The LAC is great because it is all profs teaching. Always.
D acts like a TA in the lab — she’s not teaching, just there to help guide (like if a student is partway through a problem and gets stuck), to check people out when they are done, etc. It’s a job that’s great for a sophomore. But at a university it would be a job done by a graduate student. That was my point.
I went to a large D1 flagship. I had lots of grad student TAs that taught my STEM classes. Many did not speak clear English. It was not ideal.
Small classes and low student to faculty ratios are not necessarily a function of there being no grad students. Indeed, Caltech, which we were discussing, has a very low student to faculty ratio and many small classes.
In fact, while Harvey Mudd does have a much higher percentage of small classes and lower student to faculty ratio than, say, Texas, Caltech is even more so.
I don’t want to belabor this, though. If some people really believe the educational experience for undergrads is more similar at Caltech and Texas than Caltech and Harvey Mudd, OK. I just don’t at all share that view.
Note I am one of the maniacs who thinks both “small” and “liberal arts” are independently meaningful.
So, I do think it matters that there are small colleges which are not only liberal arts and sciences. Swarthmore to me is a relatively minor deviation because they have a relatively small general engineering program. But Rose Hulman, say, is to me small but not liberal arts.
Wesleyan would argue that it’s the presence of grad students that enable labs to run while its professors are teaching, and that it’s a win-win for everyone because it means more activity during the actual school year in addition to the summer when, typically, LAC profs have more time to devote to research. They also have an impact on the kind of research being done.
OTOH, Wesleyan would also argue that at such a small scale, undergraduates and graduate students commingle more and that the departments are much more collaborative than they would be at a typical R1 university.
I know this is the LAC thread but not all big flagships are the same, just like not all LACs are the same. My D had zero grad students teaching STEM classes at Purdue. Zero. Only full professors teach courses. And from a student perspective, she’s much rather have a PhD student running labs than a peer, although I can see that being advantageous for the student getting to TA. She also did research with a prof. Yes there were grad students in the lab too but she worked right along side them, had weekly meetings with the prof, and he even spent an hour with me when I got to tour his research facility before graduation.
And she was a course grader, and asked to TA a recitation when she was a senior for a freshman class.
Thank you. My daughter worked as an SI in one of her classes for several semesters, she was never taught by a grad student, she participated in research with profs for all 4 years, traveled with one, went to dinner with her profs, is still friends with them etc. She also attended a flagship.
I had a great education at Texas, too. I had just one class taught by a grad student, and he did a good job. I loved going to a big school. It was like a big city with many small neighborhoods. You don’t see 40,000 people all at once, except at football games which are awesome. I think I had only two huge classes and one of them, American History, ended up being my favorite class in college.
When I was a grad student doing research, I had undergrads working for me.
Except for being an undergraduate TA/grader, my kids had the same experience at two different large universities. It’s hard to compare the research happening at an R1 to the research at an LAC. There is tremendous opportunity for undergraduate participants at R1s. My kids also had very positive learning experiences with grad students, PhD students, and post-docs in labs and recitations. They can add to the educational experience in a very positive way.
Were getting it all wrong folks! We should apply to BUNI, or MUNI, or SUNI, or SSUNI.
Big Uni
Medium Uni
Small Uni
Super Small Uni
To mix it up and streamline everything, let’s add more acronyms: MWBUNI, SEMUNI, NESSUNI, etc…
There will be a quiz at 10 am EST. BTOBS! (Bonus point if you get that acronym.)
Why repetitively use three letters that never vary and therefore serve no distinguishing purpose (“UNI”)? This isn’t the UK, we don’t have to call every higher education institution or program “uni”.
But we could keep one letter to describe institutional size, for people who find that relevant.
For people who find the following distinction relevant for reasons discussed above, you could use just one of those letters to distinguish between the undergrad programs at a primarily undergraduate institution, aka colleges, or at institutions with robust graduate and professional schools, aka universities.
You could use the last two letters to describe the academic focus of the program, like liberal arts and sciences versus science and technology or so on.
So, if you wanted to go to a large science and technology focused program at a university, you could call that a LSTU.
And if you wanted instead to go to a small liberal arts and sciences focused undergraduate program at a college, you could call that a . . . SLAC.
