<p>I am not a science person so I don’t have an opinion on the breadth or quality of the science curriculum at LACs, Ivies, or anywhere else. But I do have questions. First, how many undergrads majoring in biology or another science don’t go on to grad school for a master’s or MD? And if your answer is “very few–most expect to get another degree after their bachelor’s”–I would then ask why it is that so many LACs have such high placement rates for their graduates into medical school?</p>
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<p>My answer is not “very few.” In fact it’s just the opposite. In my experience and throughout my current working career I’d say only about 10% of bioscience graduates have doctoral level degrees. Maybe another 10 or 15% have a masters. The rest are the foot soldiers of the R&D and biotech enterprise. Their formal scientific education consists of whatever they were taught in college. </p>
<p>Some eventually go off into other fields - Manufacturing, Marketing, etc. Some go to business or even law school. But many also stay in science. </p>
<p>The reason why some LACs have a good medical school placement rate is that a comprehensive undergrad scientific education is not required for admission. The pre-med science curriculum basically consists of general chemistry, organic chemistry, calculus, physics, and general biology. Provided you take those specific courses you can major in pretty much anything for the rest of your undergrad education: Economics, Engineering, or even Classics or English Lit. and still get into medical school. That’s why those abbreviated post-bac pre-med programs are offered at some schools (e.g. Columbia) - to provide just those specific pre-med courses for people who in majored in something else and later decided to try for medical school. </p>
<p>So it’s relatively easy for LACs to offer a solid suite of the limited number of courses sufficient to get students into med school. But that’s far from offering a comprehensive undergrad scientific education in any one branch of science. </p>
<p>Science is one of the traditional liberal arts. And LACs do offer a sort of an overview-type scientific education. But as the course offering shows, if you want something beyond an overview from your undergrad education, you are better off at a university.</p>
<p>Thanks for the explanation. Turning back to the original question, then, I’d say for someone who wants to be a “foot soldier” in R&D or biotech, a reputable, relatively affordable state school would make more sense than any Ivy, unless for some reason the Ivy turned out to cost less.</p>
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<p>Just to set thew record straight (and not meaning to hijack this thread): No, in fact in most fields there is actually very little overlap between the courses at Haverford and those at Bryn Mawr. That’s by design. Bryn Mawr has some departments (Classical & Near Eastern Art, History of Art, Geology, Italian, Russian) and programs (Dance, Growth & Structure of Cities, Hispanic & Hispanic-American Studies, International Economic Relations) that Haverford doesn’t, and vice versa (Haverford has Fine Arts, Music, Astronomy, and Religion). Some programs and majors are explicitly Bi-Co (e.g., East Asian Studies, German, Comparative Literature, Education, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Hebrew & Judaic Studies, Chinese, Japanese, Neural and Behavioral Sciences, Romance Languages, Theater), with each school contributing faculty and facilities to a single bi-campus curriculum (i.e., zero overlap). A few are Tri-Co, with Swarthmore (e.g., Linguistics, Environmental Studies). And even where there are parallel departments, they often have complementary emphases (e.g., Haverford’s biology department is more focused on molecular and cellular biology, Bryn Mawr’s more on ecology, evolution, and genetics), or they coordinate course offerings so that the only overlap is in the lowest-level intro courses, and there only in some fields. For example, in History for the Fall of 2012, Haverford is offering 10 courses and Bryn Mawr 11 (not including independent studies and senior thesis seminars); no two are the same. That’s 21 History courses in a single semester, comparable to Princeton’s 22 at the undergraduate level (200- to 400-level). One difference: 3 of the Princeton classes are humungous lectures of 162, 133, and 164 students, respectively. Another currently has 98 students registered and may yet top the century mark; yet another has 88. That’s factory education. Though in fairness, Princeton also has some small to moderately sized History classes as well, one with 4 students, one with 9, a couple of 11s, 16, 17, 20, 21, 25. </p>
<p>In Political Science for the Fall of 2012, Haverford is offering 15 courses and Bryn Mawr 8, with zero overlap. That’s 23 Poli Sci courses in a single semester. In comparison, Princeton is offering 20 undergraduate (200- to 400-level) Poli Sci courses in the same semester. Pretty similar. Here’s the key difference: at Princeton, 3 of the courses have enrollments of over 100 students, and another 8 have enrollments in the 50-99 student range, with one additional course currently at 47 registrants. The only small Poli Sci classes at Princeton are 6 400-level seminars, each capped at 15 students. </p>
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<p>Yeah. That’s like at Yale, going the distance from Jonathan Edwards College or Pierson College all the way to the Science Hill. Who’d want to do that? Too much hassle.</p>
<p>Or at Harvard, going from Eliot House, on the river, to the Engineering campus. Nah; can’t be bothered.</p>
<p>Some very interesting points raised.</p>
<p>Teaching quality:</p>
