<p>Are liberal arts colleges within research universities the same as liberal arts colleges? Is there the same amount of competition and the same class size or no?</p>
<p>Humm, can you give an example?</p>
<p>say like the College of Arts and Sciences in Brandeis is a liberal arts college, how would that compare with Welleslley College</p>
<p>Class sizes and offering frequency can sometimes be found by looking at each school’s on-line class schedules.</p>
<p>Of course, the catalog will tell you what courses may be offered, though not necessarily that frequently.</p>
<p>Interesting you should use Brandeis as an example, as it’s <em>almost</em> unique in this category.
Disclosure: I’m a Brandeis alum.</p>
<p>I would say where it really matters is if you’re studying in a field where the research-side of the university is actively involved. Otherwise (say you’re studying English or Music), it will make little difference.</p>
<p>The curriculum and academic focus is more or less the same, but the structure and ambiance are different.</p>
<p>Liberal Arts Colleges (or Schools) within larger universities are just that: the academic organization that teaches the liberal arts – humanities, social sciences, math/science. The larger university would also have other schools like engineering, law, business, etc.</p>
<p>A small liberal arts college or LAC, is a small – roughly between 1500 and 2500 students – college that focuses on teaching the liberal arts to undergraduates. Generally, they don’t have graduate or professional schools, though it’s not uncommon to find exceptions.</p>
<p>Small LACs are known for small discussion based classes and individualized attention from teaching professors, as contrasted with large lecture based classes and teaching assistants. </p>
<p>Medium and large universities draw on the strengths of their graduate schools and often offer a greater breadth and depth of courses</p>
<p>Competition is more a function of culture than size. </p>
<p>No. Universities have Colleges, with a capital “C.” Liberal arts colleges, little “c.” Just because they have similar titles doesn’t mean they’re alike. A liberal arts college is a unique, autonomous institution consisting of departments in the liberal arts. These are the liberating arts, the ones that were thought for centuries to free a man from confusion and ignorance by teaching him how to think about a subject clearly and precisely. The liberal arts were often associated with the world of ideas about humans and the universe in which they find themselves. Many of these arts, like natural philosophy (science) and theology, were thought of as unengaged with the material world. The purpose of the liberal arts was not, for instance, to make men wealthier or in many cases to make the world a better place–because the world was often anathema to the idea. The world was part of the problem, and men must be liberated from it to the world of ideas in order to find the truth. </p>
<p>On the other hand, a “College of Liberal Arts” or a “College of Arts and Sciences” is using the term college in an older manner, as one collection of independent departments each maintaining its own teaching staffs and curricula united (often barely, always grudgingly) under one heading such as “liberal arts” or “arts and sciences”–but understood to be independent to a great extent from the other Colleges within the university. A COAS in this sense provides some central organization of varying strength to department units that retain a modicum of independence from that central administration. The point here is that faculty in whatever department have a hard time being told what and how to teach, research, and run their departments, and so they agreed unwillingly to organizing themselves under the auspices of a central administration that quite often does want to tell them what to do. It may be recognized as a necessity, but it’s often felt to be an infringement on academic freedom. And a College of liberal arts teachers was as far as they were willing to go. Committees and administrators of the College might be allowed to make suggestions to the departments of arts and sciences, but the faculty of the COAS has to draw the line somewhere. Otherwise, the faculty of, say, English might have engineers and dentists telling them what to teach and who deserves tenure!! Preposterous! While the institution might have the need to centralize, the departments have a need to maintain their integrity, and so you get such units as the COAS or the College of Engineering or College of Dentistry. Can you imagine a College of Engineering and Dentistry? Neither can any faculty member in those disciplines.</p>
<p>A COAS, then, is one college within a university consisting of upto 10 or more colleges (and maybe one or two schools, but let’s agree not to go there). A COAS, often the largest college, will serve to protect not only its own autonomy but the autonomy of every department within it from the encroachment of the other colleges and any attempts by the university to infringe on their autonomy. For example, the university administration might want to start an initiative to educate students as businesspeople, usually because this is a way to grow enrollment and extend their power into the business community. Well, no right thinking members of the COAS (or engineering, for that matter) are going to want to take on such students or such faculty as businesspeople. These are creatures of the world, after all! They are not “one of us,” the faculty of COAS say. So they refuse the desires of the university admin to install these creatures into their College, and the university simply creates a new College of Business, whose departments will in turn demand their own independence from their College and the university.</p>
<p>It seems funny and a little crazy, but the system has worked for 900 years, thru wars and social upheaval that have torn apart Europe and that medieval world in which Europe and the university were born.</p>
<p>If yo want to compare Brandeis to Wellesley just do that. That is a unique case because Brandeis is as small as a liberal arts college with a small grad school. It doesn’t help you to look at generalities when you have specifics to look at. </p>
<p>Using @jkeil911 's terminology, COAS faculty often prefer the lecture method of teaching their material. There have been a ton of threads on this.</p>
