This is how you and your child select the right college

Parents Forum
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@calmom , well you’re entitled to think what you wish. my perspective is hardly narrow. I attended a school (Stanford) quite different from those attended by my kids with full support - hardly narrow. narrow would have been insisting they attend Stanford, Rice, Duke, an Ivy or the like. I didn’t do that. could it be that I’ve looked at it and drawn the conclusion that it’s a great thing? each of them had plenty of choices to attend larger schools.

the issue here is that there are people, and apparently you’re one of them, who want me to like what they like and say that I see everything as equally good. I don’t. and this board is full of people who see things from their point of view and communicate it w/o hesitation. those people, too, don’t think everything is the same, and think something things have advantages that others don’t.

and look at you. in your retort, you said “… the benefits of the LAC without the limitations,” “a perspective of LAC’s being places at which students suffer due to lack of exposure to diverse backgrounds and points of view,” and “an internal need to rationalize tuition expenditures for your offspring.” it seems you have some intense opinions of your own.

if I flipped that around and wrote, “the benefits of a large state university without the limitations,” or “an internal need to rationalize having to choose college options for your offspring based on cost,” then about 20 posters on this forum would lose their minds.

and somehow, my view must be romanticized … why? because it departs from yours? how do you know what I think?

I didn’t claim that anyone claimed large universities are perfect, I’m not claiming LACs are perfect, and I’ve not claimed that large universities don’t have things to offer. I see you brought your rhetoric with you today.

I’m not protesting anything. I’m on an anonymous internet message board responding to threads and contributing my perspective. Some take issue with it - usually the same group. Many don’t. Some of them support my view publically; many more choose to do it in PMs. I wish they’d do it openly.

I wonder … why it’s ok for some here to knock the small college model so freely (the word ‘limitation’ is used often) and then get so defensive when someone finds fault with the big school model? It boggles my mind that some of you don’t see that.

I think you posted this to throw a punch and to be mean.

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@calmom What did your son not like about the LAC and what was the determining factor that caused him to transfer? What type of Uni did he transfer to? Thanks

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Many issues: relative isolation of the suburban campus; lack of political engagement of student body; what I might characterize as food boredom (not a whole lot of options on campus, so ended up ordering a lot of takeout food from local area restaurants); difficulty getting into classes he wanted because of limits on class size; frustration with some teachers & classes – the small classes & seminar setting that had seemed so attractive didn’t always work well-- he realized that in many cases listening to a qualified professor lecture would have been more valuable than listening to other 18 and 19 year olds offer up their often banal or repetitive opinions and observations. He did not immediately transfer – he quit school and worked for three years, then transferred to a Cal State U, where he immediately became actively involved in student affairs, found the faculty very accessible, and was awarded a very prestigious fellowship his senior year.

I’m not saying the LAC was all bad – you just asked me about the negatives. I also posted above that I could list the positives just as easily – but sometimes a characteristic can be both positive and negative. My daughter also had a similar complaint about some of her seminars at her LAC – finding herself in a room with a brilliant professor and being frustrated at the vapid caliber of student discussion - but my daughter’s campus also afforded a good mix of small and large classes, and a huge array of courses to choose from.

It’s not that all of the small classes were like that – but it was essentially a risk inherent in the small group setting – sometimes there is a great mix of students, other times not-so-great. And when there’s a bad group it gets rather tedious as the semester wears on.

I think in hindsight the biggest problem was that my son wanted a college learning environment “just like his high school”-- and that was a good idea for the first semester, but my son grew into a person with different needs. He needed a wider variety of opportunities than his LAC afforded, and he was definitely ready to grow beyond the very small-group setting for all his instruction. And there really was no way to do that other than move on. Perhaps if he had chosen an LAC affiliated with a consortium his experience would have been different – unfortunately he had to turn down a couple of LAC spots because of insufficient financial aid.

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^ Thanks

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Geez, after reading through this thread, I am further away from giving my D any advice about UC Berkeley vs. SLAC. She can’t decide either. It seems she likes different aspects about each type of school and is trying to figure out priorities. It was easier to make a list of schools she liked. It’s harder to select a single school that is the “best fit”. Sigh.