How can any of us sensibly discuss what’s going on where you live when we don’t know where that is?
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Especially when you are quibbling over whether an admit rate is 4% or 10%. Or even 25%. These are all reaches.
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I may be the one reader here who agrees with you.
Where I am, most SLACs are struggling with interest and enrollment. The top 2-3 schools in my upper Midwest state are still doing OK. They are filling, and they have not had to drop student quality. One of them (a T10 LAC) even has a lower admit rate (20%) than when I attended ~35 years ago (when admit rate was 43%) although I think the lower rate reflects an increased denominator due to the ease of applying under the Common App rather than any true increase in selectivity.
But anyway, other than the top 2-3, LACs in my state are struggling. It used to be that many top students chose school 4, 5 or 6 but now these schools are approaching open admission and are on the lists published each spring of schools still accepting applications because they didn’t fill.
Where are students going instead? Well, the biggest competitor seems to be our state flagship. It’s located in an appealing big city. But 35 years ago, we were in the middle of a crime wave, and the area around the U was seen as dumpy, gritty and kind of dangerous. Other competitors seem to be the flagships of other states, and private universities located in appealing cities. For example Columbia (and Barnard too..let’s just admit it’s not an LAC, it’s a division of a University) were viewed ~35 years ago as having an unappealing location–gross, dangerous. Not now!
As for your contention that the education at LACs (at least the good ones) is better quality, I’m going to agree with you on that too, with some caveats. I went to med school and found the classes to be very easy. My preparation was just head and shoulders above that of many of my classmates. This included classmates from Stanford, the Ivys, flagships etc. Very few of them understood how to actually read a scientific paper and analyse its strengths and weaknesses, very few understood the process of designing an experiment including planning for statistical analysis. This was something we were required to do from Bio 101 onwards at my LAC.
Now can you get a great education at big universities? Yes, I’m sure. Do Ivy+ universities have amazing resources, cutting edge research, and star lecturers who fill 500 seat lecture halls due to their brilliance? Yes, absolutely. Have some kids always preferred big schools, while others preferred small? Sure.
But let’s stop gaslighting the OP here: the overall trend is away from LACs (especially rural ones) and toward bigger schools, urban schools, and schools with preprofessional majors.
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You had me until this. Points off for needless contact.
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Mods, can you lock this thread?
I really don’t think this is an accurate depiction of university education. Yes, some profs are attracted to the research support of a university and are less invested in teaching. But that’s not a fair generalization of university professors. I know many professors at large universities who are deeply invested in teaching. And while it’s true that intro-level classes at universities might be more large lectures than small seminars, more advanced students have access to more small classes (no TAs) as they get into the upper-level coursework in their majors. Some universities have enrollment caps across the board (I’m at Master’s-level university, so we have few TAs, and my intro-level classes are capped at 35). Sure, the small-class experience starts earlier at a LAC, and LACs tend to hire faculty who are on board with their educational models and eager to place teaching on par with research. I’m very much pro-LAC, but it’s not fair to caricature university education like you have.
By the way – a TAship is essentially a teaching apprenticeship for graduate students, who don’t have the kind of training that student teaching offers for K-12 teachers. It’s as essential to their professional development as their research is, given that most Ph.D.s who are lucky enough to find jobs can expect to end up in institutions that are more teaching-intensive than their R1 grad schools. So rather than knock TAs, we might instead see their work as as crucial to the wider project of promoting excellent college-level teaching.
Wow, this circled the drain pretty quickly.
For the record, there are LOTS of struggling institutions, many of which are NOT LAC’s in the midwest where it gets a lot of snow or otherwise have some objectionable quality (I didn’t know snow was a problem… a lot of kids post on CC looking for colleges where they can ski twice a week and AFAIK that’s not happening from U Alabama.)
Queens University of Charlotte (for example) got a lot of press (and attention on CC) for its recent merger with Elon. Birmingham Southern. Mills College merger with Northeastern (which was a Hail Mary pass to save the school).
Colleges struggle, close, merge, etc. for lots of complex reasons. Not having a nursing school has impacted SOME. Not having the other pre-professional majors have impacted SOME. But I don’t notice HS kids shunning Stanford because they can’t major in “Travel and Tourism” or HS kids shunning Amherst because they can’t study agronomy.
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I think this applies across a broad swathe of schools.
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Is this necessarily true across the entire range of admission selectivity? Or are more popular and selective universities becoming more selective while less popular and selective ones becoming less selective, reflecting a flight to perceived quality? Is it similar with LACs?
Okay, the serious answer to your question is that it depends on where you live. I live in NYC and sometimes it even depends on what neighborhood you live in. I attend a mainline Protestant church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and degrees from the NESCAC colleges, what’s left of the Seven Sisters, plus Swarthmore and Haverford are still pretty popular status symbols.
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I’m always curious that kids want to be taught by profs or that colleges will say, 97% of classes are taught by profs.
I had crap profs and great profs.
Similarly I had crap TAs and fantastic TAs - one was in History, a PhD student at Syracuse. I remember his name because he inspired whereas I only remember one profs name (he was outstanding too but unfortunately has passed).
I know it sounds nice on paper and for marketing - Only PhD profs teach our classes but many can also get a great experience from a TA, who given their age, often are better able to connect.