<p>such a simple distinction can not be made, @circuitrider. It is simply not true. COAS faculty don’t prefer lecture over anything else necessarily. Whether we teach by seminar or lecture can be the product of class size, classroom space, or even the furniture in the room; there is also the problem of the material to be learned. When you come out of a literary survey or a Chem I course, there’s a whole lot of information you are expected to have learned. Sometimes the best way to deliver that information to arrive at that goal is to lecture. In upperclass courses, after a whole lot of information has been learned, there is more time for analysis and discussion of what has been learned. Often the best way to teach analysis is by discussion or seminar.</p>
<p>Actually, learning by generalities and specifics is the best way to learn, @BrownParent. No two people are alike in how they learn, and no two subjects are necessarily best learned the same way. Brandeis actually has one College of Arts and Sciences and several Schools: a Graduate School, a Business School, the Heller School for Policy and Management, and a School of Continuing Ed. One would not expect to find the faculty divided up this way at a liberal arts college like Wellesley, and they’re not. The size of the classes at Brandeis’ College compared to those at Wellesley has nothing to do with one being a university and the other a liberal arts college. It quite often has to do with money: simply which school can afford to have a lower student to faculty ratio. A wealthier school might have smaller classes in the course as a less wealthy school. </p>
<p>@jkeil911
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<p>Well, you’ve amply described one of the other differences between a COAS and a free standing LAC: the layers of bureaucracy. Getting things done, whether it’s designing a new building or shifting a department in a different direction, it’s just easier from an administrative pov to do these things at a LAC.</p>
<p>My impression–based in part on one child in a state u and another in a small lac:</p>
<p>Lacs–all your classes are taught by faculty, and there are no big lectures with separate labs or discussion groups led by grad students. The labs are led by the professor. </p>
<p>If you are interested in research–and this was repeatedly stressed on a recent tour–you are not competing with grad students to work on a professor’s project. But at unis there all be more research and more big projects.The amount of research activity at lacs varies–so check the particulars.</p>
<p>The classes at lacs are really smaller. Even at Ivys, and other smaller universities, most of your intro courses will be in a lecture hall. Electives and upper level courses at unis may approach the class size of a lac–but not always. </p>
<p>Obviously, much greater selection of courses at a uni. If you want to learn Finnish you’re not going to find that at a lac–unless the lac is in northern Minnesota. At a lac, for your major, you’re going to be working and studying with the same 5-10 professors for 4 years, for the most part. (And socializing with the same sorry faces.)</p>
<p>And consider lacs with agreements to allow cross enrollment for courses. That widens your choices. </p>
<p>Overall, not much different from choosing between bright lights big city and Mayberry. </p>
<p>@circuitrider, you’ve provided us with another generalization that is of little use or accuracy. Each institution is different from another and different even within itself.</p>
<p>^I think it’s the nature of the OP’s question. Try not to get so upset. :)</p>
<p>Done. Neither can I live without some generalizations 
There’s very little difference between attending an LAC and enrolling at Brandeis’ College of Arts and Sciences in terms of the kinds of attention you will get from your professors. You will have introductory courses like Freshman English that are taught by graduate students, and you will have other courses where grad students are teaching the labs or recitations and the lecture is left to the professor. At Brandeis that doesn’t mean that in the latter courses you will have no contact with your professor. In addition, the grad students and TAs might be some of the best professors you have (true at any uni). At your seminar courses and upper-level courses you will have professors running the classrooms, sometimes assisted by grad students serving as lab assistants. I taught at Brandeis.</p>
<p>I also taught at a small LAC, and it wasn’t all that different in terms of access to professors. Instead of having grad students teaching the FE courses you had mostly faculty who were not on the tenure-track and so MIGHT have a less permanent investment in the institution and your education, might be part-time, might have a couple of additional courses they were teaching at another nearby college. In the labs, similarly, instead of grad students you frequently found lab techs, members of the staff whose job was to run the labs. In the science lectures of 50 or 60 students, you just had over-worked faculty trying to handle all the needs of the students and doing it with varying degrees of success. </p>
<p>Let me make one more remark about faculty workloads. At an LAC, a faculty member will often be expected to teach three courses each semester with no help from a grad student. Often it is 4 and 4 and sometimes more. In almost every case, the higher the course load the less attention students in general get from the professor. At a university like Brandeis, the teaching load is 2 and 2 or less, so that faculty are expected not only to increase their research productivity but to increase their student contact hours. Also, in general, the higher the course load the less up-to-date faculty are on the most recent research and the less they are publishing. The research opps for students at good LACs can sometimes be worse than those at PhD granting departments such as Brandeis has because the faculty themselves don’t have a lot of research going on.</p>
<p>Each school is different, and you cannot make generalizations about whether students get more attn at an LAC than a university. A lot, too, will depend on the student and how much he or she goes out and gets what is available to them in terms of time with the professor, research opps, etc.</p>
<p>@jkeil911
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<p>Speaking of generalities, what you’ve just stated is not true of the little ivies where the teaching loads are much more likely to be two courses per semester.</p>
<p>There are very few LACs where that is the case, and many more where it is not. Hence my use of the word “often.”</p>
<p>^That’s why the ones where that is the case are called “little ivies”.
And, COAS professors do often prefer the lecture method.</p>
<p>:)) </p>
<p>I can’t think of a LAC within a large research U other than Barnard College. </p>