Consider me clueless, but what is a LAC?

interesteddad
Sat, 29 Oct 2005 02:27:29 +0000

Sure. There is still pressure to publish. For example, my D’s poli sci professor at an LAC just published a new book that has won several awards.

The big difference is that professors at LACs are not under as much pressure to generate revenues. At many top universities, the revenues from research grants exceed the revenues from tuition, room, and board. Professors are expected to generate those revenues. Also, you don’t have professors who are hired exclusively for research, teaching at most a token class here or there.

The other difference is that research and published articles generated at an LAC typically involve undergrad participation, rather than grad students.

Having said that, there are advantages to the scale of research at universities. Most of that doesn’t have much impact on undergrads, but there are levels of research that are not feasible at small colleges. So, again the trade-off is the scale at universities versus smaller, low budget research endeavors that involve undergrads in one-on-one mentoring relationships with the professors.