Cupcake- in what field? You can’t make a comparison without knowing the discipline.
To illustrate this point, let me tell you the story as how my D got her first (and only) research assistant-ship as an undergrad.
In a 1-week short course (free of charge for any student/faculty), one of the presenting professors handed out a problem to which solution was “left to the reader.” My D worked on it for a week, then came to the office of the professor to present her partial solution, and asked for guidance to a complete solution. The professor gave her some URLs for more reading materials. She came back the week after to ask for more details on a subject that caught her interest when she went through materials. This subject was only slightly related to the original problem.
At this point, the professor told her, “This is not really my domain. If you are more interested in the subject, come with me to Professor A’s office. I know he is doing some work in that field.” They both walked to Prof. A’s office.
Prof. A told them, “I handed that research over to Dr. H (a new post doc joining the lab a few weeks before). Please go see him at …”
My D went to meet with Dr. H. He recently obtained funding and approval for 2 undergrad RAs, but hadn’t had a chance to post the available positions. My D got the very first RA position and continued it for 2 years until she graduated.
@blossom He is interested in scocial sciences and humanities but as a gifted overacchiever, very strong in sciences as well. Undecided at this point but wants to do at least double major and if possible some fun minor as well. No pre-professional aspirations. Education and enlightenment along with ability to make a decent living and being able to help others are among life’s goals. He is naturally everything Ivies and LACs dream about in a student.
In general, I am a big fan of research universities. I loved mine. I loved my TAs. The TAs I loved went on to become big deals in their fields. I loved that there was a huge community around things that interested me, with lots of visitors coming through, and experts on practically everything close at hand.
However, life has taught me to be respectful of the somewhat different way LACs meet student needs. Hence, two anecdotes about kids I know very well.
Kid #1 was majoring in Environmental Policy at his LAC. He developed an interest in sustainable agriculture. First, the college got him funding for a summer research project in which he traveled all over the country to look at Community Supported Agriculture projects. Second, when he decided to take his research into action by creating a network of CSAs in the college town, the college provided seed capital and committed to be a significant participant. This resulted in creation of a vibrant, successful CSA network in the college area (and a very trendy aspect of the college’s food service – a great deal of locally grown vegetables). Third, he developed a roll-your-own major, Philosophy of Agriculture. The college decided it didn’t have anyone appropriate to supervise him, so it contacted with a professor at a public university about 50 miles away who was prominent in that field. Needless to say, Kid #1 had an awesome college education.
Kid #2 was a woman interested in computer science, but also in other subjects as well. She knew that her career was likely to be in computer science – there was a particular type of job she really hoped to qualify for – but she didn’t want to be limited to that in college, and most of the university programs that accepted her were engineering or computer science schools with limited liberal arts offerings. She went to a prestigious LAC that has never appeared anywhere on a list of great CS schools, where she double majored in CS and Linguistics, and did a semester abroad in India that she loved. The college funded her to do CS research during her second summer. Since she had funding attached to her, she was able to get a position in a cutting-edge lab of a professor at a big-name university engineering school. She hit it off well with the people in the lab, and continued working on their projects long-distance when she returned to college, and she returned to the lab on their dime the summer after her third year. She was hired for exactly the job she had hoped she would have someday, doing work that related directly to the research in which she had participated. Kid #2 also had an awesome college education.
I will say this: Of the cohort of my children’s friends and my friends’ children who are now in their late 20s, the ones who are having the most success achieving their impossible personal dreams are four kids who went to LACs, including the two discussed above (and the older sibling of one of them, who went to Amherst in fact). The kids who went to Harvard all wound up following the money. The kids who went to LACs – at least some of them – have been following their hearts. I find that impressive.
JHS, my kids all went to medium sized research U’s and have followed their hearts (one took a huge paycut last year for a job in public service, one is in the “dream job” which happens to be quite lucrative right now but that was not a given, etc.) I don’t think any type of college has a lock on who follows their heart vs. who sells out.
And to be honest- there are kids from poor families who don’t have the luxury of public service coming out of college. They have loans to pay off, and younger siblings to help, and maybe pay grandma’s heating bill during the winter, and so for them, “choosing” a lucrative career after college is less of a choice than it is for an upper middle class kid who has a safety net to fall back on.
Just saying.
