It’s LAC, not SLAC

College Confidential Community
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I’m not sure why it seems people are increasingly using the acronym SLAC to refer to almost any liberal arts college, or even a liberal arts program. I kind of wish they would stop though. I have never thought it was necessary to add the S to LAC and it seems meaningless. (I’m aware that within universities there is typically a college of arts and science, but since I’ve been on CC at least, no one usually calls the college in the university an LAC.)

At first, I thought SLAC meant southern LAC. It doesn’t. AFAIK, SLAC has only fairly recently (last few years, maybe) come into use when people want to refer to very selective LACs, such as SWAP, Carleton, Grinnell, Claremont Consortium, or NESCACs, and various others.

I just saw a thread in which someone referred to a university with 5000+ students and an over 80% acceptance rate as SLAC. I don’t know if that person is simply confused, or referring just to the college within the university. At any rate, can we vote to stop using the term SLAC and just go back to LAC? Rant over😆

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I thought the S was for “small”!

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Really? Pretty sure it’s “selective” because LACs are always small, or they are supposed to be. :smile:

And I guess your post is a perfect illustration of why we need to dump the S!

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Me too.

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From Google search:

small liberal arts college

SLAC, an acronym meaning “small liberal arts college"

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Proving my point again!

S is either redundant, or misused, or plain wrong, hahaha.

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I would say…most SLAC schools are way smaller than larger universities. I never thought it meant selective.

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I think you’re deliberately trying provoke me and I might have to flag your post! Just LAC! :smile::rofl::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Maybe we can take a poll, to ban the S and just use LAC. Based on content across Cc it has been used variably to mean small or selective. The first is redundant, for sure. The second is redundant in the CC community of preferred LACs🤣

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I think it would be hard and probably pointless to ban people from using S, but it’s clear from this post at least that it causes confusion.

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LOL. I was wondering why everyone started adding the S a year or so ago when we had been consistently using LAC for many years before that. The fact that people can’t even agree on what the S stands for is comical, but demonstrates that it is unnecessary and detracts from consistent understanding. Happy to go back to LAC, as it has been long before someone snuck in the S and everyone followed suit.

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I actually kinda like the term Small Liberal Arts College.

I do think it is important to know that liberal arts and sciences colleges can either be independent (or at least part of institutions with only very small grad programs where the college is easily the dominant partner), or can be units within a medium to large research university, including possibly other undergrad units and also robust grad and professional programs.

I guess ideally the term would be Small Independent Liberal Arts and Sciences College, SILASC. That is obviously unwieldy, but probably my choice for shorter would be I-LAC, because I really think it is the independence from a medium-to-large research university that is important, as is the possibility of an LAC which is not an I-LAC. R-LAC? Something like that.

But I am probably not going to be able to force enough people to start saying I-LAC and R-LAC (although if anyone wants to join me in trying, let me know!).

SLAC, though, seems to basically mean the same thing as I-LAC, and in fact it isn’t a bad proxy because at least most of the time, I-LACs are in fact smaller than R-LACs. Like, Penn’s R-LAC is over 6000 students. Pitt’s R-LAC is over 10000. Michigan’s R-LAC is over 17000!

So, functionally, SLAC and LLAC would be mostly equivalent to I-LAC and R-LAC. And in fact, If you wanted to introduce MLAC for the LACs at Penn and such, that would arguably be a more informative system than I-LAC and R-LAC.

So anyway, absent the I-LAC/R-LAC movement taking off, I will vote for keeping SLAC. But I also will vote for people using terms like MLAC and LLAC . . . which will probably not take off either.

I am also not deterred by any confusion during the transition period. I am not sure how I knew this, but I always knew SLAC meant Small Liberal Arts College. If some people are just learning that now, fine, I am prepared to be accommodating of different learning curves.

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Or, to avoid confusion, just LAC.
Voila!

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Unnecessary. We have been using LAC for years to mean what you call SILASC. No one was confused. Everyone understood that some major universities also provided liberal arts educations but they were not what was meant by LACs.

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Since that fails to distinguish SLACs/I-LACs from MLACs/SLACs/R-LACs, I believe it has always been more confusing in a substantive way.

Indeed, not to get off on a whole tangent, but I think it was really the US News that forced on the world this idea that the fundamental division was between undergrad programs at major research universities and undergrad programs not at major research universities. That in my view has caused an ENORMOUS amount of avoidable confusion, with many people cross-shopping the wrong undergrad programs.

So not only am I not going to vote for preserving that classification system as US News defined it, I am looking forward to a revolution against our popular magazine overlords.

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Did they?

That has not been my experience. My experience is many people who absorbed the US News National Universities versus National Liberal Arts Colleges classification system were often deeply confused about the variety of what US News called LACs, the variety of what US News called National Universities, which such undergrad programs a person with given interests should be cross-shopping, and so on.

So I don’t view the US News classification system as a gold standard, I think it was (and remains) a really poor and often misleading classification system.

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Since I joined CC in 2014, it’s just been LAC, which means Liberal Arts College. There are many LACs and it’s easy to Google a list of them. Using the acronym LAC doesn’t refer to the college within a larger university, unless someone chose to wordily say, for example, “Cornell University has 8 colleges, one of which is its LAC, The College of Arts and Sciences.” But why? No one would ever need or want to do that, even if they technically could I suppose.

I don’t think anyone is referring to USNWR lists.

IMO, it’s not confusing to just use LAC, as everyone knows exactly what is meant by the three letters. The confusion has arisen from using the S.

At any rate, this discussion is probably not going to end up being moved to the Politics Forum, and for that we should all rejoice.

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I thought it stood for “sententious.” :joy:

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https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/1053552.page

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Maybe it stands for Scandalous?