They gave me a pretty competitive COA compared to UT Arlington, but im worried being a college instead of a university its going to lack research opportunities and grad school competitiveness.
My D graduated from Laf a few years ago. She found multiple research opportunities during her college years and was published in a peer reviewed journal. D and a number of her friends had excellent success in terms of grad school acceptances (in many different disiplines). At least for my D, I think her grad applications benefited from strong, personalized LORs from professors who knew her very well.
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thank you!
Could depend upon the particular type of research projects that are of interest to you.
With the current administration freezing research funds at most of the top universities, there may be fewer opportunities and some layoffs of profs whose research funds are being held back.
I can’t speak to Lafayette specifically, but students at strong LACs are (I believe) even likelier to end up at grad school than students at large universities. There could be a number of reasons why – students who go to LACs might want the kind of close contact with faculty members that is similar to working with grad school mentors, they have an easier time getting on their professors’ research projects, or the LAC vibe is often more uniformly academicky and collegial than the university vibe (where there could be highly academic-minded niches but also a lot of other things going on). These are vast generalizations, of course, and I know there are plenty of universities that are academically intense and/or send a lot of undergrads to grad school, but if you look at lists of schools that have exceptionally high rates of alums heading to grad schools and academically demanding professional programs, you’ll see a lot of LACs.
ETA: This isn’t a new trend. In my Ph.D. program at UW-Madison (I finished – yikes! – nearly 20 years ago), most of the people I knew had gone to either LACs or Ivy+ type schools.
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My friend is a professor there in a STEM field. She publishes quite a bit, all with undergraduate co-authors.
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Also may have to do with the fact that most LACs do not have programs such as business, engineering, nursing, etc. which lead students directly to jobs. (FWIW Laf does offer engineering.)
True (although more these days have business and ENG than they used to, the latter often in 3-2 collaborations with other schools). I think it’s a self-selected population in part that gives LACs these vibes and these grad school admissions results. So if a student is thinking grad school in the future, a LAC might make sense because they’ll be more likely to find their people.
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As a suggestion, revisit your premise.
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I will repeat what I have written any number of times - 67% of the top 100 colleges with the highest percent of students who go on to receive PhDs are Liberal Arts Colleges. That includes 6 of the top 10.
There are a number of reasons for that, but the most important message is that LACs are excellent at preparing their graduates for grad school applications, and for success in grad school.
One of my kid’s best friends from high school attended Lafayette, and is now in the Robotics PhD program at UW-Madison.
That will not be dependent on the college that the OP attends.
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Thanks everyone, I think I have a better grasp on it now.
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As a tangential aspect that may be of interest, according to Princeton Review survey-based information, Lafayette students appreciate their science lab facilities:
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Odds are that you will actually be better prepared at Lafayette than at Arlington because you’ll have smaller classes, hence professors who know you and have been selected to teach there in part for their ability to involve undergraduates in research.
You’ll also be surrounded by highly qualified peers who are serious about their work, which is very conducive to all reaching their maximum potential (although they can be serious about having fun, too, of course - put together several hundreds young people 18-22 you can’t expect a convent). But because it’s residential, everyone is focused on making the most of their educational opportunity. It’s a great set up if you’re smart, hard-working, and ambitious.
Lafayette is known for its science programs BTW. If they gave you a good deal/a better COA than UTA, jump on the opportunity 
and congratulations 
it’s a tough admit.
Btw, in the US, a college is a university, unlike Canada or the UK where the word means something different nowadays.
There’s nothing wrong with being named “college” - Lafayette is a university that’s smaller and private.
Sometimes, in the US, “college” connotes/indicates “old, private institution”; the earlier system of reference was the Oxford and Cambridge colleges that form Oxford/Cambridge universities. For instance, you have Harvard College (the original college) and if you add Harvard Law School, Harvard Med School, etc, you have Harvard University. Here, “college” just means “the original university dedicated to undergraduate education”.
In the mid to late 19th century the US system found new inspiration in German universities and also through the Land Grant “Morrill” Act which created state/public universities dedicated to Agriculture, Engineering… In that set up, “college” means what other English countries call “Faculty”, ie., Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science = College of Liberals Arts, College of Science.
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Lafayette is a college (not a university) as it does not offer greaduate degrees. The advantage is that undergrads do not have to compete with grad students for research opportunities and no grad students/TAs teach classes. In general, class sizes at a LAC will be smaller as well.
Yes, that was the point 
- OP worried about Lafayette being a “college” not “university” and I explained where the name came from, how it’s not an indication whether one is better than the other.
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