any LACs strong in math & science?

College Search & Selection
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isn't it better asking graduating seniors how they in hindsight feel about their decsions?

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kinda what I was trying to find out myself....

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I've asked my S that very question, now that he is a senior at one of the LACs mentioned in this thread. Over the past few years, he's had the chance to do scientific research at his home institution, a state uni, a private research uni (under a top PI), and at a research institute overseas. He thoroughly enjoyed all of his experiences and was, by commonly accepted standards, productive at each but is adamant that, had he to do it over again, he would not have gone anywhere else. It was simply the best place for him.</p>

<p>As to outcomes, I guess he'll know come early spring as he's in the process of applying to grad schools. Interesting to note, too, that the uber-superstar researcher he'd most like to have as a grad adviser did his own undergrad at a lowly state uni on nobody's radar.</p>

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Is it possible that research opportunities may be limited, and that some research professors are inattentive? No doubt. But my EXPERIENCE is that there are large numbers of UG in research laboratories where they are being mentored by investigators who are enthusiastic about their participation.

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<p>Uh, isn't this a matter of survivorship bias? You see only the successes. You don't see the failures - i.e., the students who tried to get a position but were denied. What you are therefore doing is just sampling on the dependent variable. </p>

<p>If we were to just examine only survivors, one might conclude that nobody ever died in war, which is clearly ridiculous.</p>

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Sakky, don’t be pedantic. I’ve known more about modeling than you can possible imagine. Not sure? Do you want to compare our CV?

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<p>Absolutely. PM or email me and we can do an exchange, if you insist on getting into a contest of pure academic machismo. </p>

<p>Besides, that message has to do with the people who continue to misconstrue the use of models. Not necessarily you, but others here. They demand perfection in modeling, when the fact is, no model has ever been perfect. The question is not whether a model is perfect, but whether it gets you closer to the truth, relative to whatever else is available today. I believe that Hoxby is at least as useful as USNews, and arguably more useful. For example, Hoxby is one of the few ranking systems that I know of that actually compares RU's and LAC's in a unified scale. </p>

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Indeed, there may be a refined math model that is more directly applicable to this. A more robust model 1) that can account for corrupted, imperfect data set, and 2) that can account for un-modeled phenomenon. This robust math model may yield a much better result even in the presence of imperfect data set. Alas, the simple model (in the paper) is not it!!!

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<p>Nobody is saying that this is a 'perfect' model. Of course you can always refine the model. But that's not the point. The point is, I am not aware of a better paper out there that deals with this subject. If you are aware of one, please present it. Furthermore, I have no reason to believe that the Hoxby article is any less useful than any other ranking system out there, i.e. USNews, Gourman, or what-have-you. Maybe the Hoxby model is too simplistic and doesn't capture every nuance. But * neither do any of the other rankings out there *. What sort of modeling did USNews do?</p>

<p>What I am saying is that it's all relative. The Hoxby model is not perfect. No model is. If perfect were what was required, nobody would ever be able to do anything in academia. The real question is not whether the model is perfect, but whether it's better than anything else we have available, at least as a first approximation. Newtonian classical mechanics as a model in physics is not perfect, and never was. But for hundreds of years, it was used as the best available model in physics until QM and relativity were discovered, and to this day, Newtonian mechanics is * still * used as a useful first approximation. I am sure that some day, we will find that QM and relativity are "incorrect" and some new model will be discovered. But until that day, we should continue to rely on the current models.</p>

<p>I put the ball in your court. What model out there is better than the Hoxby model? </p>

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I believe the sample is not representative of the underlying population, which includes non-applicants. All the people who like BYU applied there, and they would and did prefer it . Their preferences were revealed. The underlying population include a far higher proportion of people who would not apply to BYU, and would not attend it if they were admitted vs. anyplace else. The preference of these non-applicants was not adequately revealed, in my opinion, judging from the results. Because the sample of applicants does not perfectly reflect the behavior of non-applicants. Whatever these equations say, this nuance was not captured appropriately in the results, which imply a preference for BYU in the underlying population of college applicants that is miles ahead where, IMO, BYU is really preferred by the mass population of applicants at large.

