^^ The user stated they are full pay.
@Dolemite - you’re not alone-- unfortunately a lot of people incorrectly believe that Penn has a more vocational feel but the reality of the student experience in the College of Arts and Sciences at Penn is very much the opposite! Students in the College at Penn are there for their love of the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, etc. If they ever feel that their interests lie elsewhere, they are free to explore other programs and encouraged to take advantage of the resources of Penn’s preprofessional undergrad schools, graduate and professional schools. I always felt this system maximized the liberal arts feel within the College while never limiting students from exploring what existed outside of the liberal arts.
20: sorry, I'd somehow missed it!
What about URichmond?
ASU Barrett - with their own separate “campus”?
Rice is an obvious choice of course, as is URochester.
The Ivies with the greatest percentage of undergrads:
Brown
Dartmouth
Princeton
Cornell
Duke, Northwestern, Dartmouth and UT Austin are four corners with a bunch of other excellent options in the middle.
Duke has the greatest grad school presence/influence among the undergraduate programs of these and the other schools mentioned above. This by no way limited to Pratt for engineering or the life-sciences track for pre-med. Durham is on the rise, the Research Triangle is a mecca of inovation. Plus 7000 acre forested campus with one or two trails. A must visit.
Northwestern has an outstanding internship program for engineering and applied science majors. Small but dedicated alumni group has propped up this program with great results for students, employers and the University. It is Chicago and it is suburban, which can anywhere between -2 and +2 depending on the applicant.
Dartmouth is a bit more targeted but the finance/economics, public policy and social sciences programs are A+. Check out the range of topic specific soph and junior research/internship programs funded by foundations with direct connections to these topics. PS a very different kind of winter than Lakeshore.
UT is the sleeper. The University’s commitment to undergraduate research is woven into the Plan II curriculum rather than being a student initiated extra-curricular. Funding, facilities, resources - and Austin - are hard to beat. If you plan to visit any large state schools, this is the one.
All of these schools have Academic recognition programs that provide access to resources in addition to the standard program. Plan II, Ramshorn and Forty Acres at UT, Robertson, University and AB Duke at Duke for example.
PS Rice has stellar academics, a quirky vibe and great resources for internships in applied science (ME, ChemE etc). Heat, smog, mosquitos, traffic are all to be considered.
Good luck, its nice to be wanted.
From interviewing Penn graduates, I do agree they have great flexibility to have dual majors, more than
other schools. Liked the end results.
Have a son at Cornell. Most beautiful campus around for those who love the outdoors.
Yes high ratio of undergraduates to grads, but I feel that the attention given to undergrads depends on the
department/major. My son changed colleges and had better attention from one college than the other.
He was encouraged to do undergrad research in his old major, by a caring prof, but profs in his new major
seem to not care if the students live or die, and don’t teach at all. They are left to figure out everything
for themselves. So my advice is, depends on your major in some colleges, do some digging.
Brandeis, University of Rochester, Dartmouth.
Brandeis uses the slogan “You don’t have to choose,” meaning between a research university and a small liberal arts college, indicating its unusual status as a well regarded research university that is still small enough (3700 undergrads) to provide the small classes and community feel of a LAC.
Cornell has nearly 15,000 undergraduates. UPenn has nearly 10,000 undergrads. Intro classes will have hundreds of people in them. Don’t get me wrong - these are truly great universities, but they are hardly LAC-like. I think at some point you exchange the LAC-type experience for the large university experience, and colleges that big fall on the other side of that line.
My list of research universities that treat their undergrads like they are at an LAC would include places like Princeton, Yale, UChicago, Duke, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Rice, Wash U and Carnegie Mellon. There are more, of course.
Most large cities have parks and places where you can run. I used to run in New York (which has a huge running community); Columbia is easy walking distance to Riverside Park, which has a decently long running loop, and one can easily walk or ride down to the beginning of Central Park as well. Also, there are lots of large cities where you don’t have to worry about safety - safety is not only an urban thing, and there are smaller cities and suburban areas that are less safe than some big cities.
Some smaller research universities:
Clark University, in Worcester - about 2,000 undergrads and 1,000 graduate students, and an R3 university.
