Why do you count HMC as a standalone LAC and not Scripps or Pitzer? HMC only offers STEM majors. Maybe I don’t understand your point.
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I am not as familiar with Scripps & Pitzer as I am with the other 3 schools.
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Claremont Colleges are clearly a better example of leveraging the resources of small individual LACs, but they’re the exception in the world of LACs. Even Claremont are running into issues with utilizing and leveraging each other’s resources. One of the big reasons some of them are buliding (or building up) their science depts is because HMC is restricting access from the other campuses because of capacitiy issues.
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Here’s an article from 2018 that includes a lengthy statement from the CMC dean about why CMC was withdrawing from the joint CMC/Scripps/Pitzer Keck science department. As structured, each of the 3 schools was supposed to contribute 1/3 of the funding for operations and for any new facilities. But CMC has a much bigger endowment than the other 2 and much more fundraising capacity. So the CMC leadership felt that Scripps/Pitzer were essentially holding them back from creating the sort of science department that the CMC students “deserve.” CMC to withdraw from Keck Science Department, create own department - The Student Life
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Not sure
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Sorry that was sent by accident, please ignore.
CMC is not a business school in the Babson or Bentley sense. However, its economics courses do appear to have a more “business” flavor compared to those at Pomona and other schools where the economics courses are less “business” oriented.
Economics is CMC’s largest major by far, although it makes up only about a fourth of graduates in a recent class. No other major has even a third of the number of economics graduates in a recent class. See College Navigator - Claremont McKenna College
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Pomona students majoring in Economics have to take their 6 core courses and at least 3 of 5 upper division courses at Pomona. My Pomona grad was told that this was because the CMC econ curriculum was recognized to be structured differently from Pomona’s.
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One more point, whether its Princeton, Brown, Bowdoin, Williams or Harvard, the degree which is conferred is a liberal arts degree, a B.A. degree with a major in English, History, Chemistry, Computer Science, etc. So the Ivies and LACs offer the same degree. The only difference is that a university have graduate schools and PhD programs and the LACs have smaller classes and tutorials.
Princeton offers a BSE and Harvard offers a BS, in addition to a BA/AB degree. The difference is that both of those schools offer multiple majors/concentrations and graduate-level courses in engineering and/or applied sciences.
Princeton claims to offer all students, including engineering students, a “liberal arts education.”
https://admission.princeton.edu/academics/what-does-liberal-arts-mean
I agree. While they are both LACs, CMC and Pomona have different approaches across the board, each with its own focus and personality. CMC has long emphasized its own particular approach to economics and government, and this has been very important to the “flavor" of the institution as a whole, even in its motto: "Civilization prospers with commerce.”
Economics is the largest major, but surprisingly (to me at least) there are a lot more “STEM” type undergraduate degrees awarded (131) than “business" type undergraduate degrees awarded (89.)
Hopefully contrasting CMC and Pomona might get us back to your original question, and something @EconPop noted about the size of organizations. There is no single LAC flavor, and it may be easier to create and maintain a particular ethos if the educational community is of a certain size.
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I agree that “a liberal arts education” and a more technical/professional education aren’t mutually exclusive. Even a technical/professional school can offer “a liberal arts education” as part of its curriculum. The term “liberal arts” is, by definition, (perhaps purposely) broad and vague. However, the term “Liberal Arts College” is relatively narrowly defined (typically by the colleges themselves).
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These excerpts offer a perspective from an earlier era in the context of developments at Kenyon College:
(Morice. Coordinate Colleges for American Women: a Convergence of Interests, 1947-78.)
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Regarding Kenyon’s president in 1963 indicating that 750 students was the ideal size for Kenyon…
Kenyon now has about 1,615 students.
Here are the results of a search for four year colleges with under 1,000 students with the following majors: biology, English, history, math, chemistry, economics:
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?s=all&p=26.0101+23.0101+54.0101+27.0101+40.0501+45.0601&pn=1&l=93&ct=1+2&ic=1&ex=1000&hs=1
Looks like about 40 colleges, not all of which may really be “general liberal arts colleges” despite offering that selection of majors covering various areas of liberal arts.