Who’s picking the college? You or your son? Seriously. Has he left the decision to you?
In all honesty, there is no wrong choice and there is no bad choice. You perhaps are having trouble dealing with the opportunity cost. But it’s not yours; it’s his.
I’d love to know the student’s preference.
Not true at the state school my son attended (which was the University of Maryland at College Park). His department had plenty of research opportunities for undergraduates and made it easy for them to have access to those opportunities.
Add me to the list of people that disagree with the statement that UG research positions are difficult to get at public universities. All of my kids have attended publics and all of them have had no problems getting UG research positions.
My kids have also taken advantage of the opportunity to take grad level courses as UGs.
@blossom I agree perfectly that kids who go to large universities can follow their hearts, too (I have examples of that as well), and also that kids from low-income families may have constraints on their ability to take low-paying public service jobs. That wasn’t the kind of thing I was talking about. The LAC students who are pursuing their dreams are not really sacrificing income, and the Harvard students I accused of “following the money” were, in all but one case, affluent (or more) kids who chased really big-bucks jobs. The exception was a kid from an immigrant family who dropped out of medical school (in a funded MD/PhD program) to work at McKinsey. Sure, maybe she wanted to help her family, but there wasn’t any prospect that she would not have plenty of disposable income within a few years. Her parents were not begging her not to be a doctor.
Of the two LAC cases I described, one of the kids comes from a family that is pretty low income. His parents split before he was born, and his mother spent a good deal of his childhood on public assistance, although she’s a public school teacher now (and paid shockingly little in her impoverished school district – much less than her age x $1,000). His father is a nice guy, but sort of a hippie carpenter who has never worked more than necessary to support himself at a subsistence level. The kid worked for a year after high school, then went to a fancy LAC on close to full financial aid. Post-college, he’s an entrepreneur who owns his own business, which he started with practically no capital besides his own unpaid labor. The other came from a modestly affluent family, and her dream job is decently paid with significant benefits.
One thing my DH observed is that if you are looking for people who are doing cutting edge research in science they are rarely at LACs.
FWIW my nephew at Rice started working in a lab at Rice during freshman orientation week. His research got featured on NPR and he eventually got a Goldwater Fellowship. There was no shortage of opportunities for undergrads at that particular university.
I had mostly great TAs at Harvard, many of whom were only a year or two away from being great professors. But over half my classes were small and taught only by a professor.
To a far greater degree than most acknowledge, students at even the most elite research universities spend much more time in big classes than students at LACs. That matters to some students, not to others. You can do the math yourself by looking at section I of the CDS.
Princeton, for example, reports 35 classes of 100 or more students for the fall of 2017, out of a total of 888 classes. That might seem like not many large classes, but by definition each of those classes has at least 100 students enrolled in it, for a minimum of 3500 student enrollments in such classes (not necessarily 3500 unique students, as some may take 2 or more while others take none). At the other end of the scale they report 324 classes of 2 to 9 students, which seems like a lot until you do the math and see that at a maximum, 2915 students are enrolled in classes of that size. So students at Princeton take more very large (100+) than very small (<10) classes.
Of course, not every 100+ class has exactly 100 students, and not every <10 class has exactly 9 students. If we assume the 100+ classes average 115 students and the <10 classes average 7, the numbers become even more lopsided: 4025 student enrollments in classes of 100+, versus 2268 in classes of <10, nearly a 2-to-1 ratio.
Similar assumptions would show about equal numbers of student enrollments in classes of 50-99 students and classes of 10-19 students. So although Princeton can rightly boast that 73% of its classes are small (fewer than 20 students) and only 10.8% of its classes are large (50+), the reality is that Princeton students on average probably spend somewhat more time in large than in small classes.
Contrast that with a top LAC like Haverford which has 0 classes of 100+ and only 3 classes of 50-99 students, compared to 144 classes of 2-9 and 137 classes of 10-19 students. Again making some reasonable assumptions about average class size within each category, we can surmise that in a typical semester Haverford has over 3,000 student registrations in small (<20) classes and only 225 student registrations in large (50+) classes, including none at all in very large (100+) classes.
Some students enjoy large lecture classes, or a mix of large and small classes. But for a student who strongly prefers or especially thrives in small classes, a top LAC is a much better choice.
Isn’t today decision day? Do tell.