Liberal Arts Undegrad at Ivies?

[modestmelody]

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ModestMelody, take a look at the Wikipedia article for St. John’s College.
Princeton Review:</p>

<h1>No. 1 in the nation for “accessibility of teachers”.</h1>

<h1>No. 1 in the nation for “best class discussion”.</h1>

<h1>No. 4 in the nation for “best overall quality of life”.</h1>

<h1>No. 4 in the nation for “best overall academic experience”.</h1>

<h1>No. 6 in the nation for “best teachers”.

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<p>Of course, Princeton Review does these based upon student surveys where students self-report satisfaction. I’m not surprised that these things are reported so highly at St. John’s since a) It’s a small LAC and never tries and pretends to be anything else so accessibility to teachers and teaching quality should be high b) Satisfaction amongst students with their experience should be high when the program is so clearly articulated, meaning that students who attend have high “buy-in” to the educational philosophy. If that’s the case, and the school is accurately conveying its expectation and model, these are the results I’d expect regardless of whether it was a GB school or not.</p>

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“According to a study published by the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium, based on data from 1992 through 2001, St. John’s ranked first nationally in percentage of graduates attaining doctorates in both Humanities and English literature. In addition, the college ranked among the top ten institutions in political science, linguistics, foreign languages, area and ethnic studies, and math and computer sciences.”

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<p>Again, Ph.D. production is always much higher in LACs (look at Reed, Harvey-Mudd, etc), and especially high at an LAC which has a very strongly articulated liberal arts education philosophy, GB or not. Not super surprising to me, and not based upon what happens at St. Johns, rather, those who would be interested in St. Johns in the first place.</p>

<p>As for how are they successful without high selectivity-- 1) A good education in general, 2) Measures are stacked in such a way that other peers may perform similarly, 3) Students who would study political science, literature, and various other humanities at the Ph.D. would likely engage in the kind of GB theoretical basis before/as part of specializing in those areas, so for them the additional work is solely in the sciences. CS being the anomaly with this explanation, unless you take into account the general proclivity of LAC students toward earning PhDs and figure that CS is one of the few fields where expensive equipment is not necessary to do top notch research.</p>

<p>I’m not saying these aren’t really interesting numbers and great examples of outcomes to be proud of SJCs success, however, I don’t find that kind of evidence to be particularly compelling for a GB curriculum or even necessarily connected to GB. Why isn’t Columbia on some other playing field when it comes to Ph.D. production when they’re more selective and also follow the GB model? In this case I think we see correlation and not causation, and many factors which come with an environment that would accept or construct a GB curriculum (rather than the effectiveness of the method itself) being the causes.</p>