@exlibris97 Is it that big of a deal? I went to a top LAC and most of my upper division courses were explicitly modeled after intro-level graduate courses, according to the syllabi- very independently focused, seminar style, research intensive. Whether or not that’s true, I’m not sure, but I’d trust my professors to know what that is like. Course selection is important for admissions to graduate school, yet you see disproportionate number of graduates from LACs, so a limited course selection doesn’t seem to be that harmful for academic prospects. As for studying at the top graduate programs- I’ve heard that most graduate schools don’t hold a candle to the academics at my LAC from many friends who’re now pursuing MAs, MSs, MBAs, MPHs, and so forth. Again- this is hearsay and I don’t have any personal experience to back that up- but if it were true, the 600 courses taught by excellent professors would have been much more than enough for me to have a robust academic experience, and I would have not ventured out to the graduate schools. We only needed 32 courses to graduate as well. Of course, if I were to exclusively specialize only in one core field, a LAC might be restrictive, as few offer a huge depth of unique courses for all of their majors. But I don’t think the students who go to LACs tend to be that way.
One of D’s biggest complaints about her lac is that she can only take 4 courses a semester so 32 overall and will never be able to take all the ones she’s interested in.
@exlibris97 “There are huge advantages in being able to take graduate courses with graduate students. You don’t compete with them. The faculty know who are graduate students and who aren’t.”
That wasn’t always the case. I went to the University of Chicago decades ago, and there were graduate students in most of my upper level classes, and they were not graded separately. It was one reason the grading curve was so brutal back then.
More generally, and recognizing that everyone likes their own things, but I think the LAC experience is better than you realize. Your kids are happy where they are, and that’s great. But there is a reason that Harvard looked to Amherst to try and improve its undergraduate learning experience, rather than the other way around. A course catalog of thousands of classes is pretty meaningless when you only take 30-35 of them, and at least half are intro classes.
The best way to pick a school is to visit all of the schools you have been accepted to. Then, choose based on academics and your overall feel while on the visit.
^ Before you can visit “admit” schools and pick one, you have to have narrowed down and applied. That’s where this starts.
@ThankYouforHelp I wasn’t saying that LAC’s are good and frankly am surprised by the defensiveness of the “LAC Lobby”. LACs are fine for some student but I do not agree that they offer a superior education, just a different one. I’d also disagree with your comment about the course catalogue. Sure, you cannot take all of the courses but they are available, as are courses in graduate and professional divisions. And only about 10% are introductory courses.
only about 10 percent are introductory courses, but about half the classes a college student takes are introductory courses and prerequisites. So it really doesn’t matter much if your school has 203 courses on Ancient Hittite philosophy if you are not going to be able to squeeze more than one or two into your schedule before you graduate.
(of course it makes a huge difference for graduate school)
The LAC lobby appears defensive because some posters have been on the attack, refusing to acknowledge any of the advantages of LACs while pretending that some of the obvious disadvantages of larger universities are, in fact, advantages. It’s silly. I didn’t attend an LAC and one of my kids goes to an LAC and the other will be going to a national university next fall. I understand that both can be good.
How did this thread become a debate between LAC or Flagship. I would just really like to know how people select the right college.
Obviously there are many different types of schools because people are different.
If any of the “LAC lobbyists” (love that term btw) would post:
“If you have a kid interested in a lab science, engineering, anything technology related or capital intensive where research is an important component of an undergrad education, you should think carefully and do your due diligence when evaluating a Liberal Arts college for that kid”
then the research U lobbyists would shut up and sit down. But the idea that the “right college” (as described in the title) is always going to be an LAC and that Oberlin or Lawrence or Vassar is going to out perform U Michigan or MIT or UIUC in a field requiring sophisticated labs, big research grants to keep the labs humming, etc is just absurd. The comments folks make about grad students seem ridiculous (many of us WERE grad students and have kids who ARE grad students) and the comments about faculty at large U’s who don’t care about undergrads are truly crazy.
Obviously you should think carefully and do your due diligence when evaluating universities for that kid also. Never assume 
IDK if I’m a “LAC lobbyist” but my kid and several of her (STEM) friends do research at their LAC. They have a large SURF program in summer and kids do research throughout the year as well. Some kids choose to apply to, and attend, summer REUs at other schools.
I am sure large universities have more, and more advanced, lab facilities. My question would be how typical it is that undergrads get to work in those.
LACs aren’t ideal for a student who wants to become an engineer in 4 years - most LACs don’t offer it. However, a good friend of my son graduated from his LAC last year with a bachelors in physics and is now getting a bachelors (masters? not sure) in engineering and a masters in physics simultaneously at WUSTL, I believe it’s a one year program. He opted to do that instead of the 3/2 he’d planned but the result is the same, or a bit better actually. So that’s another way to do it.
I went to a major research university with tons of grad and professional programs and I took courses from several of the grad programs as an undergraduate. I took courses with 600 students (and lots of TA’s) and some with a dozen. Had a great experience. Absolutely loved it… But I also toured a ton of LAC’s with my son who now attends ones and am a huge fan of that experience too. Totally different, but not a “disadvantage.” For every advantage you could list for a research university as an undergrad, you could easily counter with advantages for LAC’s. Despite loving my college experience, I am envious of many of the experiences my son has…
So there’s no objective right or wrong here, it comes down to the student. I never felt “lost” at my major university and got to know my professors but I knew others who did feel overwhelmed, intimidated and isolated by the large school and massive student body. Just as there are those who feel claustrophobic and stir crazy in small, rural LAC’s while others love the small communities.
The great LAC’s certainly do well in matriculating their students to top graduate and professional schools so clearly those grad and progressional programs don’t consider LAC students at a disadvantage.
