From what I have gathered, liberal arts colleges tend to offer a more broad undergraduate education, while regular universities allow you to focus more deeply in your chosen major. Since grad school is completely focused on your chosen field, would a student at a liberal arts college be put at a disadvantage since they may have to take more courses outside of their major? Or is this simply not the case? I’m not if this changes it, but, probably the only subject I would want to study in grad school would be history. Thank you!
Any well ranked LAC will have depth in its history offerings. That said, if there is a particular kind of history that interests you that is somewhat less commonly taught (not US or Europe), then you might want to investigate further to make sure there are the faculty resources, both in history and in requisite foreign languages, to ensure sufficient coverage.
The number of credits to fulfill a major falls within a fairly narrow range across colleges and universities.
Also, large universities can sometimes have heavy general education or distribution requirements. Curricular openness or flexibility is not necessarily a function of size. I have seen LACs that require only two writing seminars and others that have distribution requirements that fill up to 16 courses.
For the schools that interest you, do research those requirements and how they might impact the opportunities for depth in your major.
At small schools, you might be able to get to know the profs better than at a huge research university. This might help with letters of recommendation that can really speak to your strengths.
Okay, thanks everyone!
Reed College sends one of the largest percentages of students to Ph.D. programs, and it is a LAC. Same with Wesleyan, Oberlin, Grinnell, and some other small schools.
As a side note, most universities are liberal arts universities. That means that the curriculum and requirements there are pretty similar to that of LACs - they require a lot of general education and divisional requirements outside of your major. So no, LAC students wouldn’t be at a disadvantage - an Swarthmore or Haverford student could delve as deeply into the major as a Harvard or Columbia student. Note also, for example, that Amherst has an open curriculum while Columbia has the Core.
“Reed College sends one of the largest percentages of students to Ph.D. programs, and it is a LAC. Same with Wesleyan, Oberlin, Grinnell, and some other small schools.”
Any school that requires a master-level thesis of all undergrads (as Reed does) will have a relatively high percentage of future PhD recipients, having already shown that they know how to research and write about it. This may even affect general grad school acceptance chances.
Reed doesn’t require a ‘master-level thesis’ - they require an undergraduate research thesis. Some of their undergrads’ theses may be sufficiently advanced/of high enough quality that they are at the master’s level, but most universities allow undergraduates at least the option to write a senior thesis if they want to.
I’d agree with the rest, though - people who go to a place like Reed where they know they have to write a senior thesis are more likely to be interested in higher-level research work, and graduate programs definitely do value senior theses.