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<p>In my own personal experience, hiring managers are familiar primarily with local colleges and universities and recruit from there. Although I am not sure about national corporations. Do we have any tangible evidence that HR managers in national corporations are familiar with schools like Amherst, Williams, Haverford, etc.?</p>
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<p>Hillary Clinton went to an LAC and it doesn’t seem to have hurt her any.</p>
<p>Yeah, of all the reasons for making a choice between LACs or universities, expectations of future leadership are definitely at the very bottom of my list–actually, off my list altogether!</p>
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<p>Some will be and some won’t. As someone who herself spent 15 years at a major national corporation …
<p>Leadership is at the personal level, anyway. That’s a series of characteristics that someone either has or doesn’t. There are future leaders who are currently studying at community colleges and future followers at HYP.</p>
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<p>Attending an LAC had a direct impact on her not winning the democratic primaries.</p>
<p>It’s true that the hiring manager of a local company is not going to give a rat’s patootie that you went to Will-yums College, but presumably that’s not the kind of job Williams graduates are going for. The graduates who donated to that two-billion-dollar endowment must have gotten that money from somewhere.</p>
<p>Then again, if getting a job and making money are your main concerns, then LACs are probably not for you, as that is not consistent with the values they generally try to develop.</p>
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<p>Oh, my sides!
The secret of Obama’s victory has been revealed! He had the good sense to ditch the LAC for Columbia UNIVERSITY. Their fates were sealed at 22. The rest of their lives is mere denouement.:rolleyes:</p>
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<p>If only she had had more research opportunities. If only her professors had published more articles in leading journals.</p>
<p>I was an undergraduate at a mid-sized state school. There the science professors didn’t do a lot of their own, original research, but most of them had collaborative projects with professors at more prestigious institutions. I got the impression that, to an extent, the lesser-school professors functioned a bit like post-docs for the better-school professors. By this I mean that they did more of the grunt work, the hands-on calculations and benchtop experiments and such, while the better-school professors were more like the project leaders, obtaining the funding and coming up with the really big ideas.</p>
<p>The advantage to me was that my professors had time to teach me about the work they were doing, and that turned into undergraduate research opportunities for me. They appreciated the help, and I got to learn outside the classroom. It’s not that their work was unimportant; this was just a way for them to participate in significant research with the modest resources at their disposal.</p>
<p>Could this be similar to the dynamic at LACs? And the reason that LAC students get comparable research opportunities plus better classroom education, as compared with much larger schools?</p>
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<p>I’m sure it happens in a few cases. And prior to a few days ago I would have guessed it happened a lot more. Such collaborating professors from a smaller institution would normally get co-authorships when the work was published, unless their contribution was quite minor. That’s why I was surprised to find zero LAC co-authors publishing with the big boys when I looked at over 600 authors of papers. I knew the LAC number would be low but not that low. </p>
<p>If they are not doing so now, I think more LAC profs should engage in this kind of research to raise their visibility and reputations and perhaps stand a better chance of getting their own research grants.</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing the results of your search. I’m surprised, too.</p>
<p>coureur, I agree - more LAC professors need to do so. Here is one example of what can be done together:</p>
<p>[Gecko-inspired</a> adhesion with stiff polymer micro-fibers](<a href=“Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab”>Berkeley Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab)</p>
<p>Fascinating stuff!</p>
<p>See, if we all dropped the snarky tone we’d get something done.</p>
<p>My kids had HS friends who were very concerned during the college search process about finding a place to “double major”. This was a core factor for their decisionmaking- either because they loved music but also wanted to end up with a degree in something they percevied as more bankable, or because their passion for Japanese literature was intense but they also loved anthropology or sociology or what not.</p>
<p>Was this a concern for my kids? Heck no. They had enough trouble picking (and sticking!) with one major, let alone multiples. That doesn’t mean that kids who want to pick a college that meets their needs are getting an inferior or superior or whatever education- they’re just identifying meangingful criteria and choosing accordingly.</p>
<p>Why so much snarkiness over kids who start college already advanced enough in their discipline, such that a narrow course offering, or fewer research opportunities is a meaningful criterion. (whether you think it’s bunk or not is pretty irrelevant- if your kid is trying to get a lab position studying bipolar adolescents, the fact that the college he or she is in doesn’t have a single faculty person who is interested in the topic, can get your kid connected with that community, or provide a meaningful recommendation might just be germane if it’s your kid.)</p>
<p>Kids and parents eliminate colleges that could have provided a great education for all sorts of dopey reasons- the mascot, the fight song, the availability of tickets to football games, etc. So we live in a market-based society- that’s not news. SOME kids need lab mentors, others do not. SOME kids want to double major, others do not. It doesn’t make the kid with narrow or particular criteria a phoney or a fraud- it’s great that some kids find what they want at Beloit or Rhodes and that others find it at U Michigan or Penn State.</p>
