Why choose a research university?

tokenadult
Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:05:53 +0000

The key point is that professors at LACs will be better than grad students at research universities because they have a lot more experience.



I might turn that around to say that a graduate student at a top quality research university is a more generally capable person than the kind of professor who ends up at an LAC. That would be a gross generalization, but it would be a gross generalization with about the same accuracy as the generalization I have quoted.

What I personally like about research universities as contrasted with liberal arts colleges, and this is a pervasive difference I notice both within my own extended family among people who have attended each kind of college and in CC forum posts, is that research universities have an atmosphere of RESEARCH, that is checking facts and making sure that statements about external reality are as correct as they can be. I’ve summed up this difference sometimes by the statement, which I acknowledge is controversial and debatable, that students go to LACs to be taught but to research universities to learn. I think an attitude that “I have to take my own initiative to learn, and verify everything I am told,” which I think is the attitude an undergraduate student will pick up at a research university, is a more successful attitude for life than demanding that classes be small and that classroom teachers have a particular set of formal credentials.

This, of course, is just my humble opinion, and I wish you and all readers of this thread well in finding a good fit for college. Good luck in your applications.