<p>You know, I don’t really see much difference between an LAC and the arts and sciences college of a research university. My university had 6 different schools (arts and sciences - the largest, journalism, music, speech, engineering and education); I wasn’t taking any classes in those other disciplines anyway, so their availability made the campus more interesting (insofar as I could befriend journalists, musicians, theater majors and so forth) but course-wise, what was the difference?</p>
<p>salandar wrote:
</p>
<p>Odd, that those are precisely the sort of LACs favored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI): :)</p>
<p>[CollegeGuide.org</a> - Rating America’s Colleges](<a href=“http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=10]CollegeGuide.org”>http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=10)
[CollegeGuide.org</a> - Rating America’s Colleges](<a href=“http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=12]CollegeGuide.org”>http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=12)
[CollegeGuide.org</a> - Rating America’s Colleges](<a href=“http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=13]CollegeGuide.org”>http://www.collegeguide.org/itemdetail.aspx?item=486fb85a-5d15-4d1f-a8f5-5ce2804c3129&page=13)</p>
<p>Johnwesley,
Make sure you know your sources. Your ratings come from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. According to their website,
“The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a 501c(3) non-profit, educational organization whose mission is to inspire college students to discover, embrace, and advance the principles and virtues that make America free and prosperous.Through its various programming and publishing elements, ISI annually reaches hundreds of thousands of individuals who are interested in the core ideas behind the free market, the American Founding, and Western civilization that are rarely taught in the classroom.”</p>
<p>^I thought the “trainwreck” lists on those sites were pretty funny. They pretty much are a list of “must go to schools” here :).</p>
<p>^ Yup, according to ISI my school “has also adopted the lax curriculum and pervasive leftist politics that characterize most other colleges in the Northeast”. Woe is me.</p>
<p>I think i’m a little sad that ds1’s school isn’t considered a train wreck by this group.</p>
<p>I should clarify I meant to say that some non top LACs lack equipment necessary for STEM majors. I think many top LACs are great for STEM fields (and faculty there are also required to do research, so they’ll have the equipment). I meant to warn about the not so top ones/smaller LACs. </p>
<p>I did my PhD at a medium size research university, where I taught many students who transfered there because the schools lacked some of the sophisticated equipment they needed. I currently teach at a large state school. Same thing.</p>
<p>Another way to look at it is where many PhD students in sciences come from. They tend to be top LACs, and private/public research universities</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, how easy would it be to navigate between those different schools if you wanted to take classes in them or to pursue interdisciplinary studies?</p>
<p>Quite a few LACs were ranked highly in this combined LAC/University rankings.
[The</a> 50 Best Colleges & Universities 2011-2012 Top School Rankings](<a href=“http://www.thebestcolleges.org/rankings/top-50/]The”>http://www.thebestcolleges.org/rankings/top-50/)</p>
<p>God, how I hate these rankings. This one’s as flawed as the rest. For instance, it gives weight to the mid-career salaries of graduates but includes only graduates with a terminal bachelor’s degree. In other words, it penalizes schools where a high proportion of students go on to complete graduate degrees. If 80 percent of graduates of school A go to careers in medicine, law or another lucrative fields but only 20 percent of graduates of school B do so I think it’s germane to any discussion of a school’s economic value.</p>
<p>This ranking also gives heavy weighting to the demographics of the town in which the college/university is located. Is the cost of living in a college town plus the median age of residents really worth more in terms of the quality of a school than the overall academic quality (acceptance rate plus student/faculty ratio)? I’d hate to see someone telling prospective employers or graduate schools, “But my school was really great. The town residents were so YOUNG!”</p>
<p>I don’t like rankings either. The one above lists Northwestern as being on the “banks” of Lake Michigan.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In a school divided into divisions like arts and sciences, engineering, business, agriculture and natural resources, etc., registering in courses in other divisions is likely expected and common. For example, the arts and sciences division should be getting a lot of students in other divisions registering for courses in English, math, economics, chemistry, biology, physics, etc… Business courses may be popular electives for students in other divisions; engineering may offer a few courses of interest, particularly in computer science. Of course, space availability may be another matter with the most popular out of major courses.</p>
<p>^^ But pursuing a minor in one of the ‘other colleges’ can be difficult.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There were majors offered that crossed the schools. There were certain classes that were likely only of interest to / relevant to those particular majors (such as performance-based high-level music classes) or had prerequisites that effectively closed them out to anyone who wasn’t majoring in that field but generally speaking … sure, you could take courses in the other colleges if you were so inclined. So again, I fail to see the difference between the 7000-person research university for which the arts and sciences college comprises 3500 students, and the LAC that comprises 3500 students. I mean, other than the obvious “the campus is bigger and there are more people around.”</p>
<p>Opinions should not live and die by one Ranking list. But it can be helpful to review numerous Ranking lists (and CC threads) with an eye for themes that are relevant to the particular student</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Having a co-located school of journalism, music, or engineering does not necessarily make a small to mid-sized college of arts & sciences much different from a LAC (think of Oberlin, Lawrence, or Rice). What matters more, I think, is the presence of a full-fledged graduate school of arts and sciences. With that comes shared faculty, TAs, more focus on research, more robust facilities (libraries, labs), and more course offerings. Usually, it also correlates with larger undergraduate class sizes.</p>
<p>There don’t seem to be too many research universities with only 7000 or so students. William & Mary and Rice fall approximately in that range. Tufts is a little bigger (~9500). Columbia, Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Stanford, WUSTL, and Yale all have 5000-10000 undergraduates, but also another 5000 or more grad students.</p>
<p>The main difference between a place like WUSTL or Chicago with 3500 Arts and Sciences undergraduates and a LAC is not on the “feel” as they’ll have a somewhat similar feel. They also tend not to have many large classes other than introductory or 100 level classes. But you’ll be able to take graduate classes, and classes outside of arts and sciences.</p>
<p>I just had to point this out - the list from ISI? It has Baylor in its top 10 and Duke/Bryn Mawr/Wesleyan/etc as train wrecks. Is it time to revive that old thread about the girl who chose Baylor over Yale?</p>
<p>3,500 would be a fairly large LAC. Of the LACs that I randomly checked (Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, Amherst, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Haverford, Grinnel, Vassar, Oberlin, Reed, Wellesley, Barnard, Smith, Bryn Mawr), only Smith and Wesleyan exceed 3,000, and most are around 2,000 or even smaller. So the size difference is significant, especially when the setting is also remote.</p>