Trinity U in San Antonio vs UT Austin (Plan 2) for Classics Major

Shelby_Balik
Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:19:07 +0000

txfriendly:

With that said…this is the one time where I might deviate from that approach, though it’s a very close call. For a student intending to pursue graduate study in a particular area, the difference between a large department with diverse offerings and small department with few choices is meaningful.

On the other hand – LACs tend to do very well in grad school admissions for good reasons, so the small departments can’t be too much of a disadvantage. You can’t just use the official count of majors as a measure of the strength of a department, because this statistic doesn’t include minors, second majors, or people taking a class because it satisfies a requirement in a different department (like history or art history). And keep in mind that a Classics department will have affiliated faculty from different home departments: comparative literature, religious studies, history, art/art history, perhaps languages if these are housed in a separate department, etc. So the offerings are greater than they might seem at first glance. Faculty in LACs also tend to have more flexibility to develop new classes to diversify offerings (there are more bureaucratic hoops to jump through in a large university). My D and two of her cousins are/were (one just graduated) all Classics majors at three different LACs, and none of them have ever lacked for new and interesting courses to take.