This is how you and your child select the right college

Parents Forum
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@PurpleTitan well it certainly seems you do, in fact, have a dog in this fight.

  • your reversal of my comment suggests that you jumped in on page 14. Read the entire thread and the context will put my comment - well - in better context. ;)
  • and I get the feeling that some people want to justify their economic decision/ position by sending their kid to the cheapest option. See how that works? I make a lot of money and can afford three $250k educations. Fair enough. But that doesn't make me indifferent to that amount of money. Trust me: I could find other ways to spend it. I'm not a stupid man. I do what I do at those prices with a full sense for why I'm doing it.
  • so you're saying that the mega universities who build LAC-like schools within their schools for their brightest students are doing ok in the prestigious scholarship area? Interesting. So you're saying that the best of the best in one category is out-pacing the general population of the other? Even more interesting. Question for you: why can't state U stand on its own as a whole institution? Why cherry pick? I guess it's time to tell my Pomona kid to transfer to the University of Tennessee-Chatanooga. Thanks for the heads up. :)
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i agree with both of you above. When you spend a lot you need to justify it and when you choose not to spend a lot you need to justify it. @MiddleburyDad2 you make good points, but there is some snobbery jumping out from some of your posts.

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@MiddleburyDad2, the best-of-the-best in one category is outpacing both the general population and the best-of-the-best in the other category. Note that I didn’t exclude elite LACs; they just haven’t done that well in garnering prestigious scholarships. And these numbers are additive, not averages, so elite LACs would show up more if they had done well.

As for “State U standing up on its own”, I have to imagine that you’ve got to be aware by now that publics have an obligation to serve all segments of their population (which private LACs do not; I certainly don’t hear about elite private LACs deemphasizing test scores in favor of class rank and GPA because they want to provide an opportunity to the top students in all high schools in a state).

Finally, I think you’re too smart not to be aware that you’re being disingenuous/snarky when you compare Chattanooga with Pomona when the proper comparison is like with like, that is, the best in one category with the best in another, that is, Pomona with an honors college/elite school/department at a public flagship. Or are you trying to make the argument that Pomona really is a regional school with low admission standards?

BTW, aren’t you cherry-picking yourself when you trot out elite LACs as examples of LACs when the vast majority of LACs are more like Redlands or Hartwick than Pomona or Middlebury?

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@PurpleTitan

  • not sure what you mean by "trotting out". Many of my comments have been general. I don't compare Williams College with the University of Arizona to prove any kind of point. But, sure, while we're on it, I'd send my kid to Puget Sound or Lawrence over UofA any day of the week for reasons I've shared previously.
  • I don't know why the LACs don't do as well in your sample on those two specific awards. I note they do a hell of a lot better in McCarthur grants on an absolute basis, by which they should never be judged anyway given the gross disparity in total student population between the two types of schools. Look through that list - top to bottom - and the LACs are well distributed on flat number of grants. On a per capita measurement they own the list. What does that mean? I don't know.
  • I like the link posted by another in this thread that shows how well liberal arts colleges do on an absolute and per capita basis producing students who go on to get PhDs, including the subset going on to get STEM PhDs ... even without all the fancy equipment and labs.
  • bottom line, I'm fighting this fight because the Mega U lobby on this forum distorts the discussion with banality and really bad rhetoric.
  • the UT Chatanooga comment, translated, means that I don't really care about who in district 14 won some award that some sponsoring organization is trying to distribute around the country. In 2015, UT Chattanooga did better than Pomona. Conclusion: so what?

@citymama9 Not my intent. Then again, there’s a fair amount of arrogance that’s been thrown around in this thread. I don’t own 100% of it.

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One more thing @PurpleTitan , The vast majority of flagship publics are more like the University of Kentucky than they are Berkeley or Virginia.

That runs both ways.

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Well, if you want a more comparable (by admission selectivity) comparison between a LAC and a state flagship, why not compare Truman State and University of Missouri, or University of Minnesota - Morris and University of Minnesota - Twin Cities?

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@ucbalumnus not sure I’m tracking your last post.

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Instead of comparing an elite LAC to a middling state flagship, or a highly selective state flagship to a middling LAC, why not compare those of similar selectivity, like the examples given (Truman State and University of Minnesota - Morris are the LACs)?

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@ucbalumnus sure of course. But as I wrote, at least for me, I’m not making elite to bottom comparisons.

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Both sides are 100% correct.

Of course he was a drunk, and worse, a Princeton man.