Lehigh University - about 5,000 undergrads and 2,000 grad students, an R2 university
Villanova University - about 6,000 undergrads and 3,000 grad students, an R3 university
College of William & Mary - also an R2, solid research university, but more undergrads (8,000) than grad students (2,000)
Duquesne - an R2, with about 6,000 undergrads and 5,000 grad students
Marquette - also an R2 research university with about 8,000 undergrads and 3,600 grad students
Southern Methodist - a research 2 university with ~6,000 undergrads and 5,000 grad students.
R2 university is a Carnegie classification designation that means that the university has high research output, but not quite at the level of a UT, Harvard, Michigan, etc. Still a robust research environment and lots of funding, but usually fewer graduate students and more emphasis on undergraduate education than the giant research universities. R3 is the same concept - they’re designated as “moderate” research activity, and have doctoral programs, so they are generally research active and have a culture of research going on but really have more of a focus on teaching and undergraduate education.
Another suggestion is Tulane University - a bit bigger, with 8,000 undergrads and 5,000 grad students. Tulane is an R1 - same bucket as Harvard and Michigan for example, but Princeton and Brown are also in there, so these colleges are quite diverse. University of Rochester is another one that’s around the same size.
Besides NU, ND and Rice, I also want to second the suggestions of UCSB’s SCS (https://www.ccs.ucsb.edu) and UT-Austin’s Plan II. Both of these are outstanding programs that could be a great fit in terms of what he’s looking for. In terms of nice places/weather, it’s hard to beat Santa Barbara.
Actually, while Penn does have about 9500 full time undergrads, the College of arts and sciences only has about 6000, which is only a little bigger than Yale. And again, Penn has a student to faculty ratio of 6:1 and over 70% of classes in the College have fewer than 25 students. In fact, there are only a handful of classrooms on campus that even have enough seats for about 100 students, never mind more than that. Large classes, even intro classes, are not common in the College. Penn also often offers several sections of it’s most popular courses to keep its classes small. So for example, this semester Penn has a section of General Chemistry I with a max enrollment of 135 students and it is simultaneously offering a section of General Chemistry I with 65 students. Both of those classes will probably be subdivided into even smaller recitations as well for students to review what was discussed in lecture. But having been an english and history major, I was never forced to take a large lecture as there were always interesting classes with 12-25 students available for me to take. So while the university is certainly a medium size undergrad school, Penn genuinely treats its students in the College like they’re at a LAC… because they are! Penn’s college of arts and sciences simply is a liberal arts college that’s comfortably integrated within a research university. Advising is outstanding from day one when students are given a peer mentor, a pre-major advisor and a College Office Advisor. Once students declare their majors they are assigned a faculty advisor within their major department and they keep all of the other advisors they’ve already been assigned, giving them plenty of resources to reach out to if they need advice or want to discuss anything from academics to their personal lives. I actually still talk to most of my advisors and I still talk to the professors who wrote my grad school recommendations as well. So in all, will there be larger classes than you might find at Amherst? Yes, for sure. But they’ll be few and far between and no student HAS to take the bigger classes if they don’t feel like those classes are well suited to their learning style.
Columbia is in a gorgeous neighborhood for running. Pull up a map of Riverside Park, which runs along the western side of the campus. There’s woods along there with a bird sanctuary. The park runs along the Hudson River with fresh air, inches from the water in some places. If that doesn’t please him, the Columbia campus has a park on the other side, the southern corner of which is 1 block from Central Park. In other words, he can run through one park and skip through “city” one block, and have all of gorgeous Central Park available. NYC is a wonderful place for running. Columbia also has lovely athletic facilities at the northern tip of Manhattan. The facilities abut Inwood Park, which is large and has some old growth forest remaining and for several years at least even had an eagle’s nest. If that’s not enough, distance runners also run north through Riverside Park, across the GW bridge to the Palisades on the Jersey side.
Agree with Rice, Duke and especially Plan II at UT Austin.
If our son hadn’t been admitted to Princeton, he’d be in Plan II along with a ChemE dual major. Research, LAC education and you can’t beat Austin for a young, single person!