“A course catalog of thousands of classes is pretty meaningless when you only take 30-35 of them”
It’s meaningless if they’re all the same to you. They aren’t the same to me. I don’t like all professors equally, either. At Bryn Mawr, one person taught abnormal psychology, one social, one developmental…and that was in a big department. Flexible people might not care, but I’m picky.
Because it started with a link to an article essentially titled “how to select the right college” that offered advice that is wholly irrelevant to anyone looking for a mid-size or larger university. Faculty eating in “the” dining area? I would have found that wholly depressing-- only one place to eat on campus?
Write to 3 faculty members and hold it against the school if they aren’t going to have time to say hello to parents of prospies when they get to campus? (As if none of them have any more pressing demands on their time)
Look for lots of courses with project-based learning? (Because you know, it is so much fun to have one’s grade depend on the level of commitment of other students in a group and spend extra time fixing up the mistakes that others have made).
All of those criteria apply to one type of school and preferred learning environment… which of course would be great for some people, but certainly isn’t for all and can’t be labeled as the key to the “right” college. For many, they would be big red warning flags that the college was exactly the wrong type of environment. Too insular, too isolated, too limiting.
I’m not saying that the author’s concept of the ideal college is wrong for everyone – just that is why it provoked debate.
I’d add something else as well – the author of the linked article comes from a tiny rural college with an admission rate above 75% and students with average high school GPA’s of 3.6. (College of the Atlantic, less than 350 students). Only about a quarter of their students graduated in the top 10% of their high school classes. Student body is mostly white and the college doesn’t meet full need of students, so presumably also mostly kids from sheltered, upper middle class backgrounds. The author is the college President, but also a graduate of the same college – so he’s got a very limited perspective. He was educated in that small, sheltered, homogeneous, non-competitive environment and enjoyed his experiences, so he opines that it is ideal for everyone.
But his idealized view is not transferable. The world of a rural LAC with 350 students is not the same as a suburban LAC with 1500 students, which in turn is very different than a quasi-LAC of 2500+ students in an urban environment such as the one my daughter attended. It is as if I wrote an article about how to pick the “right” pet extolling the virtues of my toy-sized terrier. It’s confusing features with requisites. (It is a “feature” of my dog that I can pick him up with one hand-- but it is not a drawback of a golden retriever that it is too large for such handling).
If the article had another title – if it had purported to present a point of view as to some of the virtues a very small college can offer – it probably wouldn’t have spurred the debate. But the title and tone of the article was far more pretentious than that.
@ThankYouforHelp Reflecting on this thread, there is a missing element: the student. It is really what they prefer that matters. Some students love the idea of a small college. Others find the very thought claustrophobic. Some students want a “pure” undergraduate experience, whereas others like my D. and niece, wanted to be part of a major university in an urban area. It really is a matter of personal preference and I don’t think it can be said that one is better than the other.
Some LACs have joined together to essentially create a “virtual” research university. They use this as a major selling point and play up how you can have the best of both worlds. Barnard does the same thing with Columbia, as does Bryn Mawr with Penn.
@momreads , while I appreciate your post almost entirely, I take issue with one small part of it.
If your son really attended a typically-sized flagship university, then I’m just going to put this out there and say I don’t believe your claim that he never had a class with more than 40 students. Even if he attended a large flagship like UVa, he had plenty of classes with more than 40. I’m sorry; that’s just not very likely to be accurate.
Maybe if he were in the honors college … but then, you’d be arguing in the other direction, at least by implication.
@Jax, good post. Finally - someone with the gumption to take on the bully. I’m tired of getting PMs from 50 people telling me they support my point of view.
Don’t PM me about it - get it out there in the open folks. What’s the worst that can happen?
though I think this is a bit like the large state U trying to offer the LAC experience, I’ll add to @Hanna’s list by pointing out that kids Wellesley can and do take classes at MIT and Harvard. There’s also the 5 consortium colleges of Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Smith and UMass.
but, I must admit, those poor kids at Middlebury, Williams, Wesleyan, Whitman and the like don’t have that luxury. They’re all on their own.
"and frankly am surprised by the defensiveness of the “LAC Lobby” "
@exlibris97 , you’re kidding, right? Have you worked your way through this thread?
“But the idea that the “right college” (as described in the title) is always going to be an LAC and that Oberlin or Lawrence or Vassar is going to out perform U Michigan or MIT or UIUC in a field requiring sophisticated labs, big research grants to keep the labs humming, etc is just absurd.”
@blossom, you have a special talent with poker-faced rhetoric. I put you in your own league on this forum. Wow. Just wow.
Who said any of that non-sense? Hint. NOT ONE SINGLE POSTER. You are the only one saying any of that, and it reveals a flaw in your position that you have to constantly appeal to outrageous categorical fallacy to make your point.
It’s hard to take you seriously now.
“And let’s not talk about the lack of diversity at most LACs that impact educational experience, especially for URMs.”
@itsgetting real, among the LACs, there are plenty that have the endowment necessary to fully fund “need” so that cost is taken out of the equation. Once you clear that hurdle, the recruiting effort for diversity candidates is fierce in the LAC world. With three kids, I have been around a huge number of LACs, and I found very few that lacked diversity. This is a running assumption of the uninformed.
Sure, at some regional non-selective LAC with modest funds, diversity can be more of a challenge, but even there, schools like Puget Sound, Willamette, Lewis & Clark, etc. - schools that don’t have the $800 million endowment #s - are not exactly lily white and affluent. But the list of those LACs that have the resources and thus are very diverse is long. So I take issue with your use of “most”, though it represents some progress within the context of this thread.