Or perhaps because they are new, they have a passion that not all profs do as they’ve done it for so long that the flame has burned out.
I’m not sure the teaching quality or learning amount is less, etc.
Yeah, teaching quality across the board varies, among TAs and faculty. There is something to be said for experience, though. When I was a TA in my grad program, I had several years’ experience as a high school teacher under my belt. So I had an advantage in that respect. Still, decades of experience have made me better, even though I’m now closer in age to the students’ parents than to the students themselves. But that’s the point - nothing replaces experience. So TAships are essential; without them, we won’t have excellent college-level teaching.
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The problem with this thread, the OP’s several assertions, and this point above is that they all are proclaimed as if they were facts, when, without any sort of proof, all they are is opinions.
I am happy to be educated if someone can produce a decent study comparing the decline of LACs (the OP mentions SLACs, the S is sometimes meant as “selective”) vs large schools. But until then, I cannot go along with the idea that schools with sub 10% admit rates are somehow in decline, or that prospective students are less interested in them. (Those schools were mentioned upthread by the OP, arguing that since Ivy admit rates were lower still that was proof those LACs were in decline).
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Don’t have time to do the research, but here is what chatgpt says
1. Declining Enrollment Numbers
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Enrollment Trends: According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), enrollment at liberal arts colleges has been slowly declining over the past two decades, while enrollments in larger, more vocationally oriented institutions (such as public universities) have been rising. For example, many liberal arts colleges have seen a drop in the number of incoming students, as more high school graduates opt for colleges offering specialized and technical programs that promise clearer career paths.
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Enrollment at Smaller Colleges: The American Council of Education has reported that small liberal arts colleges in particular have faced declines in enrollment.
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The trend of declining enrollment at liberal arts colleges is well-documented, and various reports and statistics show this shift in recent years. Below are key data points and findings that highlight the decline in enrollment numbers at liberal arts colleges:
1. National Enrollment Trends
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According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), total undergraduate enrollment in U.S. colleges declined by 1.8% between Fall 2020 and Fall 2021. While this decline affects all types of institutions, smaller, private liberal arts colleges have experienced sharper drops compared to larger public and technical institutions.
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Specifically, private nonprofit colleges (which include many liberal arts colleges) saw a decrease of 3.7% in enrollment between 2020 and 2021, compared to a smaller decline for public colleges (1.2%) and for-profit colleges (4.4%) during the same period.
You can access this data on the NCES website here: NCES College Enrollment Data.
2. Data from the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC)
The Council of Independent Colleges has been tracking enrollment data at small, private liberal arts colleges. Their reports consistently show that smaller liberal arts colleges have seen a downward trend in enrollment over the past decade.
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A 2019 report by the CIC found that enrollment at small liberal arts colleges had dropped by nearly 10% over the previous decade.
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A 2020 study showed that liberal arts colleges with fewer than 1,000 students saw a significant decline in enrollment, with many facing financial struggles because of reduced tuition revenue.
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The CIC’s 2023 annual survey of small independent colleges found that 40% of respondents reported a drop in enrollment of more than 5% compared to the previous year.
Source: Council of Independent Colleges Enrollment Trends.
3. Enrollment Trends by College Type (IPEDS Data)
Data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is maintained by NCES, offers a look at enrollment trends by type of institution:
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Between 2012 and 2019, the number of full-time, first-time undergraduates at liberal arts colleges decreased by 15% on average.
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The American Council on Education (ACE) also reported that enrollment in liberal arts colleges fell by more than 25% in some regions, especially in the Northeast, where many traditional liberal arts schools are located.
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Enrollment at large public universities, in contrast, has been either stable or growing, often due to the expanded options for specialized programs and the accessibility of state funding.
Source: IPEDS Data (U.S. Department of Education): IPEDS Enrollment Data.
If you use AI as part of your own thought process and it informs you somehow, that’s fine, but could we please not just directly post AI output on these forums? It’s so often wrong or misleading or just made-up.
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took me 20 seconds on chatgpt to find the data you want
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I also think this is why we see LACs adding more “vocationally” oriented majors - engineering, business (even if just a general business), etc.
At the same time, we also see big schools cutting the humanity type majors and focusing more on STEM, business, engineering or other quant majors.
People want bang for their buck - and yes, I know there are defenders of things like Classics or Anthropology - but by and large those type majors don’t have the initial employment success and I know not everyone on this board thinks that the purpose of going to college is to find a good job and employment prospects but I’m guessing for most Americans that it is.
I always note that the top LACs don’t show their salaries on the career outcomes table. I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole again but there’s a reason they don’t I’m sure while a Bucknell or Richmond do - because they are producing what people want to pay for whereas maybe the others aren’t.
But I think your trend toward vocations comment is exactly correct.
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That is not how it works. When ChatGPT says “a 2020 study” for example, you need to double check (1) whether the referenced study even exists, (2) if it exists, whether it is about the topic claimed by ChatGPT, (3) if it is about the topic, whether the study says what ChatGPT claims.
AI can be useful in brainstorming, or making suggestions of things for you to research for yourself, but it’s not at the point where we can just blindly trust everything output by a 20 second ChatGPT query.
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Point of Information: Doesthe “S“ in SLAC stand for “selective” or “small“? The answer to that question could save a lot of bandwidth.
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