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<p>In my opinion, those downsides sometimes are exaggerated on College Confidential. For most students, the benefits of small classes and greater faculty attention to teaching far outweigh the absence of Afrikaans courses, or the fact that your major only offers twice as many courses as you possibly can take (instead of 3 or 4 times as many).</p>
<p>If you do believe the downsides are significant, then yes, one way to mitigate them is by attending a consortium college. Another way is to attend a relatively small, well-endowed university where average class sizes are nearly as small as a LAC’s. A third way, in some cases, is to attend a public honors college.</p>
<p>However, there is not a single university in the USA where 100% of classes have less than 50 students (as is fairly commonplace at LACs). Many LACs seem to do quite well in academic outcomes such as PhD production rates or admission rates to top professional schools. If there are significant academic downsides to LACs, I don’t see them reflected in such data. </p>