about all the graduate-level courses that Princeton undergrads are allowed to take? These graduate courses - at least, the ones that had one or more undergrads in them - were included in the 836 classes reported in the CDS; and there are many more that weren't reported. Further, what about all the other Ivies? Princeton is particularly LAC-like, second only to Dartmouth. Indeed, Princeton's breadth isn't nearly as good as most other Ivies (HY, Columbia, Penn, Cornell).

I agree that this has been a problem for Yale, which deserves criticism for it. That's one of the reasons that I personally wouldn't go to Yale for science. But Yale is also remedying this problem by building two new colleges next to Science Hill, accommodating an additional 800 students or so, the majority of whom will probably be STEM students. (Since Pierson and Jonathan Edwards colleges are next to the school of art, they could easily have a higher concentration of students in the arts.)

Harvard has a similar problem, with some students having to take a shuttle to campus and with some departments/schools miles away from the main campus. It's also remedying this by building a more extensive campus directly across the river in Allston, which will accommodate undergrads and grads and provide extensive STEM facilities.

Hunt,

I like that.

sally305

tk21769, forgive me if your question was directed specifically at Pizzagirl. I would say that for us the assumption going in was that all of our choices would fall within a range of "high-quality" schools. And we did NOT define "high-quality" by USNWR. We used collegenavigator(dot)gov to evaluate schools based on test score ranges, talked to numerous people we know in academia, and researched student outcomes and satisfaction (via NSSE). We used this site and others to get a sense of the culture or "vibe" at each college we were considering. And then we started visiting. Our early visits were serendipitous, as when my son and I spent two days in Cambridge visiting a friend his sophomore year--we wandered around the Harvard campus but didn't have a formal tour (he wasn't at all thinking of applying, but he did get a sense of what a very intense academic environment might look like).

For kids interested in the performing arts, as my younger child is, I imagine the search process will be entirely different, as the schools with good theater/dance programs range widely in their academic requirements, urban/suburban/rural locations, campus size and public/private status. There is no one right way to go about it, obviously. But since the choices are so numerous, anything that allows a family to winnow the list early on seems to be worth considering.

Pizzagirl

"If you want to base your choices largely on hunches and intuitions, that's fine. However, if you truly cared more about academic quality, then did you not have some mental rules-of-thumb (at least) for identifying what you thought were high-quality schools?"

I must not have been clear. Of course, academic quality was uppermost (all of the schools I mentioned fall under that designation of high academic quality, no?). But I, for one, don't get my panties in a wad or wring my hands unnecessarily over a handful of large lecture classes when you're talking schools of the caliber I was talking about. Sure, my S at NU will have a few more large-lecture classes than D at Wellesley. But honestly, his professors are more likely to be nationally renowned in their fields, so now what? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.