Best STEM at a liberal arts school?

rayrick
Tue, 10 Nov 2015 15:49:45 +0000

Yeah, got to agree with the mystification about Rose-Hulman not offering a Ph.D. being horrendous. Here’s the deal: there is a small collection of schools out there that devote themselves to technical disciplines that are also exclusively focused on undergraduate education. Two of them, Harvey Mudd and Olin, I’d put up against any school in the land for outstanding undergraduate STEM education. Rose-Hulman is in their same category and is also excellent. Don’t let the fact that its got “Institute of Technology” in its name make you think it’s in some totally separate class of schools and therefore somehow required to offer graduate degrees.

All of those schools are quite small (Mudd and Olin are downright tiny), and the trade-off, just as with LACs, is you don’t get the same breadth and depth of research and course offerings as you would at a large research university. What you get in exchange is high-caliber instruction in small classes taught by professors (not TA’s) who consider teaching to be their highest priority, and research groups that are geared toward providing opportunities for undergrads. In my opinion, that’s a trade well worth making, but then, I have a daughter at Olin, so I would say that.