Consider me clueless, but what is a LAC?

interesteddad
Fri, 28 Oct 2005 23:09:42 +0000

Hazmat described what a liberal arts education is. However, many sizes and types of schools teach a liberal arts curriculum, including many top universities.

Liberal Arts College, in popular usage, refers to a small undergrad college that does not have the graduate and professional schools of a university. A university, to use Harvard as an example, consists of a college for undergrads (called Harvard College), plus graduate, medical, law, business, education, and public health schools that are, for all intents and purposes, separate subsidiaries of the corporation that have nothing to do with teaching undergrad students (except that grad students moonlight as TAs to help teach undergrads because they are cheap labor – the professor gives a lecture once a week to a couple hundred students and then the TAs lead discussion sections).

A liberal arts college is a school that just has the 4-year undergraduate school with no graduate schools or graduate students (or in some cases, perhaps a very small grad school in a particular field). Liberal arts colleges tend to be small – always under 3000 students, usually under 2000, compared to the 4000-30,000 undergrads at a typical university.

The tradeoff is that a small liberal arts college cannot offer the breadth of course options and activities of a university with far more students. However, it can offer 100% focus on undergrad education and teaching, a personalized style of education with very small class sizes, and a very cohesive community.

For the most part, the top LACs and the top universities teach the same stuff (for most students). They just do it in different ways. Each has its own pluses and minuses. The choice really depends on the individual student. I can argue it either way.