<p>I attended Reed. My son attended Chicago. Reed and Chicago are similar in academic philosophy. But aside from some obvious differences between the two colleges (Reed is a liberal arts college, i.e., it’s small; Chicago is a university and each entering first-year class is about as large as Reed’s entire student body) they go about things differently. Chicago has its core curriculum. Formally, Reed does not have a core. Instead it has its mandatory humanities sequence (Hum 110) that’s essentially an introduction to the classics followed by a second-year option “civ” course that can be focused on Western Civ (Hum 210) or some other. Beyond that, Reed has a set of distribution requirements in math/science, humanities, social science, and language that may be a lot like Chicago’s core by another name. But the big difference in the end is that while at Reed every student takes that same year-long first year Hum 110 course (which is tantamount to about 4 semester-long courses), at Chicago there is no single course that all students must take. I think this gives Reedies a common language of discourse based on that shared experience that Chicago students may not get. There’s more common intellectual discourse and experience at Reed among students with widely different majors (from math to art to anthropology to biology), while Chicago students tend more toward pre-professional thinking (pre-law, pre-med, pre-business, etc. (there is no business major, but a huge number major in economics, which takes them to business later)).</p>
<p>Beyond that, however, at both colleges the faculty have high expectations of the students. Both colleges ask students to do a lot of independent work, perhaps more so at Reed, however, with its universal requirement of a senior thesis (it’s optional for honors students at Chicago). On the other hand, at Chicago students have a broader variety of courses to choose from, including graduate courses; and they have Chicago (I’m not denigrating Portland at all, but it’s no Chicago).</p>
<p>Because of their “intellectual” orientation, both colleges send substantial proportions of their graduates on to doctoral studies (a larger fraction at Reed than at Chicago – <a href=“http://web.reed.edu/ir/outcomes.html[/url]”>http://web.reed.edu/ir/outcomes.html</a>).</p>