Advanced students may find more options at top U’s. D1 is a CS junior and is taking two graduate level courses this semester. I don’t think that would be possible at most LAC’s.
If one is looking for a LAC experience but wants broader access, consider the offerings at consortiums. 5 Schools in MA and Quaker Consortium in PA for example.
Going back to the music (and to correct a previous poster that stated that Harvey Mudd had no music), there are plenty of music opportunities at Mudd.
At the 5 C’s there are plenty of classes available for music including both instruments and voice , they have an orchestra and choir (http://www.jointmusicprogram.org/) ,several acapella groups, and even much more casual opportunities to perform throughout the semester to mention a few of the many opportunities. (OP doesn’t state whether the son wants to study or perform or whether it’s an instrument or voice.) Also, every Mudder must have a humanities concentration and music is one of the choices for this.
Wesleyan has its own doctoral program in math.
So does Bryn Mawr (a women’s college at the undergraduate level, but men can take classes there through the consortium).
He can also supplement his school’s offerings through study abroad, REUs in the summer, etc.
Are there schools where graduate students teach algebra and analysis?
@b@r!um went to Bryn Mawr and then onto a doctoral program in math, and has posted about it. She might be able to provide some insight into the doctoral course offerings there.
With foreign language study, at the college level it’s not so much a question of attaining fluency. Yes, you have to live in a community where it’s the primary language to attain fluency, but you don’t need college to do that. Children attain fluency in their mother tongue and often one or two other languages. What you do need college for is studying the art and culture (including history, politics, etc.) associated with a language, and that’s where you run into course depth issues at many LACs. Very few LACs, at least as far as I have seen, offer a significant number of such courses taught and using texts and other materials in the original language, as opposed to English.
You’ve gotten some good advice. The two key points for your son may be to also look at smaller research universities and to make sure and really take a hard look at the course catalog AND the course schedule to see what higher level math classes are offered and how often. Also take a look at what research the professors are doing - is this in his area of interest? My son was interested in several LACs that promoted undergraduate research opportunities we investigated what the professors current research was. None of it was in the area of interest for my son. He is at a public research U and has been involved with research since second semester freshman year (but only because he is in a pretty unusual major and so had that opportunity, if he was a straight bio or chem major he may not have had that chance).
“Very few LACs, at least as far as I have seen, offer a significant number of such courses taught and using texts and other materials in the original language, as opposed to English.”
might be true for Chinese, but that can’t be said for all languages.
I still argue true fluency is obtained living amongst native speakers. That may come from living abroad or from growing up in a native language speaking family. It’s not going to come from a classroom setting.
Chiming in with a son at one if the very top LACs for math and science on many lists only after MIT, CalTech, and Mudd. My kid is at Reed a very small LAC. At this point he is debating math or one if the interdisciplinary math majors (Econ and Physics).
What is clear from our conversations before choosing Reed and his short experience so far, is that the level of rigor at these schools makes up for the smaller list of classes than those available at a large research university, as well as many other LACs. Almost all of his APs and dual enrollment classes didn’t meet the bar for Reed in several subjects. His DE calc two class allowed him to bypass the introductory calc class, but even that was not a given. It was only approved after a discussion with his faculty mentor. His current econ class will cover several semesters of what he would get at a UC but in a shorter period. The AP course came nowhere close to a single class.
It is not about the list of classes that you can read about, but the actual content of those courses that are important. The next course at Reed, after a single semester of calc is a proof based analysis course. They don’t follow the same path as just about any other college or university. Their math program is also heavily proof based, and different than most. That is why it is at the top of the PhD list. Students complete the program with an extremely in depth knowledge of math, not just a list of common classes.
As for running out of courses, most if you are looking at that incorrectly. Reed and many other top LACs use that last year for heavy major based research one in one with a mentor. Reed also has an exam at the end of Jr year much like a graduate level exam, that a student must pass to move on.
The OP needs to look at this, not by counting classes, but by actually speaking with those that teach the classes. There is a reason that many SLACs top the list of student who not only pursue, but complete, PhDs. This is also why Reed is considered one of the most intellectually rigorous colleges in the United States.
Oh and one more comment about Reed and many other to LACs is that they immediately mix the students through their intro core courses. For example. Reed has a nightmarish (to me) humanities course the all freshman take together for the first full year. They break out in small conferences for discussion but the lecture contains the full freshman class of approx 350 students. This allows students to imeadiatly interact with individuals from all disciplines at the college and to make friends from everywhere from day one.
(I also understand they have a very good voice program, and private music lessons are reasonably priced - or even free for students with financial need.)
“Almost all of his APs and dual enrollment classes didn’t meet the bar for Reed in several subjects.” This is not unusual. Many AP classes are not equivalent to the supposedly same class at a rigorous college. Some of those colleges will take the credits, but sometimes those kids then have difficulty in the next course up.
Also, in some areas, the organization of the college’s intro course sequence may not match up too well with the AP and DE classes the student completed. This was an issue for my kid and she ended up repeating some material because what she had done didn’t mesh too well. For instance the intro cs class covered some topics she hadn’t yet had, and used a language she hadn’t been exposed to, comfort in which was expected at the next class.
" Reed also has an exam at the end of Jr year much like a graduate level exam, that a student must pass to move on." In a PhD program, students who don’t pass generally leave with a master’s degree. What happens to a college junior who isn’t allowed to continue in their major senior year?
