Best Public University?

@akiddoc michigan actually provides a ton of undergraduate research opportunities through the undergraduate research opportunity program. my friend who is a freshmen was able to start research right away through that program. also, since umich has the amazing grad schools, undergrad students can expose themselves to those schools and grad schools tend to favor their undergrad students during admission. congrats on your son for being recruited into michigan athletics, you have to be one of the country’s top to be recruited. i heard all the athletes live together on west quad. even though michigan is a big school, undergrad students can be more proactive by going to office hours, joining michigan learning communities, doing the undergraduate research opportunity program, etc. its easier to make a large school seem small than a small school seem large. also many small liberal arts colleges are in rural areas, which many students for example studying business may not prefer because it can be harder to find internships.

At Michigan, a student could access these immense resources for research as a freshman under the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.

So I read up on the UROP program. It appears there are 1,300 spots for the 25,000 undergrads at UM. That may be enough, or it may not. My daughter’s school basically has 1,600 spots for 1,600 kids. For my son, this is probably not a concern. When you are practicing your sport 20 hours a week, you are lucky just to find the time to study for your tests and write your papers. For his sport, those practices are year round.

It is definitely against NCAA rules for any dormitory to be over 50% athletic team students, although it seems likely that they generally house athletes closer to the practice facilities. I do not know all of the UM details. Again, I’ll worry about that if he gets in, but I do not believe he has a high enough SAT. We were told that his GPA is acceptable. Obviously, this is not football or basketball, or he would not be waiting like everyone else here. Those sports seem to be in their own different world.

@exlibris97 Columbia has 8,300 undergraduates. Harvard has 6,700 undergraduates. UPenn has 10,400 undergraduates. UM has 29,000 undergraduates. My daughter’s school has 1,640 undergraduates, and no grad students.

@akiddoc As someone who went to Harvard, the College is very much part of the university and doesn’t feel “small” in any way. Indeed, you certainly wouldn’t go to Harvard–or Columbia or Penn–if you wanted to attend a small LAC, which is the point I was making. (Barnard is a small LAC but very much part of a major university). Michigan does have 29,000 students but you are broken up into units. The Residential College is very small. So it doesn’t feel monstrously large.

In the case of your daughter, I think it’s great that her college is small and undergraduate-only. Some kids like that. My kids, conversely, wanted to be part of a major research university.

I simply was reacting to your use of the word “monster” to describe some universities. It’s like my niece who described one LAC she visited as “hideously tiny”. It’s all a matter of preference.

@akiddoc Research opportunities at a major research university are very different from those at LACs. And there are many different types of research opportunities available at Michigan. I’ve known students who landed some simply by talking with their professors. Students who want to do research can.

As for housing, athletes are concentrated in certain dorms but do not dominate any one dorm. Michigan complies with NCAA rules.

You read it wrong. UROP is a program to ENCOURAGE undergraduate research targeting primarily freshmen and sophomores. You can start doing research as a first semester freshman. “All schools and colleges (including medicine, engineering, business school, etc.) are active participants in UROP, which provides a wealth of interesting research topics for program participants.”

There are plenty of opportunities (virtually no limit) for undergraduate students interesting in research outside of UROP. Michigan has an annual research budget of over $1.4 billions, with cutting edge research and facilities no liberal arts colleges can hope to match.

akiddoc, the 1,300 spots are for Freshmen and Sophomores. UROP is a two year commitment for incoming freshmen. And while 100% of the students at your daughter’s LAC may be engaged in research projects, at Michigan, the vast majority of incoming freshmen are not interested in UROP. The question one needs to ask is what percentage of incoming freshmen who request an UROP are actually placed. The answer is close to 100%. Furthermore, as exlibris97 stated, many students join research projects by approaching faculty directly. That is especially the case for sophomores and juniors. The complexity and funding of those research projects at Michigan are unmatched by LACs. Michigan spends $1,3 billion on research annually, and undergraduate students have access to many of those opportunities.

