<p>I went to a small liberal arts college in the South and am currently getting my PhD at a top 10 program in my field. Do I regret going to a SLAC? No, and if I had to do it over again I would still go to a LAC although probably a slightly larger and much richer one (my LAC had a student body of 2100 students and an endowment of around $215 million; I would this time choose one with a student body of about 6,000 students and a much larger set of resources).</p>
<p>Pros:</p>
<ol>
<li>Individual attention from professors, without vying for time with other students.</li>
<li>Small, discussion based classes. With less goofing off. I am TAing an intro psychology course with 200 students in it. The number of students whispering, giggling, checking email, shopping online and flipping through Facebook throughout the lecture is astounding. Nobody ever did that during the classes at my school. We didn’t even bring our computers to class because everything was a seminar, a discussion.</li>
<li>Strong focus on a liberal, well-rounded education. I got a strong foundation in my field (psychology) but I can also converse on a variety of topics.</li>
<li>Individualized strong research experience. I wanted to go into academia. It’s a myth that LAC students can’t get research experience, as research is still required of professors at LACs. They may not have the most expensive equipment or a huge lab, but what they also usually don’t have is graduate students. That means that they need the labor of undergraduates to help them with their lab, which means that as an undergrad researcher in a lab of 3, I had the responsibilities that a grad student normally would have as an undergrad. I was also paid for my research, and I started in my sophomore year. Many are encouraged to start as early as the second semester of their freshman year, and there was a LOT of research going on at my LAC. We were also in a college city with three large research universities located nearby (two of them very prestigious), and plenty of students did research with the professors at those schools.</li>
</ol>
<p>And at some schools, they DO have the best equipment and a large start-up budget. I’m on the other side, now - about to go on the job market in the fall - and most prestigious LACs have a research expectation that comes with start-up funds for buying sophisticated equipment. They expect you to involve undergraduates in their research and try to give you the ability to do that.</p>
<p>I watch the undergrads here at my Ivy. They work with postdocs and grad students, and not with the professors. They are not paid (not in my department, anyway). They get 1-2 years of experience, typically. Our PI does not know them individually, beyond their names, so our postdoc writes recommendations for them. Typically undergraduates do not get to work with that superstar professor as an undergrad, even if they are pushy and know how to ask. I think even the pushiest undergrad would still end up working with a postdoc in my department.</p>
<ol>
<li>Alumnae network, though small, is very tight. Meeting alumnae of my college is like meeting a sister, or a distant cousin. They are always willing to help and implicitly trust you even if they don’t know you very well. (I’m not implying that it’s not at larger schools.)</li>
</ol>
<p>Cons:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Starts to feel claustrophobic after 2 years.</p></li>
<li><p>Resources may or may not be lower, depending on where you go. Clearly my LAC doesn’t have as many resources as Emory or Duke, but a Swarthmore or Amherst may be able to match what a student could get at a place like that.</p></li>
<li><p>Programs and majors can be more limited. At my school, in the psychology department, you were mostly limited to the basic foundational classes plus a few pet specialties of some professors (adolescent psychology, African-American psychology, etc.) There wasn’t a health psychology class in my major until they hired a health psychologist after I graduated. At other schools you may get varied and interesting classes like Drugs and Behavior or Psychology of Human Sexuality.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>HOWEVER, I will say that my psychology department’s foundational course offerings and programs, IMO, compare favorably to the students here at my Ivy. Our general psychology introductory course spanned two semesters whereas theirs is only one, so they get less information crammed into a very short period of time whereas I felt like my introductory course helped me pick the subfield I wanted because we spent more time on the subfields. Here, the students are only required to take one laboratory class, whereas my program required two. And my program offered an advanced statistics course that was a requirement of the program (students could either take that course or take a counseling course), whereas this one only has a basic stats class. My Statistics II course set me up to be a methodologist and quantitative scientist on the grad level. I also have to say that while the classes were less of the “interesting” variety, there were also more classes focused on professional psychology, and I saw more students doing non-research based internships that were focused within psychology than here. We were also required to take a unifying senior seminar and there is none here. So in many ways, I think that my LAC department’s undergraduate program is stronger than this one’s even though this is an Ivy with a top 20 grad program.</p>
<p>I also think I learned to write better. The paper requirements at my undergrad were far more rigorous than the ones here, most likely because grading 20 papers is much easier than grading 200 even when you have 6 TAs to help you. But IMO, it shows in the writing. I’ve been baffled at some of the writing I’ve gotten from bright Ivy students. That’s just within my department, though - I have an RA who’s a philosophy major and they are always writing papers.</p>
<ol>
<li>Library holdings. That was a biiiig con at my LAC, which shared a library with two other LACs in a consortium. To be fair, even among those three LACs the total number of undergrads was about 8,000, so it’s not like it was overcrowded. But this meshes with resources, so the library holdings were smaller and I had less access to research papers I needed, plus our ILL was weaker. I LOOOOOVE my grad university’s library system, I am SO spoiled here. More places to study, and I can obtain virtually any book or article I want here.</li>
</ol>
<p>This is important even if you are not doing research, as most classes require papers.</p>