Are liberal arts colleges perceived as second tier?

Parents Forum
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<p>Note to all of you people using percentages:</p>

<p>The only relevant denominator is the number of students at an institution, of equivalent capability, who want to get a PhD in biology (or whatever). Or get published in Nature magazine. Or whatever. For that analysis, it should not matter that there are other individuals attending the same university who are studying architecture, or whatever, and are unlikely candidates to pursue a PhD in Biology, or perhaps anything else for that matter, from the outset. These other people simply don’t matter, including them in the denominator creates error.</p>

<p>What ought to matter most is what opportunities are there for YOU, given YOUR interests (as these might change, also) and capabilities. This includes not only ability to achieve possibly desired next steps, but also opportunities to learn, explore while you are actually there. As influenced by many factors,for example number of courses; number of sections of courses, offered; frequency courses are offered.</p>

<p>IMO, if hundreds of students have successfully navigated a particular path matriculating from a given university, there’s a good chance that, if you have what it takes, you can do it too. While enjoying greater course selection along the way. Regardless of the numbers of students there that choose other paths.</p>

<p>If there are other students physically present there who are not interested in Biology, or do not have your identical academic capability, then their results also do not much matter. They will possibly get lower grades, or grades in substantially different programs; lower GRE scores, etc then the more capable students there. So why is it important to consolidate their results, an pollute your denominator with those people? What matters is what YOU can achieve from there, given YOUR capabilities. YOU are not a statistical average of disparate people.</p>

<p>The less homogeneous an institution’s student body is, in terms of : capabilities, interests, fields of study: the less relevant these % measures become, for the purposes here. LACs are largely more homogeneous in student bodies and academic fields of study than some of the big universities. That does not of itself mean that YOU will have a better result at either one. Regardless of how, or what, other people do there.</p>

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<p>I dunno … I would think that somehow, you’d want to calibrate expectations based on school size (or program size … or something). Not that there won’t be benefits of scale that make the absolute numbers relevant, too.</p>

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<p>Sorry Mollie…I just saw that you stated earlier that “our top feeders are MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford” and that they represent about 25% of the students" (so a higher % of the research univ students).</p>

<p>Iin general, there are a small number of “feeder” schools for your top research programs, and most of those feeders are going to be the usual suspects…so…the LAC’s are not likely to be so far out of line…given the number of science grads, per capita!</p>

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<p>Some actual DATA on LAC research output (albeit, not the most recent):</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v15p310y1992-93.pdf[/url]”>http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v15p310y1992-93.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p><a href=“http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v15p317y1992-93.pdf[/url]”>http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v15p317y1992-93.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Marite observed:

D was recently part of a team reviewing resumes and applications for internship positions. She had what I thought was an interesting observation: they weren’t looking for students from “elite” schools, whether university or LAC, but students from those schools wrote better applications. So in addition to preparation for lab-based research, it seems that writing ability is something else to look at. </p>

<p>I have several clients who teach in the physical sciences at UCLA. One of them remarked just the other day that he turned down a grad student applying for a research position because his writing skills are just awful. </p>

<p>Anyway, I think Coureur’s narrow point—that students at research universities tend to have access to higher-level research opportunities in the physical sciences than do those at LAC’s—is probably true. Depending on the students and their individual interests, physical science majors are the one group more than any other where I might recommend universities over LAC’s. The example of Marite’s S2 is, I think, fairly rare: a student where the depth of a department at the undergrad level is going to be a serious consideration. </p>

<p>My D, from an LAC, didn’t find herself terribly outgunned at the Budapest math program; one of the strongest students, from Yale, would be brilliant no matter where he had pursued his undergrad. The fault line between students who were competitive in the program and those who struggled was not a university/LAC line but a greater/lesser overall quality of school line.</p>

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<p>Zapfino’s citations in #324 are interesting, if dated. Great advertising for the top women’s colleges.</p>

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<p>tk21769: I checked out that link and I found 8 Nature papers since 1986. I then checked a random paper from 2005 on that list, and it was in the “Letters to Nature” section (no mean feat at all). That issue had 2 research articles and 14 letters, giving a total of 16 original research papers in that issue. </p>