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<p>First off, the study never says that the model is representative of the population at large, if by that you mean every single student in the country. The study explicitly stated that their data was from a group of top high school students. I think that actually makes the model better. After all, I don't want to sound harsh, but I am not particularly interested in the preferences of some of the irresponsible, unmotivated kids that I went to high school with. I remember one of them loudly proclaiming that he just wanted to find the college that will allow him to smoke as much weed he can, and so he was seriously looking at going to college in Europe, especially in the Netherlands. Do you think that his "preference" is a preference that others should care about? I'm sure that some of the Playboy Magazine Top Party Schools are highly preferred by many students, but do you think that that's a meaningful preference to model? The truth of the matter is that plenty of American kids are not particularly motivated to learn. They go to school to have fun on their parent's dime. </p>

<p>Secondly, I still don't see why it is so unrepresentative that BYU should be preferred highly. I don't see why it's hard to believe that many of the most motivated students in the country happen to be Mormons. Mormons are very hard-working people. Certainly a heck of a lot harder working than many of the kids back in my high school. </p>

<p>But more importantly, like I said above, if you don't Hoxby, what else do you got? USNews? Gourman? Like I said, the measure of a model is not perfection, but whether it's better than anything else available. If you have no good alternative, you have to go with what you got until such time as somebody creates an alternative. I'm sure that every single thing we know about science today will be proved wrong at some time in the future. But so what? That doesn't mean that we just give up and claim to know nothing at all. Our models are never perfect truth, but they get us * closer * to the truth.</p>

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You can't redefine arbitrarily what a LAC or a RU are. A research university offers programs up to a PhD level, LACs do not. The definition is pretty straightforward and universally applied.

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<p>Straightforward and universally applied, eh? Is that right? </p>

<p>Case in point. USNews classifies Bryn Mawr as a LAC. Yet what's this I see in the following links? Hmm, isn't that interesting? I thought you said that the definition of a LAC was straightforward and universally applied as universities that offer PhD's. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.brynmawr.edu/socialwork/phd/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.brynmawr.edu/socialwork/phd/&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.gradprofiles.com/brynmawr.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.gradprofiles.com/brynmawr.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>So if Bryn Mawr can apparently be classified as a LAC, then why is it so hard to believe that Dartmouth or Brown, or even Princeton could be considered LAC's too? Honestly, what is the difference? Where is the dividing line? </p>

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I am confused by statements that Harvard does not pay enough attention to its undergrads. Isn't Harvard College an independent school within Harvard University with the sole mission of furthering the goals of its undegraduates?

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<p>Yeah, * Harvard College * has that mission. The problem is, as others have stated, that no faculty members are employed by Harvard * College *. Instead, they are hired by one of the other schools of Harvard, and in the case of undergrads, the relevant profs are employees of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Plenty of these profs do not care about teaching undergrads, as they would rather spend time on their research.</p>

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In terms of a preference poll, isn't it better asking graduating seniors how they in hindsight feel about their decsions? Why does anyone think it's objectively valuable to ask incoming freshmen? They know hardly anything about their schools, compared to when they graduate.

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<p>The major statistical problem with this is that you will tend to get lots of extreme opinions. For example, for psychological reasons, many people will attempt to justify their choices they make as a defense mechanism, as people generally don't want to acknowledge that they were wrong about something. You will also get the case of students that were extremely upset about their experience and will therefore rank their schools anomalously low as a matter of psychological revenge. I remember being absolutely ticked off at my undergrad college such that if you had asked me how I would rank it immediately after I graduated, I would have given a very low ranking indeed. Time has caused me to think more objectively about the situation, to the point where my experience may not have been the greatest, I acknowledge that it could have been a lot worse. </p>

<p>So while I agree that incoming freshman don't know enough, graduating seniors probably know "too much", and in particular, are emotionally tied one way or another to the school.</p>

<p>But again, I would reiterate, nobody is saying that Hoxby is a perfect study. There are no perfect studies out there. As Johnwesley said, you have to work with what you got, not what you wish you had. It's nice to think that researchers can always get perfect data and run the perfect methodology to get the perfect study. But that's not reality. The real question is not whether the study is perfect, but whether there is a better one out there. Is there one? I am not aware of one.</p>

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The real question is not whether the study is perfect, but whether there is a better one out there.

