Financial Aspects of College Transfer for a Geology Major

[whenhen]

@merc81 Ok, from the course description it looked to be exactly what we did in my very basic intro GIS course (however we didn’t do the data collection ourselves, we used unclean info from various university owned sensors). Perhaps Carleton teaches it in a more rigorous fashion, but it does seem to be missing advanced concepts, most fundamentally statistical manipulation which is absolutely critical for meaningful reports.

Since a concentrator will commonly enroll in one or two geosciences courses per semester, choices for an individual student are deep and varied. If inherent limitations restrict the choice of taking Field Study in Iceland, an available geosciences course at one LAC, to alternate years, the student will simply plan around this, and ideally will be appreciative of having an opportunity which may not be available elsewhere.

Not true. It’s common for upperclassmen students to take 3-4 geology courses a semester. If the OP’s son were to also need to study forestry, or some possible analogue like environmental science, real scheduling issues do come into play.

This is why I asked the OP which geology courses her son had taken up to this point. There are four or five core courses upon which virtually every advanced geoscience concept is based. If the son has taken 3/5 of the classes, then maybe a LAC (but really only a tiny number of LACs) would work. If not, I would strongly advise a research university.

Beyond the above, LACs tend to encourage, and almost always allow, registration in upper-level courses across the curriculum, irrespective of a student’s major.

Not unique to LACs, unless you mean students can enroll in science courses without the prereqs. I would not advise doing that.