Why Study at LACs in the era of AP?

College Search & Lists
1

<p>It seems to me that with the cost of top colleges now approaching $50K per year, talented students need to explore the value proposition a degree from a Liberal Arts College that either denies, or severely limits AP credits, offers versus a degree from a major university that grants AP credit. For the talented student with many high AP scores, the opportunity a major university offers to obtain either a fifth year masters or proceed to professional school a year early makes the LAC a relic of the pre-AP past. Why in the AP era would anyone with honors scores from many such exams, delay their lives to obtain a degree from a LAC that denies any AP credit and forces ‘tuition credits’ to be obtained. </p>

<p>It seems to me that the traditional LAC is ill-equipped to meet the needs of today’s top students since in most cases, it will not have the masters level courses and certainly not have any professional level courses for a student of talent to take. When students see their peers with the exact same AP scores move on to fifth year masters and first year professional school, they will not want to attend the LAC to have their achievement go unrewarded.</p>

<p>Can anyone offer an argument in support of LACs that deny AP credit?</p>

2

<p>Because there are others priorities that some people put way ahead of getting credit for their APs. Plus all the LACs I’m looking at give credit to APs</p>

3

<p>Not everyone is career obssesed and professionally motivated. The fact that LACs might not accept AP credit is a drawback-but think of what you obtain from such a small school. Reduced class sizes and personable relationships with professors. If the school has no graduate program-all funds are circumvented for the benifit of the undergrads. Also, those that are pre-professional can be coddled and prepped personally by an amicable faculty that is usually on a first name basis with all or most students on campus. To the OP-you aren’t really making a fair assesment. Basically just say that you don’t like the idea of a tiny LAC. That is your opinion. I know many people that would disagree, and I, though not planning on attending a LAC, also disagree. I think you have to step back and look at the big picture. Why would you want to rush through college? Not only is it a time for academic development, but it also serves as a period of personal maturation and social growth. If you hurry right through these years, you miss important aspects of young adulthood. You sound like a person who has a mind of what he wants to do, but I encourage you to look at all options of higher education and not scorn those which you choose not to be a part of.</p>

4

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<p>The first thing I would say to this is that your criticism is off-base. If the lack of AP-credit is the problem, then why pick on only the LAC’s? Some research universities, notably Caltech, also don’t provide much in the way of AP-credit. So why not pick on ALL schools, LAC and university, that don’t provide much AP credit? Why pick on LAC’s specifically? </p>

<p>Secondly, just because a school offers master’s or professional level courses doesn’t mean that you as an undergraduate are allowed to take them. Let’s use MBA courses as an example. Many of the top MBA programs do not simply “allow” any undergrad to take their courses. For example, I have personally never seen a Harvard undergrad in a Harvard Business School course. I know a lot of Harvard undergrads who WANT to take a HBS course, but I personally have never seen one being successful. There might be some, but they are pretty rare and almost certainly have to go through a special petition process for which success is far from automatic. The same is true at Harvard Law School - it is extremely rare for a Harvard undergrad to be allowed into a HLS course. I know the same is true at Berkeley and Stanford - Berkeley/Stanford undergrads can’t just decide one fine day that they’re going to take an MBA or a law school course at their school. They have to get special approvel to do this, and that approval is far from automatic. And then of course there are some universities such as Princeton and Caltech that don’t offer any professional courses at all. </p>

<p>Note, it should be said that some universities do allow undergrads relatively easy access to professional courses. For example, some undergrads at MIT take MBA courses at the Sloan School, and the same is true at Wharton. But the point is, there is no hard and fast rule. Just because you are an undergrad at a university doesn’t automatically mean that you have access to professional courses. </p>

<p>Furthermore, some LAC’s have strong relationships with existing universities. For example, Wellesley has a cross-registration relationship with MIT such that Wellesley students have full access to the MIT course catalog, including grad/professional courses. Hence, I would say that through this cross-reg program, Wellesley students actually enjoy GREATER access to graduate/professional courses than students at many research universities. Scripps runs a cross-reg program with Caltech. Students in the Claremont Consortium can cross-reg at any of the other Claremonts, including Claremont Graduate School. Students at Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr are allowed to cross-reg at Penn. Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith students can crossreg at UMass. The point is, many students at LAC’s are able to access graduate (and sometimes professional) courses if they want. </p>

<p>Furthermore, you talk about how major universities offer the possibility of a fifth year masters. Not all universities do this, and those that do often do so for only certain majors. Caltech, for example, doesn’t offer this. Berkeley offers this only in certain disciplines (mostly engineering). You also talk about how you might be able to go to professional school early if you go to a university. But that presumes that you will actually graduate on time, which means getting the classes you need to graduate at the time you need them, which is far from assured at many universities, particularly many public universities. Berkeley students often times have problems in getting the courses they need when they need them, which therefore delays their graduation. That’s because many of the courses are oversubscribed such that just because a course is offered doesn’t mean that you will get a seat in that course. Who cares if your school offers lots of courses if you can’t get the course that you want? </p>