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Hey, what’s wrong with being a drunk? Sobriety is overrated in my book. :wink:

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@MiddleburyDad2: Yes, the majority of flagships are like UK. And the majority of LACs are like Redlands. I’m pretty certain that UK has an honors college, though (or several).

All I’m saying is that when you are comparing, you should compare between like and like. A kid who can get in to an elite LAC can also get in to a good public honors college. And which is better between the two really depends on what is offered by both and goals.

BTW, I’m of the opinion that the middling student would benefit more from the (average) LAC experience (compared to the average public experience) than an elite student would (at an elite LAC compared to a good public honors college) for many goals.

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@PurpleTitan ,

I share your last-expressed view. The kid who has the most development ahead of him or her would, in my view, get more out of a small school than a large one.

As I said to you and to @ucbalumnus before, I’m really not comparing Williams to Arizona. I think 99.9% of my views on this topic stay consistent down the line, from Williams to Linfield, and from Berkeley to Oklahoma State. I don’t rely on the mis-match between top and bottom to make my points. Like I previously stated, I’d send my kid to Puget Sound before sending him/her to Kentucky or Arizona. That’s a no-brainer for me.

Also, I haven’t posted anything inconsistent with your remarks about honors colleges. I’ve used it to ask the rhetorical question why they exist in the first place. To me, leaning on the honors college to make your point almost makes mine. Put another way: you needn’t convince me of the virtues of the public honors college. You have my full support. The Big U lobby wants you to focus on something else though. :slight_smile:

On the topic you brought in regarding prestigious academic awards, there are articles linked to the topic of MacArthur fellows and the substantially disproportionate share of that particular award enjoyed by LAC undergraduates. Those articles tend to try and uncover why that is the case. The reason many of them offer is that a real LAC tends to maintain tighter adherence to the ideal of a true liberal education, which is associated by many people with creativity, which in turn is a big part of the MacArthur fellowship. Look at Swat with 11, Barnard with 10, Oberlin with 9, and teeny tiny Amherst with 7. Venerable Yale, much larger than any of those schools, has, what, 19? University of Washington, carrying 35,000+ has 3; hell, several LACs with a small fraction of that student body have that many or more.

In the end, you don’t see that particular award often going to people who are overly concerned with vocation at the undergraduate level.

Food for thought.

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@MiddleburyDad2:
“In the end, you don’t see that particular award often going to people who are overly concerned with vocation at the undergraduate level.”

For sure, but being more vocationally-focused (as you put it) also has its advantages. For example, according to the College Scorecard, of those students counted in the Scorecard, which I believe are those on fin aid, UCLA grads out-earn Pomona grads 5 years out on average ($59.6K vs. $51.4K) and a higher percentage of them out-earn an average HS grad (72% vs. 59%).

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?110662-University-of-California-Los-Angeles
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?121345-Pomona-College

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Puget Sound does beat out 'Zona in those numbers ($49.4K vs. $44.0K and 71% vs. 68%), but UDub bests Puget Sound ($53.7K and 76%).

And whoops; all these numbers are evidently 10 years after matriculation (so roughly 6 years after graduation).

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Yeah; I’m completely willing to cede the salary wars. The LAC crowd traditionally has too many kids who go off to do things that don’t pay well.

But you can take a LAC education and make money too if you want that. I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about that fact among many people. The Williams kids seem particularly adept at that endeavor. :slight_smile:

I only brought up MacArthur because of your post about the other prestige awards.

Ultimately, outcomes are so student driven and interests are so diverse that I tend not to focus as much on who does what after college. I care only that my kids have a good experience, obtain a well rounded and rigorous education, and make meaningful connections with faculty and classmates. What happens next is entirely their deal. By then, they’ve (hopefully) got the tools to direct the rest of their play.

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@PurpleTitan , it appears that LACs are also doing very well on a per capita basis (and pretty impressive on an absolute basis as well) in # of Fullbright students. Compare the list of recipients at research universities vs. bachelors institutions, and then account for the differences in total student populations:

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Top-Producers-of-Fulbright/239220

PS: someone sent that to me.

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How we came up with our list: D went through the Fiske Guide and made a list of about 24. I found Colleges that Change Lives and Right College, Right Price to be very helpful. I also found the website The College Solution to be very helpful.

How we pared and adjusted our list: D went on her first trip to NYC with her grandmother and came home and crossed all the NE schools off. LOL. That cut the list by about 1/2. As we developed our tour schedule, I added 2 schools that were near other schools that we were touring.