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<p>I think the question is whether the study is good, warranting reliance. There are indeed caveats for any polling, but I don't see the value in asking incoming freshmen; it's a beauty contest at that point.</p>

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<p>"The high-performing LAC student has proven him/herself as capable of mastering a challenging academic curriculum, and not necessarily just in the chosen science. (This is a consideration as being broadly trained and literate is usually an asset). However, what may be untested is how they will enjoy and perform in a highly focused, technically demanding, and frequently tedious graduate experience. (Some students will find that they resent giving up their Contra dance classes for nights and weekends in the lab.)"</p>

<p>I have to admit I thought of this thread yesterday, when we toured Vassar. The tour guide mentioned there's a big contra dance thing going on there this weekend, or periodically, or something like that.</p>

<p>I didn't ask how many prospective scientists were expected to be in attendance. But I thought about it.</p>

<p>Wasn't going to mention it, as I thought this thread was dead...</p>

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<p>Vossron:</p>

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<p>I think we're all in agreement on that last point. :) In fact, I would go so far as to say, that the RPP is basically a measure a school's "gravitational pull" for whatever that may be worth; some people may wish to read more than that into a given school's results; that's part of what makes it interesting.</p>

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I think the question is whether the study is good, warranting reliance. There are indeed caveats for any polling, but I don't see the value in asking incoming freshmen; it's a beauty contest at that point.

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<p>To quote from Hoxby, p. 2-3:
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"First, students believe and act as though their peers matter. This may be because peer quality affects the level of teaching that is offered. Alternatively, students may learn directlyfrom their peers. If such channels for peer effects are important, then it is reasonable for students to care about whether they are surrounded by peers with high college aptitude.
Students will want to see a revealed preference ranking because it will show them which colleges can offer the highest concentration of desirable peers. A more preferred college wins more often in matriculation tournaments. Thus, it can afford to be more selective and can offer peers with higher aptitude.</p>

<p>Second, students–especially the high achieving students on whom we focus–are not ignorant about college quality. They gather information about colleges' quality from publications, older siblings, friends who are attending college, college counselors, and their own visits to colleges. A student may place the greatest weight on his own observations of quality, but he will also put some weight on the observations of other students, simply because
his own sample of observations is too small to be representative. A revealed preference ranking efficiently aggregates observations about quality from thousands of students. There are parallels to other industries. For instance, people judge restaurant and hotel quality based partly on their own experiences, but they also want to know about other people's experiences.
This is why there is a demand for guides like Zagat's, which aggregate people's observations about hotels and restaurants.</p>

<p>Third, it has long been hypothesized that specific colleges' degrees serve as signals of a student's aptitude, which is hard for future employers to observe directly [Spence, 1974]. In equilibrium, a college's degree signals the aptitude of the students who actually attend it. For instance, there will be an equilibrium only if a Cornell degree signals aptitude that is consistent
with the actual distribution of aptitude among Cornell students. This is another reason for students to care about the ability of their peers and, thus, their college's tendency to attract students." *</p>

<p>I find that to be a convincing explanation of why the preferences of incoming freshmen matter. The truth is, school quality is not a constant. Rather, it is a variable that depends on the quality of student that it draws. The better the students, the better the school. This is true from a social networking standpoint (because students tend to learn more when they're surrounded by better students) and from a market signalling standpoint (that the school's brand name becomes incrementally more valuable as better students attend). Education is therefore a tipping market - a school that is seen as desirable tends to attract better students, which therefore makes the school more desirable, which attracts even better students, etc.</p>

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This is why there is a demand for guides like Zagat's, which aggregate people's observations about hotels and restaurants.

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<p>Exactly my point. People contribute to Zagat's <em>after</em> they have eaten at the restaurant. Students know more about a school <em>after</em> they attend.</p>

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Exactly my point. People contribute to Zagat's <em>after</em> they have eaten at the restaurant. Students know more about a school <em>after</em> they attend.

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<p>Uh, I think you missed the point of that phrase, which is that these are all inherently intangible goods. Education is, especially, an intangible good. So is going to a fancy restaurant or hotel. After all, most people who go to fancy restaurants are not * themselves * gourmands. Most people who go to fancy hotels are not * themselves * professional hoteliers. So they don't have the expertise to really judge the quality of these things. Hence, their opinions about these things are going to be inherently influenced by what others around them think about it. That's basic human psychology. Regular Americans, by themselves, might think that a McDonald's Big Mac is a great sandwich. </p>

<p>But besides, like I said, students who attend a school become emotionally vested in it, either positively or negatively. Hence, they are not exactly impartial observers. In particular, whatever psychological bias that does exist tends to be upwards. People tend to justify the choices they made in life, because nobody likes to admit, even to themselves, that they made a mistake.</p>