<p>The point is, I don’t think the dichotomy is as clear-cut as you are making it out to be. Going to a major university does not automatically grant you access to grad/professional courses, and going to a LAC does not automatically deny you access to these courses. Not all universities grant you easy AP credit, and not all LAC’s deny you such credit.</p>

5

<p>Because, frankly, what’s the point of working your butt off to get in, only to be such a hurry to get out after you do.</p>

6

<p>My daughter’s LAC gave her tons of AP credit. The others she looked into appeared to give as much AP credit as the university she looked into would give her. So from what we’ve experienced here, you seem to be operating under a false initial premise.</p>

<p>However, having said that, it has been made evident to us that breadth and depth of a college’s course offerings, in areas of interest, are particularly germane to someone coming in with a great deal of AP credit. It is very important to such a student that they investigate whether they will have numerous course choices available to them during their upperclass years of college. There might indeed be some legitimate concerns in this regard, but on a case-by-case basis and not necessarily as a blanket matter.</p>

7

<p>Many top universities limit students’ use of AP credit, too. Here is a sample of their philosophy (taken from the current Cornell University catalog):</p>

<p>“Advanced placement credit is college credit that students earn before they matriculate as freshmen and that counts toward the degree and degree requirements as specified by the individual college at Cornell. Its primary purpose is to exempt students from introductory courses and to place them in advanced courses. Its value is that it allows students to include more advanced courses in their course of study.”</p>

<p>In other words, the goal is to let students with advanced preparation fly as high as they can, not to shorten their period of study. Having AP credit seems to be especially valuable to students who are interested in more than one subject. Being able to waive some basic prerequisite courses makes things easier for students who want to 1) double major, 2) study abroad, or 3) complete the pre-med requirements while majoring in a subject other than biology or chemistry.</p>

<p>My daughter, who will finish high school with approximately 30 college credits from AP and IB courses, is planning to apply to Cornell, among other places. The idea that she could finish college in less than four years never crossed our minds. At that academic level, kids generally don’t do that sort of thing. It would be impossible for a student to learn everything that Cornell has to offer even in a hundred semesters. Why try to get out of there in fewer than eight semesters?</p>

8

<p>While if your objective is to get a BA in the quickest least expensive way possible I agree that attending a school that welcomes AP credits/community college credits taken while still a high school student is the way to go. If you are interested in the depth of the experience that taking a full 4 years of credits at a top college or university will give you, AP classes will only serve to help prepare you to take classes in a rigorous college program, they don’t serve as a substitute for them.</p>

<p>If you are really eager to complete college quickly, why even go to high school? :D: A close friend of my daughters, skipped high school, entered the university of washington at 14 in their EEP program, and graduated with a double major in astronomy and physics, before my daughter even entered college!</p>

9

<p>Why would you be willing to pay double for, in effect, a repeat year of undergraduate credit instead of obtaining, and insisting that the college provide 30 graduate credits? (Have people literally lost their minds when it comes to colleges? People who would bargain over the last $2000 of closing costs on a house or last $1000 on a car, are literally willing to build a bonfire of $100 bills for a college.) In this case, it appears that you are willing to spend $50,000 for additional undergraduate credit when your daughter is already qualified for graduate work. At the level of a Cornell,the BA is just a first start on a six to ten year marathon. Cornell, with all its courses and resources, should be promoting the life of its students minds rather than the health of its bursury and give your daughter the credits she has earned so that she can expand and not limit her horizons with upper division courses in her senior year.</p>

10

<p>That is one way of looking at it, Vienna Man, and I know that many people share your view.</p>

<p>Fortunately, there are many universities that will allow and even encourage students to approach their education in the way that you suggest. My state’s flagship state university is one of them. If my daughter goes there (which she might), she could easily graduate in three years and probably would. She would also learn a lot less than she would at Cornell. (I have a son at that state university right now and I am myself a Cornell graduate, so I think I have some basis for making this judgment. The difference in rigor between the two institutions is obvious to me.)</p>

<p>As for Cornell and other schools like it, they don’t generally require students to repeat material they have already mastered. In instances where the college’s introductory course in a field is quite similar to the AP course, students are usually encouraged to use their AP credit and take more advanced courses immediately. Only in instances where the content of the AP course differs from or is less rigorous than the college’s introductory course are students with AP credit encouraged or required to take the introductory course. If my daughter goes to Cornell, she’s not going to be spending her first year repeating anything. Instead, she would be taking more advanced courses in subjects where she already has a substantial background and taking introductory courses in subjects she never had a chance to study before. You seem to be concerned that a student in her position would be wasting a year doing things over. It doesn’t work that way in most cases.</p>