I think it’s a bit misleading to portray Reed as a center of mathematical PhD talent. If you go to the Putnam competition home page at http://www.maa.org/programs/maa-awards/putnam-competition-individual-and-team-winners and look at the winners since the competition started in 1939, you can see that Reed college has had one student place in the top 5, back in 1972.
Reed is not representative of other colleges (LAC or otherwise) in how its math curriculum is organized. It may be a good thing about Reed for an advanced math student, but it does not necessarily mean that most other LACs are good fits for such a student.
A 350 student lecture not really something that LAC seekers are looking for, at least from statements on these forums.
With 100,000 high school seniors taking the BC calc exam each year, not to mention those who cover the material in DE classes, Reed may feel that they can teach the material in a single semester. Most of the students have already been through it once. I recall a post from a frustrated parent on this site whose student (at Swarthmore if I recall) was struggling in calculus. Turned out they were the only student in the class who hadn’t already taken it in high school.
LOL
It is a single freshman classes on early Mediterranean classic literature that meets 3 times a week in a large lecture and then breaks 2 times a week into small seminars, and includes 8 one on one meetings with the seminar professor. That sounds petty LAC to me. It is a one time core course that is specific designed to increase writing and critical thinking skills. All students start with the same humanities background, no matter what the eventual major.
The class is taught by different humanities professors throughout the year.
Many classes at Reed include a larger lecture and small group seminars taught by professors. Like other LACs the seminars are taught by PhDs.
Reed is only a fit for a small number of students. It is unique. But the OP was asking about math programs at LAC. I answered her.
I will let the PhD stats speak for themselves.
@b@r!um – who studied math at Bryn Mawr and went on to Stanford – actually thinks LACs can be limited for a serious math student. She also says that the consortium schools, while good in theory, can be tough to take advantage of, due to scheduling and transportation issues. OP, you might PM her. (She posts on the international students forum, and is among the more informed posters on this whole site.)
Here’s a link to any analysis of the baccalaureate and PhD origins of faculty from the very top (think Harvard, Princeton, MIT, etc) and normal top (think top large research universities) universities.
http://parsimoniouspursuits.blogspot.com/2016/04/analysis-of-phd-and-baccalaureate.html
The take-home message as I see it, is that Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and UC Berkeley produce a disproportionate fraction of math faculty at top universities (no surprise there) and that also these faculty tend to come disproportionately from the same top universities—ALTHOUGH definitely undergrad origins are very diverse among faculty. Note that this is looking at a fairly limited selection of universities (a subset that has strong math PhD programs). If you look at math faculty at LACs, say, you’d probably see a rather different pattern of undergraduate origin.
However, that doesn’t mean that an individual student’s odds of doing math research are highest at one of these tippy, top universities. Malcolm Gladwell’s 2013 Zeitgeist Google talk (just google that) discusses that it’s the top 25% of quant SAT scorers at any particular university that tend to get a undergrad degree in STEM. The result being that if you go to a university where you are not the top in math, you’ll likely to get weeded out early. Lots of students who are very talented in math get weeded out early at places like Harvard, Princeton, UC Berk. At a school where they where they were in the top 25%, those same students might have gotten a degree in math and possibly gone on to grad school in math and had a different career path.
Maybe, but wouldn’t they have been weeded out in grad school? I had a math major friend at Harvard who realized by senior year that much as she liked math, she was never going to be among the brilliant mathematicians of her generation making new discoveries and such. I suppose she could have gone on to get her PhD and ended up teaching math somewhere where that didn’t matter. In the end she decided to put her logical mind in use at law school.
As a Reedie myself (from a bygone era…), I agree with everything that @LKnomad has posted here. I would add that the large lectures in the Hum courses were often amazing, b/c rather than one lecturer covering the vast field of western humanities faculty were drawn from many disciplines to give a few of the lectures. The lectures on Homer or Plato or Shakespeare were given by specialists in those fields. I still have my lecture notes, which I typed up after each lecture and put into a bound volume! But 80% of the effort in those courses was on US, the students. To read, write about, and discuss the core texts in small seminars (“conferences” in Reed’s lingo). When I say “texts” I don’t mean textbooks. There weren’t any in that course. Instead we read Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, and so in in their original, not predigested form. And we read a lot, and wrote a lot. I’d pay $10K to be able to participate in one of those courses again!
Another feature of LAC’s is that the students intermingle across specialties. While one might be a math major, another a biology major, and a third a philosophy major, they were part of the larger Reed community and not living in isolated dorms or subcommunities. The first-year Hum course helped to build that sense of community.
My son was admitted to Reed but chose to attend Chicago, which is a much larger academic community (university, of course) but that had an undergraduate ethos that was closer to that of Reed than to most large universities (such as the large state university where I made my career). His concern was that he wanted to attend a college where it’s “ok to be an (independent) thinker.” Chicago fit the bill for him; Reed would have, too. He majored in economics.
When I attended Willamette we also had a Freshman core class like that. The fact that the whole freshman class went to a large lecture was not a drawback. Hey, one of the speakers was Maya Angelou, who can complain about that? We also met in smaller groups of 2 profs and 12 students to discuss the lectures and the books/essays/etc. we were reading. It was awesome.