<p>I’m thinking about double majoring in math and economics, but I don’t know what kind of schools would be good for those majors. I’m most worried about getting a job after college. What’s the difference in career opportunities between liberal arts colleges like Ithaca College, big universities like Boston U., or technical schools like Rochester Institute of Tech.? Are employers more likely to hire from one type of school over another? Also, what’s the difference between the education received at different types of colleges?</p>
<p>depends on what you want to have a career in.</p>
<p>Technical schools often have very sciency general education requirements. Do you care to take physics and chemistry in college, or would you prefer loser requirements? I would also expect economics at a technical school to be very math-heavy, all about statistics, data analysis and forecasting. While that’s a very important aspect of economics, there are some economics classes that are more concerned with business methods or public policy or sociology or history, which might get left out in an all too quantitative approach. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends primarily on your interests.</p>
<p>The primary difference between big universities and small colleges are the number of opportunities and resources available, and the amount of personal attention you get. A big university might offer 30 upper-level classes in your major every semester while a small college might only offer 5. At the small college you might take most of your classes with a subset of a group of 20 students, while at a large university you are lucky to find a couple of people you know in each class.</p>
<p>On the other hand, students seem to have much closer relationships with their professors and with each other at small colleges. I am a full-time student at a small college with about 1,500 students, but I have taken several classes at two universities with more than 15,000 students. At the small college all of the professors in my major department know me by name and I talk to several of them about my life outside of class. We share cookies, we play cards, they help me find summer opportunities outside of my college because there’s not much my college offers. At the larger universities most students did not seem to know their professors very well. In lower-level classes there did not seem to be any interaction between the professor and the students at all, except for lectures and homework. In advanced classes the students crowded around the professor after class because that was about the only opportunity to talk to them for 5 minutes. At the small college, most professors had a lot of office hours (5+) or a feel-free-to-knock-whenever policy. They have a lot more time to teach because they are not quite as interested in doing research.</p>