Looking for some good medium-sized schools that have strong Classics departments and research opportunities for undergraduates. Any ideas would be helpful!
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With respect to schools that have been noted for offering more than ordinary opportunities for undergraduate research, you can find potential choices through this resource: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/undergrad-research-programs. Regarding classics specifically, colleges strong in this field tend to enroll a relatively high number of students who choose it as a major. You can obtain this information through IPEDS (e.g., https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=Princeton&s=all&id=186131#programs).
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What can you afford and where colleges are you competitive for, not really useful to suggest Princeton if your not competitive or can’t afford it.
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Here’s a link to the Wesleyan Classics Dept… I would pay particular attention to the list of thesis projects:
https://www.wesleyan.edu/classics/
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Some schools with notable Classics departments
Bryn Mawr, Davidson, College of the Holy Cross, Brown, Michigan, Oberlin
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@CU123 - You bring up a good point. To clarify - I’m not seeking financial aid and I’m looking at top tier schools. But, I want to make sure that my list is balanced (good # of safeties, matches, and reaches).
With respect to your size criterion, note that some smaller colleges register more students who choose to major in classics than their university counterparts. For this reason, you might want to include suitable liberal arts colleges in your search.
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Are you more interested in Greek and Latin language and literature or classical archaeology? Even the strongest Classics departments have particular strengths; Chicago has a very good track record in ancient history, for example, but it has historically been much weaker in classical archaeology than, say, Penn or Michigan.
I’d place the top private universities into the following approximate tiers:
TIER 1
Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Yale
TIER 2A
NYU, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, USC
TIER 2B
Tufts, Tulane, Vanderbilt, WUStL, Dartmouth, Brandeis, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Rice, BC, Fordham, etc.
USC’s Classics department is very much an up-and-coming department, which is somewhat unusual since relatively few colleges are expanding their humanities departments. It hired three (!) new tenure-track faculty members last year and is doing another job search this year.
Liberal arts colleges typically don’t offer as much in the way of ancient studies - at least when compared to the powerhouses like Berkeley, Yale, Hopkins, and Chicago - but that’s not an issue since you seem interested in larger schools anyway. That said, I agree with @wisteria100 that Bryn Mawr (or Haverford, if you’re a guy) is uniquely strong in Classics and classical archaeology and is well worth a look.
A lot depends on your language background; you need to look more carefully at course offerings if you’re coming in at the intermediate level in Greek and/or Latin than if you’re starting both languages from scratch. My rule of thumb for a strong classics program:
[ul][]Both beginning Greek and Latin are offered every year
[]Intermediate Greek and Latin are offered every year
[]At least one advanced seminar each in Greek and Latin is offered every semester
[]There’s a decent variety of civilization/archaeology courses[/ul]
Be sure to check the schedule of classes at each school of interest for what’s actually offered rather than the course bulletin, which may contain classes that haven’t been taught in years.
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As suggested earlier, you may want to consider level of student interest when researching programs:
Graduating Majors in a Classics Field (from Tier 1 list above)
Penn: 18
Chicago: 13
Columbia: 13
Brown: 12
Princeton: 11
Harvard: 9
Stanford: 7
Cornell: 5
Yale: 5
Duke: 1
Source: IPEDS, “first majors.”
I’m not sure I grasp the reasoning behind this, as it’s not hard to find examples of weaker departments producing outsized numbers of graduates. Cornell graduated 39 general math majors last year compared to 64 at the slightly smaller Boston College, for example, but I very much doubt many prospective math majors would choose BC over Cornell. A small department (which should be distinguished from a small college) with a large number of majors seems the worst of all worlds; one has more students fighting for a relatively small number of classes and faculty attention.
Additionally, Classics is a discipline few students encounter in high school and thus plan to pursue in college. Unsurprisingly, many Classics majors took Greek or Latin in high school – often at private prep schools in the northeast. Per capita, for example, the state of Massachusetts has 22 times as many middle/high school students enrolled in Latin classes as the state of California! Little wonder that colleges that draw heavily from the northeast have decent enrollments in their Classics departments.