<p>But to assert that the output in the hard sciences (just to take the example that has been flayed to death here) from your typical LAC department or lab is on par with that of a typical research U department or lab is ludicrous. There are ongoing projects with price tags into the hundreds of millions involving interdisciplanary teams of professors and grad students and undergrads and affiliated staff at large U’s which would, as a practical matter, overwhelm any LAC which tried to mount such an effort. Too big. Too much. Wrong facility. And not enough apprentices (PhD candidates, post-docs, research fellows, and yes, undergrads) to provide the day to day labor which makes the project stay on track. If a project involves animal research- that’s probably a full time compliance person to make sure safety and welfare protocols are being met. Human subjects? Even more people. Pharmaceuticals involved? Several statisticians just to make sure that the recruitment and retention protocols will yield statistically sound data. Engineering/transportation safety research? A computer science team to run simulations (how many airplanes can you crash before someone calls the Feds?)</p>
<p>Does this matter to the typical HS kid picking a college? Heck no. Many of these kids would never venture into the nano lab or neuro department or “future of transportation center” if you paid them. So if that’s your kid, ignore this factor. </p>
<p>My kid did research at MIT starting sophomore year. It was a fantastic opportunity for him. His professor was not a replacement father figure, my kid won’t name his first child after him, and probably won’t credit him as having been a critical figure in his intellectual development.</p>
<p>But it was a huge deal for a kid to be treated like a real grownup, to be stretched intellectually on something harder than “book learning”, to contribute to a signficant study where his contributions were valued not because he was there to learn “technique” but because his teammates handed off a chunk of the project to him and expected him to deliver in a meaningful way. He had many other opportunities to be mentored by different faculty- where faculty invested in him because they wanted him to learn and they wanted to teach. But the research position was unique in that he wasn’t there to warm the bench or to soak up knowledge- he was there to question and argue and contribute and produce.</p>
<p>Would he have gotten a fine education without this experience? Absolutely. Was this a net positive in his life? Absolutely.</p>
<p>I would encourage any kid who wants another dimension to his or her learning to try and get some sort of research position- professors in the humanities need editors and fact-checkers and interviewers and ghost grant-writers. Professors in the social sciences need all of the above plus project assistants and data analysts.</p>
<p>See- isn’t it easy to be civil?</p>
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Sure thing! I’ve been collecting this data for the past few entering classes of my program, mostly because sakky has previously posted analyses of the undergraduate origins of Caltech’s graduating PhD classes, and I was interested to see if my data matched his.</p>
<p>My program is fairly large (because we’re the main source of PhD students for the many biological sciences professors at Harvard Med School). We’ve had a total of 238 students enter over the past four years.</p>
<p>Of these students, 167 (70.2%) went to a public or private research university. 35 (14.7%) went to an LAC, and 36 (15.1%) did their undergraduate work at an international institution.</p>
<p>Our top LAC feeders are Williams, Swarthmore, Bucknell, and Smith – they’re the only LACs that have sent more than one student to our program in the past four years.</p>
<p>Even though LAC profs apparently published a miniscule amount of research in scientific journals, what is the significance of that conclusion for the matter of whether an LAC is an appropriate setting in which to major in the sciences?</p>
<p>Though their professors apparently publish little, LAC students may still fare well compared to science majors at research universities when it comes to obtaining a PhD. For example,
“Moreover, even some academically strong, big universities produce very few science majors who pursue PhDs. Here is one example: The University of Wisconsin-Madison has 28,000 undergraduates; Oberlin College is one-tenth the size. Yet those institutions graduate similar numbers of physics majors who later receive doctorates in physics: in 2001-Oberlin, 5 and UW Madison, 9; in 2002-2 and 2; in 2003-2 and 4; and in 2004-1 and 4.” (From: [Small</a> Colleges: Tops in Training Scientists](<a href=“http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=732&p=2#0]Small”>http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=732&p=2#0))</p>
<p>LAC students also fared well in receiving Goldwater Fellowships in 2009: <a href=“http://www.act.org/goldwater/pdfdoc/2009scholars.pdf[/url]”>http://www.act.org/goldwater/pdfdoc/2009scholars.pdf</a></p>
<p>While an LAC is not the best possible match for all science students, it is for many.</p>
<p>And the reverse is equally true. This is what some of us have been arguing. No sweeping generalization is possible. There is no Brand X LAC, there is no Brand X LAC. Two state universities are not interchangeable (try Cal and Wyoming for size), LACs are not uniformly excellent, and no two students are absolutely alike.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with that</p>
<p>Hmm. From Mollie’s data, her Ph.D. program gets its students from research universities by a margin of 5-1. Now, what’s the overall undergraduate proportion between research U’s and LAC’s?</p>
<p>Mollie, glad to see that Smith is hanging in with multiple participants in your program.</p>
<p>TheDad:</p>
<p>Mollie’s stats show that LACs are overrepresented, though not at twice the rate of their proportion; more important, they show that only a tiny number of LACs are feeders for her program, illustrating the idea that not all LACs are created equal. Some truly do turn out students who are extremely well prepared to do lab-based research; and others, presumably, are not as competitive.</p>