<p>From what I’ve read, the Ivies make much more use of TAs. From PR’s “Best 373 Colleges,” “Harvard employs a lot of Teaching Fellows for the larger lecture classes.” This seems to be a common practice.</p>
<p>Prestige:</p>
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<p>This seems like the best thing the Ivies have going for them. People want to go there because people want to go there - a self reinforcing loop.</p>
<p>Job Placement Success:</p>
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<p>Any good comparision between Ivy/Non-Ivies on this dimension? I saw a WSJ article that had many big state schools as tops in recruitment.</p>
<p>"I saw a WSJ article that had many big state schools as tops in recruitment. "</p>
<p>At the large state schools, the type of firms that recruit there are usually the Big Four firms, Fortune 500 companies, and technology consulting companies like Accenture. It’s not uncommon for a firm like Deloitte to hire 200 CPAs for one single office from a school like Illinois or Texas.</p>
<p>However, if you really want to land a job at Goldman or McKinsey, I think attending an Ivy league school will help you in that regard. I know someone from a state school that was an analyst at Goldman, and he told me that most of the people in his analyst class were from the Ivy league schools.</p>
<p>lynn o’shaughnessy from the college solution has a great blog on this</p>
<p>the blog title is the 3 degrees of college prestige</p>
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Perhaps the analogy would be more like the research U is the big buffet with everything, while the LAC is a nice restaurant with table service, but fewer choices on the menu. Both can be very nice, depending on what you prefer.</p>
<p>^That’s implying the experience is greater at a LAC. Some research U’s, especially top end ones like the Ivies do offer lots of academic guidance (waiters?) and many other luxuries in the form of clubs, professional school guidance, etc. If you want to adapt the buffet analogy then the LAC would mean less people at the table so you have a closer/more personal environment.</p>
<p>As a parent with twins at each, I think it’s stupid to even make it a competition. Smaller schools and larger schools each have pros and cons. And LAC 1 and LAC 2 each have pros and cons. And Univ A and Univ B each have pros and cons. Now what? Decide between schools, not categories.</p>
<p>^ If you’re not first deciding between these categories (LAC v. university), that suggests you don’t care too much about issues such as overall size, average class size, class variety and selection, undergraduate focus, or research opportunities. In each of these features (some more than others), there is typically a significant difference between LACs and universities. Other fairly typical differences include location/setting (LACs tend to be set in rural locations or small towns), the sports scene (LACs often cannot support a variety of large D1 sports programs), or specific program offerings (for example, LACs usually don’t offer ABET-certified engineering programs). </p>
<p>So, for many students, it does make sense to prefer one or the other. If you don’t care about the above issues at all, then what is your basis for deciding between schools?</p>
<p>If your most important criteria by far are academic quality and net costs, or maybe distance from home, and you are a prospective liberal arts major, then it might make sense to include both LACs and universities on your application list.</p>
<p>An interesting perspective on Harvard posted this morning–long but worth a read.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/1359081-so-you-want-veritas-truths-harvard-student.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/1359081-so-you-want-veritas-truths-harvard-student.html</a></p>
<p>Shrug. My S’s list included a mix of unis (Northwestern, Gtown, Tufts) and LACs (Kenyon, Grinnell, Haverford, Macalester). He ED’d at NU but would have EDIi’d at Kenyon if not accepted. So he would have had a different experience. So what? He would have had a different experience at every single one of these schools, because they re all different schools. Why couldn’t he have equally liked lots of different places? I find it odd that you “have” to draw a line in the sand and only pick from one side.</p>
<p>edited to add - yes, we cared more about academic quality but also about simply liking a place. If you met my son, you could easily see why he’d like both NU and Kenyon for example. Some decisions have to be made on intuition and heart, too, not just a straight “what % of classes have fewer than x students” metric.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I see your point, and can imagine my younger child having a list like your son’s. For my son, the realization that he wanted an intimate environment with predominately small classes, personal interaction with faculty, and a compact, self-contained campus was a good starting point for our search. This is a kid who often felt bored or “checked out” in high school, especially in the many big classes where he was lectured at and not personally engaged. We live in a university town, so he has a very good sense of what a giant campus is like and does not think it is for him. It was by choice that he focused his college search on institutions smaller than his high school, and helped us refine what otherwise would have been an overwhelming list of options.</p>
<p>Right - my D, on the other hand, liked smaller schools. But she didn’t explicitly choose LAC over university on philosophical grounds; she just preferred smaller schools.</p>
<p>Some people are going to be more sensitive than others to these differences.