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I wonder why you hold that most who’re interested in LACs are unlikely candidates for honors programs? All I have is anecdotal experience, but my D, amongst many high achieving students in our area who wound up at highly selective LACs, applied to and was admitted to UW honors (and UO honors). In fact, pretty much every kid we know who wound up at an elite college of any size applied to UW HC, and that includes a lot of LACs.
I won’t pretend to know what all the many honors colleges around the country are attempting to do or not do, but the honors colleges at the University of Washington and Oregon (I believe UofO’s is the first such college) do convey as advantages to their programs some of the primary advantages that proponents of LACs tend to tout. Here’s what the UW HC has to say:
Interestingly, when you decline the UW Honors college, they ask the student to voluntarily complete a questionnaire explaining why they didn’t join. I’ll spare you the details, but this led to a conversation with a former colleague of mine who is on the faculty at UW (though admittedly not a UW HC admin). His take on the college is that they are, at least in part, seeking to attract accomplished kids who might otherwise score UW’s undergraduate size to be less than appealing and who prefer the benefits conferred by smaller private colleges. I doubt the internal conversation is limited to competing for students who might otherwise go to Dartmouth. They’re also very interested in a kid who would otherwise choose Whitman College.
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One thing that makes these discussions less than satisfactory to me is the binary approach many posters take with it. There is LAC and large research and a lumping of everything non-LAC into the latter category. It seems to me that there are a lot of colleges that are elsewhere on the spectrum that are assumed to be “large research”.
It’s also interesting to talk to people who have attended some of these places to get their perspectives. I have a corporate recruiter who works for me who attended Harvard who is very defensive when anyone suggests Harvard is a big research school. She also attended HLS and is quick to distinguish between those who attended Harvard for grad/professional studies and Harvard College. She would be banned on this forum in a split second discussing this topic because she would almost scream at you that Harvard College is a LAC within the university and is in fact “the real Harvard.” Of course, the Cornell people readily and enthusiastically distinguish between A&S and CALS (which admittedly truly is a different thing), and many people in and out of Dartmouth say that it’s a large LAC that happens to have a few grad and professional schools. All of the Ivy League is described by some people as “LACs that grew up.”
I don’t know about all of that, but I know this: I have a kid at Brown now, and had two others at LACs, and I myself attended a large and well respected research university (which I greatly enjoyed btw) and a Top 5 LS. Based solely on my exposure to those places, the biggest outlier and the top candidate for “which one of these is not like the others,” was my undergraduate institution. By a long shot.
So, UT Austin, Princeton and Williams are three different animals.
Not sure that I fully appreciate the nuances of this discussion.
My thoughts include:
A well organized honors college / program at a National University offers more than an LAC academically & socially.
Exposure to graduate students & to graduate programs is quite valuable & does not mean that undergrads at a major research university are given less attention or fewer opportunities than undergrads at an LAC; in fact, I believe that the opposite is more accurate. (Undergrads at National Universities have more benefits & options & opportunities than those at LACs.)
Publisher, I don’t think this thread is meant to be a rehash of which is better, a LAC or a research u. I’m taking the question in the subject line literally, are there such things as “large LACs?”
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Your reaction is too narrow. My post did not take a definite position. No need to be so defensive as I appreciate both types of environments & am just trying to understand the differences between the above posters (cquin85 & 1 NJParent).
@circuitrider: Please don’t turn this into a debate.
Well, there is at least one nuance that I’ve expressed my preference to have cleared up.
“National University” is US News nomenclature and lumps in institutions of a different kind. “Major research university” is an equally imprecise term. Again, when you summarily say that undergrads at one are not given less attention than at the other, for that to mean anything to me I need to know whether you’re talking about Dartmouth or the University of Texas. Those are different places and experiences.
As to the rest, based only on a general recollection of prior posts on this topic, we are in general agreement about what a large university HC can do, which is to alleviate some of the challenges presented by allocating resources across an undergraduate city population of 35,0000 + students. So, that means that the large public HC is a great option. On that I think we agree. And, extending that just a little, it represents, to me at least, a better option as compared to undergrad gen pop at such schools.
Whether these HCs really offer an experience that is like a true LAC is harder to peg. To really know, you’d have to talk to someone who did both. I don’t know such a person. When my D was making the choice, she clearly perceived a lingering difference, and I would bet if she could do both and compare she’d say they were not 100% overlapping experiences.