We toured schools in 2 regions: WI/MN where we live and OR. The tours helped D realize that she wants a college in an urban environment. She has grown up in a small city of 12,000, and she attended a semester school in a small town of about 300. She decided that’s she’s “been there, done that” with the small city/town thing and she wants her college to be urban. So we crossed more schools off.

Where she applied: 2 flagships, 1 medium size private university, 3 LAC’s.

What her thoughts are at this stage: Before our first tour, D thought she wanted the anonymity of a flagship and was unhappy when I added 2 LAC’s to our tour schedule (even though they were within 1 hour of the 2 LAC’s that were on her list). However, now she has decided she definitely wants an LAC. Her reasoning is that she plans to go to med school and that will probably be at a large university. So undergrad is her only opportunity to get an LAC experience.

My thoughts: I wanted to go to an LAC (Smith), but got wait-listed and ended up going to an OOS flagship. It was a mixed experience. Reading this thread has helped me remember the anthropology teacher who had our class to his house for dinner and the history of the American environment teacher who I met up with for coffee 20 years later. The Latin American studies and Peace Studies professors both gave me a lot of individual attention and mentoring. But thinking about the professors in my major, I can’t think of one of them that I had a close relationship with. Also, like another poster, I went to law school (at another flagship) and I agree that the Socratic method is challenging, stimulating, and engaging. Finally, my D blossomed at her semester school where she called her teachers by first name, the learning was experiential, and it was a tightknit community. Being around other independent, intellectual students changed her forever and she came back a better student with higher goals and aspirations. For all of these reasons, I support her choice to attend an LAC.

Final decision: Don’t know yet. Will update when I do.

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@NolaCAR , good post.

“Before our first tour, D thought she wanted the anonymity of a flagship and was unhappy when I added 2 LAC’s to our tour schedule (even though they were within 1 hour of the 2 LAC’s that were on her list). However, now she has decided she definitely wants an LAC.”

And yet, we are assured by the resident experts that (1) whatever you can get at a LAC you can get at a large flagship, and (2) the kids who choose the latter know with full awareness exactly what they are doing.

Let’s face it: even as adults, we’re often guessing. I’m almost 50, I’ve travelled, I’ve worked with all kinds of people, many/most a lot smarter than I am. I’ve done all kinds of things; I’ve won, I’ve lost, I’ve been burned, and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. All that experience, and yet I often feel like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. If I can be described accurately as a smart man, then I hope I am smart in the way that a good lawyer is/should be smart. That is, in the law, we often say, the best lawyers are those who are more keenly aware of and focused on what they don’t know than what they do know.

I, myself, am terrified of people who struggle to say, “I don’t know.” I don’t like to work with them and I don’t like relying on them.

I myself didn’t attend a LAC. Over the years, I came to learn more about that model of education delivery, and came to the conclusion that it does offer something that is very hard to replicate at a 35,000 seat school. And while it has not been a bed of roses (what is?), I would say that thus far my educated guess has been vindicated. But then again, my kids didn’t attend a flagship, and I can’t know what would have been. I freely admit that.

One thing’s for sure: LACs are very misunderstood among the general public, the latter in which I’m losing faith more and more each day. :slight_smile:

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@MiddleburyDad2 – If I was a person who had never heard of LAC’s and was looking into that possibility for the first time, your posts on this thread would do a good job of convincing me to stay far away. You fall in the category of someone who protests too much. The narrowness of your perspective and the intensity of your prosthelytizing tends to reinforce a perspective of LAC’s being places at which students suffer due to lack of exposure to diverse backgrounds and points of view.

However, given that didn’t attend an LAC yourself, I think that you simply have a romanticized view. Perhaps coupled with an internal need to rationalize tuition expenditures for your offspring if, like many, the LAC experience was something considerably more costly than home state U. alternatives — as well as apparently a dislike of your own large public u. undergraduate experience.

There are positives and negatives about every option. My son spent 2 years at a LAC before calling it quits— I understand why he chose it and what he liked about it, but I could also write a pretty detailed list about what didn’t work and what he disliked about it. My DD was fortunate enough to attend a hybrid – a LAC attached to a large research U, so she had the benefits of the LAC without the limitations… though she had her own set of things she didn’t like about her environment, and the added dichotomy of likes/dislikes about attending a women’s college.

No one has claimed on this thread that larger Universities are perfect – only that students have different needs and preferences, and the LAC environment is not ideal for everyone, and for some the extolled benefits of an LAC would be perceived as negative, not positive, qualities.