I’d imagine that many people, if not most, could adapt to either one. (Frank Costello in The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.”)</p>
<p>For some students, having an ABET-certified engineering program will be a fairly firm requirement. That rules out nearly every LAC. A few young women simply want to get away from male classmates for 4 years. That limits the choice to a small handful of women’s colleges (LACs).</p>
<p>If you want to base your choices largely on hunches and intuitions, that’s fine. However, if you truly cared more about academic quality, then did you not have some mental rules-of-thumb (at least) for identifying what you thought were high-quality schools? Or was the process pretty much serendipitous? (“I’m going to Philly next week on business. Jane’s daughter goes to Bryn Mawr. Want to check it out?”)</p>
<p>bclintonk, thanks for the extensive info. I admit that it was pure assumption that there was overlap between Bryn Mawr’s and Haverford’s course offerings (that’s why I said “probably,” so that I didn’t have to expend the effort investigating how different they are :p). It does appear that the two have worked hard to coordinate and complement each other’s offerings.</p>
<p>I notice that you are referencing only Princeton, and only its undergraduate courses. True, it’s a bit of a pain to compare with all the Ivies, which I wouldn’t expect you to. But I’ll throw the rhetorical questions out there: what about all the graduate-level courses that Princeton undergrads are allowed to take? These graduate courses - at least, the ones that had one or more undergrads in them - were included in the 836 classes reported in the CDS; and there are many more that weren’t reported. Further, what about all the other Ivies? Princeton is particularly LAC-like, second only to Dartmouth. Indeed, Princeton’s breadth isn’t nearly as good as most other Ivies (HY, Columbia, Penn, Cornell).</p>
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<p>I agree that this has been a problem for Yale, which deserves criticism for it. That’s one of the reasons that I personally wouldn’t go to Yale for science. But Yale is also remedying this problem by building two new colleges next to Science Hill, accommodating an additional 800 students or so, the majority of whom will probably be STEM students. (Since Pierson and Jonathan Edwards colleges are next to the school of art, they could easily have a higher concentration of students in the arts.)</p>
<p>Harvard has a similar problem, with some students having to take a shuttle to campus and with some departments/schools miles away from the main campus. It’s also remedying this by building a more extensive campus directly across the river in Allston, which will accommodate undergrads and grads and provide extensive STEM facilities.</p>
<p>Hunt,</p>
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<p>I like that. ;)</p>
<p>tk21769, forgive me if your question was directed specifically at Pizzagirl. I would say that for us the assumption going in was that all of our choices would fall within a range of “high-quality” schools. And we did NOT define “high-quality” by USNWR. We used collegenavigator(dot)gov to evaluate schools based on test score ranges, talked to numerous people we know in academia, and researched student outcomes and satisfaction (via NSSE). We used this site and others to get a sense of the culture or “vibe” at each college we were considering. And then we started visiting. Our early visits were serendipitous, as when my son and I spent two days in Cambridge visiting a friend his sophomore year–we wandered around the Harvard campus but didn’t have a formal tour (he wasn’t at all thinking of applying, but he did get a sense of what a very intense academic environment might look like).</p>
<p>For kids interested in the performing arts, as my younger child is, I imagine the search process will be entirely different, as the schools with good theater/dance programs range widely in their academic requirements, urban/suburban/rural locations, campus size and public/private status. There is no one right way to go about it, obviously. But since the choices are so numerous, anything that allows a family to winnow the list early on seems to be worth considering.</p>
<p>“If you want to base your choices largely on hunches and intuitions, that’s fine. However, if you truly cared more about academic quality, then did you not have some mental rules-of-thumb (at least) for identifying what you thought were high-quality schools?”</p>
<p>I must not have been clear. Of course, academic quality was uppermost (all of the schools I mentioned fall under that designation of high academic quality, no?). But I, for one, don’t get my panties in a wad or wring my hands unnecessarily over a handful of large lecture classes when you’re talking schools of the caliber I was talking about. Sure, my S at NU will have a few more large-lecture classes than D at Wellesley. But honestly, his professors are more likely to be nationally renowned in their fields, so now what? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.</p>