Of course there are others which offer business and/or engineering, but I can’t think of another which we commonly refer to as LAC which offers these programs and enrolls 37% of their students in them. I’m also frequently surprised to see colleges which don’t offer majors so obviously pre-professional as business and engineering but are not classified as LAC.
Excellent advice, @NiceUnparticularMan. I just find it frustrating when Bucknell is grouped together in conversations with “other LACs like . . .”
So for sure there are colleges like Lafayette which at least graduate a higher percentage of kids in Engineering than Bucknell. And then there are colleges like Richmond which graduate a higher percentage in Business. In fact, Richmond apparently graduated 36.9% in Business stuff:
I know you prefer to look at majors not awarded degrees, but that is still an awful lot in comparison.
Off hand, I do not know if there are any similar colleges with both more engineering AND more business degrees awarded than Bucknell. The list of Baccalaureate colleges with engineering is just so short, because typically engineering also involves a grad program, and then most of the remainder are publics like the Cal Polys or tech-focused colleges like Olin and Rose-Hulman.
So it might really just be Lafayette with more engineering among private Special Focus: Arts and Sciences colleges, and Lafayette does not have Business.
My two cents is it really helps to internalize the idea that part of the point of small private colleges is they can be super fit colleges. Meaning they can each market themselves, successfully, to a relatively niche group of students. Which is great if you really want to pick a college that is a super fit for you as an individual.
But then this typically means many of them will NOT be super fits for you. For some other kids, sure. But not for you.
Bucknell is one example of that, but really in my mind they are all examples in their own ways. Even in the same consortium, a Pomona kid, Harvey Mudd kid, CMC kid, Scripps kid, and Pitzer kid may all be looking for different things. Or an Amherst kid, Smith kid, Mount Holyoke kid, or Hampshire kid. Or so on.
Again, to me this is the whole point of these colleges. Not to be one-size-fits-all, but to be as tailored as possible to each individual and what they really want in a college.
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I understand. What I’m saying is that when 37% of your students are enrolled in business and engineering, it’s hard to say that your main focus is arts & sciences. Engineering & business students bring a different vibe to a campus. I don’t find that the small number of engineering students on campus at Smith, for example, changes the mission of what that college is about.
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I get it, and of course you can have that opinion. Going forward I would expect LACs that don’t offer business or engineering majors are going to have a harder time filling seats than those who do offer those majors.
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Just to continue exploring the Carnegie system–another quirk of that system is when it comes to “Undergraduate/Graduate-Doctorate” institutions (so your typical research universities with undergrad programs), it does not actually have those Special Focus categories. You can be Mixed or Professions-focused, but that is it [<–this is wrong, it turns out, see below. NUM]
OK, so take a university like WashU (I picked it because my own S24 goes there):
It has a broadly similar mix to Bucknell, with some variations. But 17.3% Business stuff plus 10.8% Engineering adds up to a similar 28.1% in those two combined. And I suspect that if WashU had been a Baccalaureate institution, it would have ended up Special Focus: Arts and Sciences despite all that.
OK, so to your point, nobody to my knowledge calls WashU as a whole an “LAC”.
That said, I know for a fact if you are in the Arts and Sciences division at WashU, they quite literally promote it as being like a larger LAC. But with access to the rest of the university as well.
There are many other differences between WashU and Bucknell, but I do think this is part of the pitch for colleges like Bucknell, Lafayette, Richmond, and so on. They would at least suggest the presence of Engineering, Business, or both does not subtract from their ability to be a good LAC, it adds a dimension for those who want it.
And of course individuals are free to disagree and think it does actually subtract.
That certainly happened with CS. These days way more LACs offer CS, and I do think in part that was a response to competitive pressures.
But in part I think that was also because CS is not a very costly sort of thing to offer. Whereas doing a proper engineering program, the kind that ABET will accredit or at least the industry will see as equivalent–takes a lot of fixed costs and then ongoing operating costs. Undergrad business programs are not inherently like that, but if you want to compete in, say, the world of selective private undergrad business programs, that starts taking a lot of financial resources as well. And in cases like this, there can be serious scale efficiency issues.
So I don’t think it is a surprise fewer small colleges have jumped into Engineering or Business as opposed to CS so far. I am sure they recognize that would make them more competitive for some students, but at what cost?
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Having an engineering program can lead to particularly robust STEM program at a LAC which can be a positive for some students.
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That was in fact part of the point of why I noted that things like “specialty sciences” are actually put into the same Special Focus category as engineering. At least per the Carnegie system, that is a natural grouping. And for sure there can be some crossover efficiencies even with general Physics, general Chem, and so on.