11

<p>couple things
I think there is more to life and to high school, than taking the most academic courseload imaginable.
While her friend came from an academic background, and had two parents with advanced degrees as well as being herself very motivated and focused from a young age, my daughter did not have an identical experience.
My oldest daughter actually attended a private high school, that didn’t offer any AP classes, and went on to take a year off after high school, before college & volunteer with Americorps, and we are all very glad that she had that year off. Without it, she would have attended a different college than the one where she recently graduated from.</p>

<p>Incidentally, while her friend did graduate from university young, she also opted to take several years off from academia, and has been working in a rural community in Kashakstan for the past few years</p>

<p>(also as my D qualified for need based aid, from a college that meets 100% of need, her degree wasn’t $50,000 a year, but rather her EFC was, approx the same price for us that an instate public college would have been.</p>

<p>I also can’t imagine a more rigourous environment than [Reed](<a href=“http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/profiles/schoolsays.asp?category=1&listing=1023568&LTID=1&intbucketid=-”>http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/profiles/schoolsays.asp?category=1&listing=1023568&LTID=1&intbucketid=-&lt;/a&gt; ) for her. She was able to get through, after taking the year after her junior year off to catch her breath. But even still, the process of senior year including writing the senior thesis that is required of every graduate, has motivated her to take at least another year off to work, rather than apply to graduate school immediately )</p>

12

<p>vienna man:</p>

<p>1) Even if a college does not offer course credit, some do provide an exemption to a course, so a student can AP out of the intro course, and take the next level class (or something else of interest) so there doesn’t have to be any repeating of work necessarily, nor paying double.</p>

<p>2) I would assert that AP courses in most high schools don’t come even close to college level of work, particuarly in the sciences. Due to insurance regs and other issues (HS’s have real hard time attracting math and science teachers), a lot of AP Chem labs just don’t come close to a chem class at Cal Tech, MIT, Berkeley, or even Podunk U.</p>

<p>3) LACs provide smaller classes, which can allow for more intensive writing in all classes the first year. It is a rare large Uni that requires a 10-page term paper for intro college classes, whereas it is the norm at a LAC. How many HS’s require well-researched, footnoted, tomes in AP courses? Yes, some (top prep schools) do, but teachers wouludn’t have the time to read them, at least in our state where the AP class size is mid-30s.</p>

<p>4) To add to Sakky’s point, the UofChicago makes it quite clear that undergrads NEED a good reason and approval to take a class in their top-ranked graduate B-school.</p>

13

<p>The only way colleges provide the need based aid (which leads people to say that AP credit is no big deal since school is either paid for or deeply discounted anyway) that is out there is because the 50% of the class that pays full boat $50,000 fees feels that they are getting a fair value proposition for their money. Literally, for every $1 increase in tuition at a major private college, $.70 get recycled into Robn Hood provisioning of the 50% who receive financial aid. If the Fifty Percent full boaters perceive that colleges aren’t playing fair with them through the colleges denying AP credit an older sibling would have routinely received five or ten years ago, the entire system will collapse.
I think the point of collapse comes at $50,000 per year. At that level, even people in the upper 2% of the income distribution are being squeezed unmercifully.</p>

14

<p>To add to bluebayou’s point #2:</p>

<p>My daughter took AP U.S. History and got a 5 on the AP exam. But the quality of the course was in no way comparable to the quality of a similar course offered at a top LAC or top university. The students in her AP class used a textbook exclusively; they did not read any other books. They did not work with primary sources. They never wrote a serious research paper, and they did only one research assignment of any kind (a group presentation to the class). My daughter knows a lot of facts about U.S. history, but she has not yet had the experience of studying history at a true college level, in the way that a college student at a top LAC or top university would study it.</p>

<p>I most definitely do not feel that the top schools to which my daughter is applying are not “playing fair” with her in terms of AP credits. I think those schools are making the judgment that AP courses are not equivalent to their own college courses. And I agree with that judgment.</p>

15

<p>Your point on the rigor of AP would be true if 40 or 50% of the students received the honor grades of 4 or 5. For most of the exams, a score of 4 or 5 is very difficult to obtain, especially considering that the test group itself is an elite of high school students. A score of 4 or 5 indicates B level work in the introductory section of any of the three hundred or so serious colleges in the country (and might indicate that the student could be the teaching assistant at the 1800 or so remediation colleges in the country).</p>

16

<p>vm:</p>

<p>most publics provide AP credit for a 3 or better…not that difficult to obtain. Moreover, based on the growing number of kids taking AP tests – several hundred thousand each year – I’m not sure this is “an elite” group of HS students.</p>