<p>If you use that as a typical number of papers in an issue of Nature (and it sounds about right to me) and crunch the numbers now, it gives a much more realistic picture of Haverford’s impact on the “Nature reading” scientific world. My numbers may be off, but it works out to about 8 Haverford Nature papers out of 16,000 Nature papers in 23 years. So about 1 in 2000 Nature papers is from Haverford. </p>

<p>Not bad at all, in my opinion, for a small college like Haverford, just not the outsized impact your post had suggested.</p>

<p>Edit: Interestingly, 4 of those 8 papers were from one author (Gollub, in physics), 3 from another (Partridge in Astronomy), and 1 from a third (Boughn, again in astronomy).</p>

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<p>I would certainly agree that not all LACs are created equal, just as not all research unis are created equal. Yet, a relatively wide range of both LACs and universities produce top science students. As an example of this, just look at the range of institutions represented among Goldwater Scholars. <a href=“http://www.act.org/goldwater/pdfdoc/2009scholars.pdf[/url]”>http://www.act.org/goldwater/pdfdoc/2009scholars.pdf&lt;/a&gt;
Among those are many that “presumably, are not as competitive.”</p>

329

<p>“The example of Marite’s S2 is, I think, fairly rare: a student where the depth of a department at the undergrad level is going to be a serious consideration.”</p>

<p>I don’t know that this is true. I don’t see why it would be all that rare, because there are a lot of academic areas at these schools which do not have all that many Professors. Most of these fields have many branches, and nobody knows everything. They certainly don’t offer courses in everything. More courses means there is more that you can learn there, pure and simple. Also the scheduling issues due to sparse or infrequent offerings can’t be rare.</p>

<p>I know it happened to my D so it can happen to someone else. </p>

<p>My D encountered limitations in course selection, # of sections offered, courses she wanted given only every other year hence not available when she would have been able to take them; all NOT in the sciences. These limitations have nothing to do with sciences, they have to do with # of faculty there, which relates to school size.</p>

<p>If it happened to her I don’t see what would make it so rare. Her major fields were not esoteric. Her LAC was larger, with more courses offered, than most. It is a generic feature related to size which IMO could well be an issue for others, and I don’t see, based on what she went through her last couple semesters picking courses, why it would be all that rare. Particularly for the highest-capability students who are coming in there with many APs/ advanced standing, as many of the most capable students are these days. This was certainly her situation, so I’ll give you that. But many other top students are in a similar boat, and the constraints didn’t all relate to that.</p>

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<p>The point is that liberal arts students at LACs and unis are likely to be roughly comparable in career aspirations. Business and engineering students? Not really.</p>

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<p>And that is precisely the point I make to those who would advocate European-style specialization in college. Ten or twenty years down the road, most will have forgotten what they learned about the Qing dynasty or about the One Hundred Years War. But, one hopes that their reading and writing skills will stay with them all their lives and come in handy no matter which career they pursue.</p>

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<p>Not sure what is meant by this passage. Business-oriented students? One does not need to major in business to go into business or finance. I know Wall Street firms that purposely do not recruit among business majors. Engineering, well, perhaps not. There are few engineering students at Harvard or Yale, more at Princeton and Cornell.</p>

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<p>^^ Or which forum they choose to post on :)</p>

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<p>My Malacster-grad European history teacher in high school surprised me by knowing less actual European history than I did at age 17. And even more surprisingly, a terrible aptitude for reading primary sources. So much for that snazzy liberal arts degree that teaches people how to read and learn, eh?</p>

<p>But anecdotes aside, any good program, regardless of specialization, should practice writing/reading skills. My MechE friends have to produce 20-30 page reports on all of their projects, and the incredible amount of specification documents for my computer science projects are not shabby either. I think this sort of writing practice is probably more useful than potential grads than papers critiquing Shakespeare… but I digress. The point is that an Liberal Arts education does not necessarily produce writing/reading skills other programs sorely lack.</p>

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<p>I don’t know where people get the idea that learning critical reading skills and good writing means reading Shakespeare or Tolstoy. That is not what a liberal arts education is about, anyway. In fact, learning how to write a paper on either of these authors might not be the best training for writing a paper in history or anthropology or other social sciences. A biology article might in fact be better insofar as reading it involves extracting the main points and weighing the evidence presented as opposed to dissecting images, tone, characterization, meter, and other stylistics.
Keep in mind that liberal arts education is shorthand for liberal arts and sciences education.</p>