“Columbia has 8,300 undergraduates. Harvard has 6,700 undergraduates. UPenn has 10,400 undergraduates. UM has 29,000 undergraduates.”

Sure, but how large are their instructional faculties? Besides, do not forget that Harvard has 15,000 graduate students, Penn has 10,000 graduate students, and Columbia has 20,000 graduate students. Many, if not most, of those graduate students share the faculty, resources and facilities with undergraduate students, which is why it does not make sense to look at the undergraduate student population in a vacuum. In this regard, LACs definitely have a distinct edge over research university.

You can’t say it’s close to 100% Alexandre. I know students who weren’t placed. It’s more difficult to get placed outside the hard sciences.

Don’t kid yourself. UCB and UCLA are wold class #1 and #2 on any list.

wayneandgarth, it would be interesting to see the actual data. True enough, it is difficult to prove one way or the other. Of the students I know that have requested UROP in recent years, every single one was assigned.

preppedparent, Cal and UCLA are indeed world class. I don’t think rankings differentiate much between the top 4 or 5 public universities. They are ranked very close to each other in most rankings. What separates Michigan from the UCs in my opinion, are the intangibles. Academically, you are not going to be able to differentiate between them.

@akiddoc You can certainly get a great education at a LAC. Many of my extended family members went to the #1 and #2 liberal arts colleges in the US. For some kids, a small, intimate environment may be ideal. However, the trade off for those kids is that they give up a lot in my opinion. You are not going to see the type of world class, cutting edge research that is done at Michigan at a LAC. Michigan has so much opportunity!! (i.e. educational, research, cultural, internships, social, athletic…). Not to mention one of the largest, richest and most influential Alumni networks in the world. I would assume that most kids that get into top tier schools are self starters and don’t need a “high school” type of environment to succeed.

@MichiganDad22 Top liberal arts colleges produce graduates who go on to get STEM PHDs at a much higher rate than top public research universities. (Only 3 publics are in the top 50 on a percentage basis.) It seems likely to me that LACs provide enough research opportunities to enable this.

I used to have a job where I oversaw the intern program at a top-level government office. We received lots of applications and we required writing samples. The LAC applicants produced noticeably better samples on average in my opinion.

Anyway, I think there is still value in LACs, even if they are falling out of favor.

LACs are for sure better to learn to read, speak and write at a college level than most public programs, although Michigan English seems to shine. LAC science students can take REUs or other summer research options with the DOE or DOD labs that will make the science experience much better. I think SOCIALLY the LACs are not as good at the big public universities, simply less variety of students to meet and go out with, and LACs tend to be in very small towns. My niece at Williams College really struggles. There is not a lot to do in Williamstown MA but that is the extreme of small locations for LACs.

umich is ranked #7 for undergrad teaching by us news.

@MichiganDad22 My daughter attends Pomona College. As you may know, Forbes has ranked Pomona between #1 and #8 among ALL colleges for undergraduate education over the last 4 years (#1 in 2014, ahead of Stanford and Harvard). The reason it is ranked so highly is that Pomona kids go to professional schools, graduate schools, and high paying jobs at a higher rate than at almost every other college in the country. The quality of work expected of those kids is unbelievable. On top of that, every kid at Pomona has to write a senior thesis to graduate. Calling that a high school environment is rather uninformed and pretty obviously meant to be insulting.

@Coloradomama Pomona is on the same campus with 4 other LAC’s (the Claremont Consortium, as they call it), so there are over 5,000 kids on campus. It is also a 30 minute train ride out of Los Angeles, so it has a huge advantage over Williams regarding location and social life. My daughter has gone to LA to see the opera, the symphony, and some jazz clubs. There is also snow skiing 2 hours away in the winter. She only did that once. She’s working too hard to make that a habit.

My son still hasn’t heard from UM, so I’m assuming it will be a no. I guess we should know for certain in the next 72 hours. We’re flying off to look at ASU, where he has been admitted, tomorrow.