17

<p>Exactly- armies of bright students who used to come from the 50% full boat group, will have their children upgrade public universities across the country. If this AP situation is not fixed even the Amhersts of this world will have an under 35% yield in the not too distant future.</p>

18

<p>With the whole private college frenzy going on right now, what actually does amaze me is that with all these mountains of applications to private colleges, the yield rates at all these colleges are so low, (and would be a whole lot lower without early decision manipulation). Places like Colgate and Boston College( to pick on someobody for illustration, nothing personal) have only 33% or so yields (Insider’s Guide to Colleges 2007) while at the same time having ten or twelve to one applicant rates. It indicates that these schools must ■■■■■ for their 50% full boaters from a wide pool of acceptances.</p>

<p>This is the setup for an “admissions bubble” ( a lot like a housing bubble) that could collapse on a dime. I am predicting that the $50,000 breech in fees will be the catalyst of a coming “admissions bubble.”</p>

19

<p>Places like Colgate and Boston College have yields of about one-third because the current trend is for kids to apply to a dozen schools, of which at least three or four will probably accept them. The kid who is accepted at Colgate but turns down the offer may indeed have gone to his state university instead, but it is also possible that he was also accepted at Georgetown, Wake Forest, and Haverford, and he chose one of those schools over Colgate because he was offered a better financial aid package, or he wanted to be closer to a major city, or he liked the campus better, or whatever. He also may have gotten accepted to a school with an even more illustrious academic reputation than Colgate, such as Harvard, and chosen to go there.</p>

<p>Getting back to APs:</p>

<p>In my opinion, a 4 or 5 on an AP exam is the equivalent of a B in a college course in only one respect – mastery of course content. In my earlier post, I wasn’t saying that a student who gets a 3 on an AP exam has had a less rigorous educational experience than a student who takes the course at a top college, I was saying that ALL students who take the AP course – including my daughter, with her 5 in U.S. History – have had a less rigorous educational experience.</p>

<p>A 4 or 5 on an AP exam does not mean that the student has learned the material at the pace at which it would be taught in college. Many AP courses (such as AP Statistics, AP Psychology, AP American Government and Politics, and AP AB Calculus) typically take a full year to cover content that would be covered in a single semester in a college course. And even in the AP subjects that are supposedly equivalent to a full year’s college work (such as AP U.S. History, AP BC Calculus, AP Biology, and AP Chemistry), the number of contact hours is usually greater in the high school setting than in the college setting, allowing more time for gradual presentation of the material and for review.</p>

<p>A 4 or 5 on the AP exam does not mean that the student has learned the material in the way it would be learned in college. In the AP courses that I am familiar with, the teacher’s lectures often duplicate the textbook and, as I mentioned before, the textbook may be the only book used. In a top-quality college course, the lectures and readings complement rather than duplicating one another, and the textbook (if one is used at all) is usually only one of several sources of readings. The other readings are usually far more challenging for the students to understand because they do not consist of regurgitated, edited material.</p>

<p>A 4 or 5 on the AP exam does not mean that the student has done true college-level library research or laboratory work. In fact, in the AP courses that I have seen, such assignments are avoided because they take time away from the course’s main goal – preparing students for the AP test. (In an earlier post, I mentioned that my daughter’s AP U.S. History class did one research assignment. That assignment was completed during the four weeks of the school year that remained after the AP test was given. There was no way that the teacher would assign such work while the students were still preparing for the test.) At the college level, the priorities are different.</p>

<p>A 4 or 5 on the AP exam does not mean that the student has been assessed in the way that college students are assessed – by two to four major exams per semester, each of which covers a very large body of material, or by the writing of several sophisticated papers, each of which counts for a large proportion of the course grade, followed by a very high-stakes final exam. Instead, in the AP courses that I have seen, students are assessed high school-style, with many smaller tests, quizzes, and assignments. It is easier for students to get through a course when a multitude of small assignments forces them to keep up with the work and when the large number of assessments makes each individual assessment less important. But a student hasn’t done real college work until he’s been faced with college-style assessments.</p>

<p>I think that most students applying to Amherst (to use your example) or Cornell (to use mine) and their parents will be aware that a year’s worth of AP credit completed in high school is not truly equivalent in quality or academic rigor to a year’s worth of study at Amherst or Cornell. I don’t anticipate that the number of applications to these schools or their yields will drop because the schools place restrictions on the ways in which AP credits can be used toward the fulfillment of graduation requirements.</p>

20

<p>The only places that will survive this are a Georgetown where you can have IR class with a Madeleine Albright. or a Princeton where you can have econ class with an Alan Blinder. The Wake Forests, Cornells. Emorys and Colgates of this world are in for a rough future if they don’t improve their value proposition.</p>