<p>At research universities, students can do independent study if they want even more specificity. It’s true that faculty aren’t focused solely on undergrads and may be unavailable (depending on the university, the department, the professor, and the time of year), but such is the price of having renowned/recognized scholars as your professors: there’s more demand for their time because their research is more highly regarded. They are still there though, and students can and do work with them. As always, there are pluses and minuses to each.</p>
<p>In some subjects, there is a reasonably well defined set of courses that are expected to be offered, among which there is a subset of courses that someone majoring in the subject is generally expected to have taken before getting a bachelor’s degree. A school which does not offer the latter set of courses would not be very suitable for a student majoring in the subject. A lack of advanced elective courses beyond the minimal set may also be unsatisfying for those with a strong interest in the subject (especially a student who enters advanced enough to skip introductory subjects).</p>
<p>For example, Amherst’s math offerings are rather limited – no advanced courses in geometry, topology, numerical analysis, mathematical logic, and set theory are offered for 2011-2012 or 2012-2013.</p>
<p>Like you’d have time to take all of those specialized courses…distribution requirements :)</p>
<p>I don’t wanna sift through a thousand courses to find things that I’d be interested in, either.</p>
<p>In my anthro class, kids hated it because they were forced take it as one of the few available electives that counted for a culture distribution requirement.</p>
<p>Have you heard of the College of Wooster? They’re renowned for their independent study…</p>
<p>If a kid is really interested in a certain subject and loves individual attention, I don’t see why an LAC wouldn’t be perfect.</p>
<p>Yes, assuming they pick the right LAC. A student who knows that he or she wants to focus on a specific area is well-advised to select a LAC that offers a strong program in that area, in order to enjoy both the small classes and individualized attention that LACs offer and also a complete range of courses in the major. But most LACs do specialize.</p>
<p>For example, imagine the quandary of a student who has already completed the calculus sequence in high school and enrolls here planning to major in math:</p>
<p>It’s hard to imagine this student would even come close to running out of courses.</p>
<p>EDIT: although technically a university, it’s really more of a mid-sized LAC with some professional programs (<3,000 students, most of them undergrads).</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with this. I pointed out that “it depends on what the student is looking for.” The argument advanced was that a cafeteria style set of endless curricular options is an absolute good and a marker of superior overall academic quality. I disagree with that position. Choices are only valuable within a particular personal context.</p>
<p>I’m all in favor of the existence of a variety of types of institutions with different educational and intellectual missions. I’m not anti-this or pro-that. However, people get tribal about defending what they know or projecting their own preferences onto everyone else.</p>
<p>The odd thing I notice on these forums is that some people seem get it backward in that they recommend that a student who is very undecided about major go to a small school which is much more likely to be specialized in its course offerings, so that has decent offerings in a smaller set of possible majors than most larger schools.</p>
<p>Small LAC-model schools do have their advantages, but it does seem odd that people recommend them to students who are more likely to run into their limitations.</p>
<p>Of course, this really has little to do with public versus private, as it has more to do with small versus large and LAC model versus RU model versus other models.</p>
<p>Here’s an OPINION in favor of LACs from a prof:</p>
<p>"I haven’t forgotten! The short answer is that your professor’s advice is basically correct. People who go to Stanford as undergraduates are discouraged from doing graduate work there in the same department. The examples work with any major university (Virginia, Michigan, Duke, Harvard, Chicago, Montana, Alabama, Texas, Yale you name it). Even after a Ph.D., universities usually want a professor to teach somewhere else for a while before “welcoming” him/her back to the university where s/he earned the Ph.D. Yes, I wouldn’t mind teaching at the Committee on Social Thought someday, but it couldn’t have happened right away. It’s been fifteen years now, so who knows?</p>
<p>I think that nothing is better preparation for graduate study at the top schools than a great liberal arts education. It is why I chose NOT to go to Chicago as an undergraduate. I wanted the perfect preparation, which I got at a liberal arts school, followed by my dream of studying for the doctorate at Chicago. An anthropology major at ****** College (recognized as one of the best, and often THE best, undergraduate department of anthropology in the country) is perfect. I am biased toward liberal arts colleges (four year ones like ******) for the B.A. Not everyone would agree, but it is hard to argue with the results over time."</p>
<p>^ wait, he turned down Chicago because he wanted a “great liberal arts education”? Sure, I can see turning down Chicago for a LAC, but it’s hard to imagine that he truly believes Chicago’s liberal arts education isn’t as good. I always thought people considered Chicago the “master” of liberal arts education, with its core.</p>
<p>phantasmagoric, rbouwins did say it was an opinion. Many feel that research universities have faculties that focus too much on mentoring/advising graduate students, raising money to fund their research, managing major research programs and publishing prestige papers in order to effectively provide undergrads the sort of guidance and instruction required at their level. It is obviously an opinion, but a valid one.</p>
<p>I understand that it’s an opinion, and while Chicago could be criticized for what you described, that’s not what the prof’s objection seemed to be. He wasn’t explicit about his exclusion of all that in “great liberal arts education.”</p>
<p>Seattle U is a private school. Is it better than U Washington? There is a HUGE range in privates too. Not many of them are all that good. Boston U–meh, GWU–double meh. Miami–triple meh. Syracuse?? and so on.</p>
<p>That is the issue which had previously drawn me into this discussion-- the notion that the education at a private, no matter what, is better than a public. Granted, some students may thrive in certain types of environments and not others. However, the notion that for ex, Earlham or Dickinson is better than U Texas or Wisconsin just by virtue of private and not public, is simplistic.</p>
<p>While I can’t speak for the other universities, the above sentiment is diametrically wrong for Harvard, which is arguably the most incestuous school in the world, perhaps unrivaled only by a certain nearby technical institute. Among the students of practically every PhD program that Harvard has to offer, the most highly represented undergraduate program is likely to be…Harvard College. In fact, in certain years, the number of former Harvard undergraduates from taken in by a particular Harvard PhD program equals/exceeds that of all other undergraduate programs combined. {For example, in one recent year, the Harvard Organizational Behavior PhD program took in 6 students, 3 of whom were former Harvard undergraduates.} </p>
<p>Furthermore, it is also true that many of the best Harvard Phd graduates place right back at Harvard. As a case in point, just last year both Sam Hanson and Adi Sunderam who finished their PhD’s in business economics at Harvard placed right back at Harvard. Indeed, there are plenty of Harvard faculty who came to Harvard as undergrads and basically never left, having earned their bachelor’s, then PhD’s, then placed back at Harvard, then won tenure. As an example, except for a Marshall Scholarship at Cambridge and a brief stint at Morgan Stanley, Ben Friedman has basically never left Harvard since he was a teenager.</p>