@akiddoc Although “data doesn’t lie”, peoples interpretation of it can be off. You can’t compare incomes of a major university with a LAC. Kids at Public Universities (even elite ones) do a broad range of things from elementary education, social work, teaching and etc Not all of those kids want big money jobs… Or course, if you compare every student at UM to Pamona, the Pomona students may have higher compensation after college. Compare Pamona to the Ross B-School kids, Engineers, or top Liberal Arts kids at Michigan. Google where the FORTUNE 500 CEOs come from (UM #5)… or Google where the countries billionaires come from (UM #4). UM is ahead for most Ivies. Also, more kids get into Medical School from UMichigan undergrad than any other school in the country.

As for your comment that I intended to be insulting when I used the term “high school environment”, I did not intend to be insulting. I apologize if it came across that way. Since you have a child at an LAC (a great one), I understand why you may feel defensive about this comment. To explain, School like Williams and Amerhest are both smaller than the high schools that my children attended and they do not offer the broad array of opportunities that my children desired for the next phase in life. Objectively, I believe most people would agree that the environment at an LAC is much closer to what High School was like vs. UM or UC Berkeley. Again, you can get a world class education at an LAC, you just have to find a small college environment appealing.

There’s a particular danger in trying to characterize all universities as one thing and all LACs as another. I think posters on this topic have committed a fallacy in dismissing LACs and universities on simply size alone. At many universities, especially within honors programs, you can definitely find a more intimate atmosphere and small classes. Pomona, Amherst, and Williams are some of the richest schools per capita- their endowment per student is 9x larger than Michigan- and Pomona/Amherst are part of consortium activities to give a greater depth of opportunities. It’s difficult to compare them directly, and the students who’re interested don’t really tend to be interested in the other. I think that’s one of the wonderful things about higher education in the US- it has something to offer for just about every type of student. People will bitterly defend what they think to be the best, but ultimately it is a subjective evaluation depending on your fit and needs.

There’s a huge depth of variety in the times of experiences out there, and simply reducing them to LAC vs. University means missing an understanding of their distinctive offerings compared to other schools.

Ultimately though, I think we’re straying off-topic. The OP never referred to Michigan in the context of LACs or private universities, only against other public schools.

I don’t think that anyone “dismissed” either Universities or LACs. It’s simply a debate between the trade offs of going to a top tier University vs. a top tier LAC. It’s real, not fallacy. I have multiple family members that went to Williams and multiple family members that went to Amherst. I know the sales pitch. “Small classes, focused on you, personal touch…” They must use that as a differentiator. Universities are going to have more majors, classes, world class lecturers/visitors, concerts, plays, sports, college town, culture opportunities to make the kid’s world bigger.

On the other hand, if you don’t want 100 kids in your freshman classes and you feel a personal touch/individual attention is most important to you, you should probably not go to a big university. That’s just pragmatic.

But not all top tier universities and top tier LACs are the same. That’s the point I’m trying to make. If we’re trying to determine which is better, it doesn’t do well to use specific examples because there will always be exceptions. Amherst isn’t just a small LAC. It has the other colleges to make for a richer experience. Williams doesn’t have that- it’s a stand alone LAC, and it’s in a less happening part of Massachusetts as well. Some people want the balance of Amherst, where you get the LAC experience but with the resources of a larger school. Some like the unique intimacy and rural setting of Williams.

The things you’ve cited and have been cited are general differentiating aspects between universities and LACs, which is all good and all, but I think trying to use examples of instances from particular schools doesn’t mean it represents every university or LAC out there. Amherst/Pomona/Williams are the tippy top LACs. They don’t represent what most LACs have to offer in terms of opportunities and resources. U’Mich/UCLA/UVA/Berkeley/etc are tippy top public U’s. They don’t represent what most universities have to offer in terms of outcomes, opportunities, and prestige. Even among each other, there are big differences.