I’ll admit my own bias is often to look for the economic and financial underpinnings of these sorts of observations, but I do think it helps sometimes to understand why different colleges are doing what they do. In the end what still matters is just what you will get as an individual and what it will cost you. But for practical reasons there are patterns, and variations on patterns, that tend to repeat.
A significant impact of having engineering and/or business on campus is an increase in male students. Whether it’s Bucknell, Lafayette, Union, or Richmond, etc, these are all either majority male or very close to 50:50. In a world where the college population is 40:60 male:female, this is a big deal.
The other effect that it has on a campus is that engineering and business people tend to be “nuts & bolts” or “bottom line” thinkers, which means, at least in some cases, less interest in the world of ideas. I’m thinking of one young woman who posted here a year or two ago about how much she was looking forward to college to debate issues and to exchange thoughts on big ideas in seminar glasses. She wrote about how disappointed she was that she didn’t experience this at LAC Union College (majority male, has engineering majors) because too many classmates seemed bored and disinterested. Her experience may or may not have been representative, but it is an example of how the experience in an LAC may shift when general classes and electives are populated with students who are there for different reasons.
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Business + engineering make up about 36% of recent graduates; the other 64% are in what are usually called liberal arts majors. The percentage in liberal arts majors is higher than that in colleges overall (liberal arts majors make up fewer than half of graduates at colleges overall).
The USAFA, USMA, and USNA all had a majority of graduates in liberal arts majors (although just barely a majority for the USAFA). However, all of the students are there for pre-professional goals (the goals being officers in the US military).
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I don’t think one can draw this conclusion in any overarching type of way, it seems like a
large leap with no supporting data. I would be interested in seeing any supporting data.
IMO the relatively bigger impact on the vibe/experience of an LAC is having a 60:40 or greater Female/Male ratio, rather than offering majors/programming/other incentives to entice more males to attend a given college, including having a lower GPA floor on male GPA when building a class each admission cycle. There is data that many students prefer to attend a school with a gender balance closer to 50:50 which is one reason why any number of LACs work hard to get the gender balance as close as possible to 50:50. (Obviously I’m not talking about those who are interested in attending single gender schools.)
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In terms of size, it’s all relative. Bucknell was considered large when it was only 2800 u/g half a century ago. It’s larger now but then so are nearly all its competitors.
Perhaps it is because the ideas and issues that are interesting for her to debate and exchange thoughts on are not the same ones that business or engineering majors find interesting to debate and exchange thoughts on.
Only 21% of graduates in a recent class at Union College are non-liberal-arts majors (engineering and business/managerial economics), so it is not like they are the main presence there in any case.
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And also that the depth and breadth of offerings within the major(s) of interest are sufficient, since small departments may only offer the bare minimum upper level course work in the major.
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Note that while the Claremont colleges other than CGU are all considered LACs, they have varying emphases on majors offered and taken. Pomona seems to be more of what people tend to think of generically when “LAC” is mentioned. CMC is heavily skewed toward business-flavored economics. HMC has engineering, and is all science and math otherwise (other than the occasional student doing an off-campus major).
I note in fact Harvey Mudd is now a Special Focus: Technology, Engineering, and Sciences college. This is a change from its 2021 classification, when it was Baccalaureate Colleges: Arts & Sciences Focus.
I also just learned that bunch of research universitiers were also moved into this category. Unlike with Arts and Science, you can be in this category if your award level focus is baccalaureate OR HIGHER (which means I was wrong about this above). This category now includes the likes of Caltech, CMU, Clarkson, Mines, Georgia Tech, MIT, NJIT, RPI, Cooper Union, and WPI, and also Olin, Rose-Hulman, Milwaukee School of Engineering, and such.
It will be interesting to see if US News actually follows suit. In their last rankings they were still using the 2021 system, and so those tech-focused research universities were in the same category as, say, Harvard; Harvey Mudd was with say Williams; and Olin was with the Cal Polys.
But now MIT, say, is with Mudd and Olin. Makes sense to me, really, but it would really change a lot of the way people talk about the US News rankings if that became its own separate top level category.
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Nope. The topics for discussion are determined by the professor and the course readings.
My D attended Lafayette College and absolutely did not have this experience. However, she did choose to seek out a number of upper level, small, discussion based classes.
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Students taking a course to fulfill a general education requirement may be less engaged in the material than those taking the course as part of their major that is their primary academic interest.