Looking ahead - LACs vs. small universities

interesteddad
Thu, 08 May 2008 17:47:19 +0000

I want to make an observation about course offerings.

College is intended to teach students the tools for researching, analysizing, forming an argument, and communicating that argument. At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter whether a course is the on the behavior development of the fruit fly or the behavior development of the horse fly. The techniques being learned are the same.

While it may be impressive to have 100s of courses in the catalog, each one focusing on the development of a different kind of fly, that’s not really necessary for an undergrad who will be taking 10 to 12 semester-courses in the major, six to eight of which are largely standardized topics, regardless of the school.

There are exceptions to this, including two biggies:

a) If you are child prodigy, already deep into college level courses in high school, then you need a university setting because you will be on to grad school courses before your undergrad years are complete. This is most frequently seen in national-level math whiz kids.

b) If you are the rare 17 year old who not only has a specialty picked out, but an obscure specialty. For example, if you already know that you want to specialize in 15th century Chinese History, then you better go to a university because few if any LACs are going to offer more than one course in 15th century Chinese history.

The vast majority of high school students don’t fall into either of those categores. Their concerns should be not the course titles, but whether the professors can teach undergrads, the sizes of the classes, the quality of the discussion (if any), the interaction and feedback from the professor (if any) on written assignments, and so forth.