@Lindagraf “The LACS are the best places for that, because they focus on undergrads. Therefore, undergrads have opportunities to do research with top professors in their fields. The bigger universities offer very limited research opportunities at undergrad level.”
Opportunities for research are good at many LACs, but they are also good at some large schools. DD is a Sophomore at Penn. She and several of her friends have had no difficulty getting Research Assistantships, even when they were freshman. If research is very important to you, I think it is one of those things that you will have to investigate one school at a time.
The college where I adjunct has a 6-year graduation rate of 45%. A lot of which has to do with the students admitted and the situations they face. Count me as one of those substandard faculty.
Unfortunately, the REAL WORLD is in my classroom, not in your hallowed ivory towers.
@Lindagaf “And are you aware that even the Ivies have classes taught by TAs?”
I know that is not true at all Ivies.
Penn does not allow TAs to teach new material to students. TAs can lead recitation to review material or explain details, but they may not teach the material to the students in a class. Did you have a specific school in mind?
My daughter is also at a large university and is involved in undergraduate research. And my other kid is at a small school in the middle of nowhere, and there are a lot of extra curricular activities on campus.
@sylvan8798 your college graduation rates are a reflection of the hardships faced by your students, not because they are partying too much. I am not alluding to your kind of colleges. I am more focused on the low academic standards despite ok admission pools like Tennessee etc.
@Lindagaf Thanks for the good luck wishes! She does have 3 admissions so far, 1 was a very decent instate flagship where she will hopefully get admitted to honors program as well and I am hopeful she will considered for their merit scholarships. Has the profile. 1 is a very highly ranked USNWR LAC that she got a surprise early notification for and that is typically correlated with merit scholarships at the LAC - all we know is she is in but we don’t know of the package yet. The last one is a top ranked public OOS and she was shortlisted for a scholarship interview. She has also applied to a couple of the Ivies as well but those are crapshoots for 4.0/2400 kids, and we are not waiting with bated breath on any of those. If she gets one of those, we will think of them but no point thinking of them now. The ones she is focused on are the high ranking LACs. She applied only to 1 safety, 2 matches, the rest were low to high reaches.
@ucbalumnus I remain amazed that 80% graduation rates are considered extraordinary. In our parents generation, I doubt there parents would have been so forgiving of kids not working their hearts out to graduate on time.
The one thing that seems to remain constant at all (ten and counting) colleges & universities that I attended is that the quality of teaching was usually pretty darn good. Impressive, in some places, given that the rep wasn’t amazing (FAU).
The only school that had really sub par teachers was Miami Dade Community College wolfson campus. That place was just a grueling, pitched battle after battle to come out with a degree.
So it’s the one thing I don’t worry about where the girls go-I know there are good professors everywhere.
Actually, probably the opposite. People of the age of current parents were more likely to be first generation to college (i.e. their parents were probably glad that their kids (the current parents) even had the opportunity to go to college at all). College was a lot less expensive then, so an extra semester was much less of a big deal cost-wise, and students were more likely to be able to work their way through college (i.e. no dependence on parental money, but also more likely to take more semesters due to needing to take lighter course loads to work).
I can’t open your link as a nonsubscriber, but I randomly found 21 colleges with 90% or better 6-year graduation rate, using College Scorecard. Not to say there are only 21, I just stopped there.
@khanam “Only 16 colleges have 90%+ 6 year graduation rates!”
I do have a subscription, and I count 31 National Universities over 90%. It is interesting to me that 24 of the top 25 Universities for graduation rate are Private. The only public is UVA.