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<p>Vicariousparent, the Haverford bibliography lists each of the 8 Nature contributions as a “journal article”. Thanks for asking the right questions and checking one of them out. The one you checked is not the only one in the “letters to Nature” section. So the right number to use per issue must indeed be closer to 16 than to 3.</p>

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If these top feeders only account for 25% of the students in the Harvard grad bio program, where are the others coming from? These 5 schools are generally regarded as the best in the country. I would assume that their uniformly strong undergraduate population is more significant in determining grad school outcomes than the fact that they are private research universities. It is interesting that 75% of students are coming from elsewhere. Of course, since we don’t know how many students apply and from where, it’s entirely possible that students at these particular schools have an unusually high acceptance rate.</p>

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<p>tk21769: “Letters to Nature” is far more prestigious (that word again) than a full research article in Cancer Research. In fact, most scientists I know would be happy to trade at least two Cancer Research full length articles for one Letters to Nature. I do not in any way wish to diminish the accomplishments of the Haverford faculty.</p>

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<p>I can do more of the analysis later tonight – my data’s on another computer.</p>

<p>But five (relatively small) schools accounting for one in four students sent to my program? I don’t think that’s trivial at all! I mean, HYPMS send nearly twice as many students to my program than all LACs in the country put together. </p>

<p>FWIW, as far as I know, all of the students my year from MIT who applied to the program (10 of us) were accepted. Most MIT bio majors are premed.</p>

339

<p>A few comments as an Ivy grad and father of LAC student:</p>

<p>D’s school friends were accepted to Harvard, Princeton, Duke, and Cornell but chose her LAC instead.</p>

<p>While visiting our D this spring, we were able to have a private dinner with her language professor. While in the campus art museum, the college president recognized D and came over to converse with us. How often would that happen at a big U?</p>

<p>Regarding research: </p>

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  • Jennifer Doudna, Pomona grad, former Yale professor, Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, UC Berkeley, author of over 100 journal articles (including Nature ;)).</p>

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  • Thomas Cech, Grinnell grad, Nobel Laureate, president of the $17 billion Howard Hughes Medical Institute.</p>

<p>From: <a href=“http://www.collegenews.org/prebuilt/daedalus/cech_article.pdf[/url]”>http://www.collegenews.org/prebuilt/daedalus/cech_article.pdf&lt;/a&gt; (also referenced by Idad in post 93 and 2boysima in post 253)</p>

<p>So IMHO, LACs may not produce top research, but they produce graduates capable of top research. </p>

<p>And to answer the OP’s original question, is there a “general perception” that LACs are inferior to universities, yes, if you mean the general public’s uninformed perception. But to the educated minority? No, no, no.</p>

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I can’t believe all y’all smart folks haven’t brought up what I think y’all call “confirmatory bias” ( I get my mitosis mixed up with my wife’s mimosas.) and , maybe more importantly, academic incest in what gets published.</p>

<p>I have read posts from scientists on CC over the 35 years I’ve been here that suggested that peer-reviewed sometimes turns into fellow alumni-reviewed (or even closer). I wouldn’t know. I’m just a simple ne’er-do-well. </p>

<p>Y’all can argue the fine points of whatever it is y’all are arguing about till the cows come home but I can’t see that any one student should base their UG college choice on the numbers discussed here. </p>

<p>IMO an interested student could (as fully as possible) investigate the research opportunities available at a particular school and the hurdles they will have to jump to actually participate in a non-bottle washing way, and then make a thoughtful decision being mindful that their research interests might change radically.</p>

<p>My data-point chose her school based in part on research opportunities (at St. Jude’s - supposed to be pretty high-powered stuff going-on there but…see mimosas above ;)) that she has only touched tangentially. She was lured away by (what to her) was a more exciting and rewarding opportunity to do very well-funded “basic” research on-campus. (It has been described by a great and knowledgeable cc scientist friend as “obscure”.) (Edit: She feels she has made a significant, independent contribution.) As always, she is following her true mentor’s advice to “throw things against the wall and see what sticks”. YM(and your kid’s M)MV. Wildly. </p>

<p>For some students the __________ (insert one : ResearchU/LAC) couldn’t be more wrong. For others, it’s spot on. For some, either one would suit them just fine. </p>

<p>My advice? Get your eyes wide open.Then jump and make the most of where you land. </p>

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