Our family values all sorts of diversity too, but we feel a bit differently on the LAC vs university matter you raise. Cutting to the chase, I think both can lead to a healthy and educational exposure to a range of perspectives and experiences, but through somewhat different means.
I think it’s true that a large student body tends to increase the odds of having more interests and perspectives, not to mention more academic offerings. And I think it’s true that undergraduates can benefit from time spent around grad students. At some institutions grad students will appear to undergrads far more approachable than certain professors.
However, it seemed to us that opportunities to learn from those different points of view dissipate somewhat when students move off campus. Students living off campus with a couple (like minded?) friends after their first or second year might have fewer chance interactions in dorms, cafeterias, or recreational facilities than students living on campus. While some private universities manage high levels of on-campus housing all four years, this isn’t as much a given as it is for typical LACs. The percentage of undergrads living on campus is a metric families might want to consider if putting a high value on facilitating new social connections all four years. USNWR has a convenient rank for those interested.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/most-on-campus
If one shares the view that professors themselves are both the primary learning resource on a campus and have disparate experiences and views themselves, then access to professors follows as a sensible consideration in exposure to a breadth of backgrounds and informed opinions. Prof access is where LACs perhaps have their clearest advantage since there are no grad students and undergraduate teaching is prioritized over research.
In my opinion, while a larger community may have more total viewpoints on campus, size in itself can sometimes stifle civil dialog. It’s a little easier to remain civil when a person has seen daily or even shared pleasant moments with someone they disagree with. Recently, while student protests elsewhere were dominating the news, I heard an anecdote about an LAC president taking initiative on their own campus before things could potentially reach a point where sides weren’t listening to one another. They invited representatives from student clubs with opposing views over to their house for dinner to share, calmly and politely, what they wanted the other side to hear. Polite doesn’t mean easy— I’m sure both sides were challenged. But my impression is the challenges were of the sort one might expect in a probing classroom discussion, and the dialog continued after the evening concluded. Hopefully such occurrences aren’t rare to that school or any other, but I would guess conversations exploring sensitive and opposing views with undergrads over dinner with the head of the institution occur less frequently at a large research university.
One of our kids was on the fence about whether they wanted to go the LAC or university route before realizing they won’t be able to attend an LAC for grad school! If one values living their own diverse experiences and plans to go to grad school, with few exceptions they can only attend an LAC as an undergrad while they can still enjoy the benefits of a university experience as a grad student later.
All that said, LACs certainly aren’t the best environment for every undergraduate. Costs, locations, major availability, D1 sports, or even just anonymity could all be valid reasons to prefer a particular university. For many if not most, both environments can be great, and which is better will come down to specific trade-offs of the schools admitted to.
Circling back to the original article by Roth, I agree students can learn to push themselves in new ways by attending schools that force them to study different things or interact more with professors. But I would contend such challenges are best pursued by those who want them, thereby still representing a type of fit.
To me the biggest irony with Roth’s piece wasn’t that his excellent college has a reputation for leaning one way or another politically. After all, it appears the overwhelming majority do! Rather, what I would’ve guessed about the school from the article is that it has extensive distribution requirements to force students out of their comfort zones academically. To me this Roth’s key sentence:
“Either way, a college education should enable you to discover capabilities you didn’t laeven know you had while deepening those that provide you with meaning and direction.”
I could be mistaken, but my understanding is that his college’s distribution requirements are on the lighter side. Incidentally, there’s a resource for getting quick (and imperfect) takes on distribution requirements I will link to below. I wouldn’t take the letter grades as an actual measure of overall education quality, they are really just measuring breadth of distribution requirements.
https://www.whatwilltheylearn.com