What if the larger classes are required for one’s major?
http://www.upenn.edu/registrar/timetable/cis.html indicates that CIS 110, 120, 121, 160, 240, 262, 380 all have capacity greater than 100 students. These are all required for the computer science major, according to http://www.cis.upenn.edu/current-students/undergraduate/csci/req12.php .
History at Penn has some large classes, but the flexibility in choosing courses to fulfill requirements makes it easier to dodge the large classes in that major. Linguistics appears to be a small major at Penn, so the courses for majors appear to be small, although the recommended (not required) general introductory course LING 001 is large.
OP here. Wow, thank you! I am overwhelmed by the kindness you all have shown me in taking the time to provide me detailed answers to my question.
This thread has generated quite a list for me to look in to. So far we have:
UT Austin plan II
Rice
Case Western
Notre Dame
Wake Forest
Northwestern
Georgetown
Dartmouth
U Richmond
U Rochester
Tulane
U Pittsburgh
Boston College
Honors programs at state flagships
UCSB College of Creative Studies
Carnegie Mellon
UVA Jefferson scholarship
UNC
Duke
UChicago
UMiami florida
U Penn
ASU Bennett
Brown
Cornell
Brandeis
Columbia
Clark
Lehigh
Villanova
William and Mary
Duquesne
Marquette
Southern Methodist
Tulane
WUSTL
@treschicos I never knew about this program at UT Austin, so thanks for this.
@PennCAS2014 That is a wonderful description of penn and has put it back on our list. I had taken it off because of some comments by our local alumni interviewer who does an info session at our local high school. He said you have to love the city because you are at 44th and Walnut (making it sound very urban) and that you have to love finance majors even if you are not one because you will be nothing but surrounded by them. Also he seems to have a bit of an arrogant personality so it put us off the school, but you have put it back on the list.
http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=university+of+pennsylvania&s=all&pg=2&id=215062#programs indicates that 2,807 bachelor’s degrees were conferred by UPenn in 2014-2015. Of these, 593 (21% of the total) were in business, and 353 (13% of the total) of those were in finance.
Total liberal arts major bachelor’s degrees were 1,399 (50% of the total). That pre-professional majors make up about half of the bachelor’s degree appears higher than typical for highly selective universities, although there is still a substantial liberal arts presence.
@trudirexar Penn has a flexible curriculum and the ability to take courses in all schools it tends to attract students who have broad interests. For example, if he wanted to major in CS, with a minor linguistics, and a minor in history, he would be able to do that.
@julliet , @Dustyfeathers I love Columbia and am totally intrigued by the near eastern studies department (was watching some lectures on youtube), and on top of that have a few friends who live in the neighborhood and my grandmother did her masters at the Teacher’s College, but my son was thinking it was too urban. I’ll have him look at what you wrote and see if he can give it another look.
@blevine Cornell is on my son’s radar as his great-grandfather went there and it is the only school I know of that actually asks about grandparents and great-grandparents on the application. Not sure how much that would help. I am worried about the weather and the large size though, and the recent news about the young man who died a week or so ago mentioned that there is not enough on-campus housing for everyone so students live in private dorm-like places where it is easy to get isolated.
@walnuthill Heat, smog, and mosquitos! Oh no, that takes Rice off the list. I hear good things about the school but those are probably deal-breakers.
It’s interesting how we get swayed by incidents that are unlikely and by small bits of data that may be unfair to a school.
For example. @londondad mentioned Georgetown which is a great school, except that I attended a concert there once years ago and got threatened with a knife on P street as I was walking to the metro with a friend. This was 25 years ago now, but it is hard to forget.
@“Erin’s Dad” He is looking at the honors program at our state flagship. His counselor says it can be close to a safety for him, and it is a very good program and a good university although a bit too large and urban. Also we would be facing the problem that @ucbalumnus brings up with the over-popular computer science major and the need to apply for direct admission (and hope to get it) rather than be able to explore and pursue other passions for a bit.
25 years ago, or 1991, was near the peak of the crime wave in the US; crime has fallen substantially since then.