In any case, one has to be careful with the numbers from IPEDS, as I have pointed out before. Many of the larger Classics departments have several different majors, and IPEDS counts only classical languages. I haven’t checked the figures at the other universities, but the correct figures for Duke are 3 majors and 9 minors in 2018.
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Doesn’t U of Cincinnati have an outstanding Classic department? Since the OP asked about safeties and matches, that may be one to consider.
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The OP may see a benefit to studying with a critical mass of students (however numerically defined) who share his interest in the study of classics. Though more wouldn’t necessarily be better, a very small number may be undesirable. I wouldn’t extend similar reasoning to generally popular departments (e.g., economics) that have clearly exceeded a necessary threshold for the exchange of ideas among students.
IPEDS does offer information on related fields such as archaeology and geoarchaeology, though I did not include it with the figures in reply #8 (in this sense, my heading was imprecise).
Note that IPEDS considers “first majors” (a term that I do not see defined). However, the discrepancy for Duke may indicate lower-than-actual figures for other schools as well. Though these relationships may be proportional, and therefore reasonably informative, I’d nonetheless suggest the OP access sources beyond IPEDS.
I’ve not seen an example of this, however.
Have you considered Oxford? It has the largest classics department in the world (over 100 students per year): http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listing/classics#
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“A small [classics] department . . . with a large number of majors seems the worst of all worlds
I’ve not seen an example of this, however.”
And I find it hard to believe that this is actually a problem. As a former classics major, I took classes in the Art History, Religious Studies, History, and Near Eastern Studies departments. I did not take a class from the Egyptology department although it was offered, and did not take a very popular “methods” course which taught field techniques but was housed in the anthropology department because it used their labs. Classics majors who were interested in carbon dating, evaluating the age of ancient manuscripts via physical analysis, etc. took that anthro class.
It is not necessary for a professor to be affiliated with the actual Classics department in order to teach courses which “count” for a classics major. And it may even be preferable- you get a much more nuanced view of the ancient world when you’ve got multiple disciplines and modes of analysis weighing in. It is very “old school” for a Classics department to be focused on Greek and Latin literature to the exclusion of everything else.
Since it appeared on a classics thread, I should correct my mistake: criteria → criterion (#11).
I couldn’t agree more, and I think we’re going to see more interdisciplinary majors (e.g., “ancient Mediterranean studies”) in the future. The primary reason I pointed specifically to Berkeley, Yale, Hopkins, and Chicago as examples of powerhouses in ancient studies was their strength not only in classics but also in adjacent fields like anthro/arch, Near Eastern studies, art history, and so on. Chicago is in a league of its own when it comes to related disciplines like Egyptology and ancient Near Eastern studies, of course.
One could add others to that list - Harvard, Brown, Penn, NYU, Cornell, maybe Columbia and Brandeis, and Michigan, UCLA, and UT Austin among public universities are especially notable.
I second this since expenses don’t seem to be a huge concern for OP. Cambridge and UCL are the other obvious places to consider in the UK, but one could add Durham, Liverpool, Birmingham, etc. There was an article a few years ago that mentioned the high rates of admissions for competitive Classics applicants, though it’s never easy to get into Oxford or (especially) Cambridge as an American.
- For those without Greek and Latin A-levels there are indeed Oxbridge opportunities: a four-year classics course at Cambridge, and at Oxford the fast-track “Course II” as well as two smaller courses (ancient and modern history, ancient history and archaeology) focussing on history and material culture rather than literature and philosophy. The chances of admission for these are in line with other courses such as English and history. But it is easier to get into Oxbridge to read the long-established classics courses, requiring an ancient language A-level, than any other subject: between 2012 and 2014, for the traditional classics “Course I” at Oxford, 51 students were accepted from the state sector and 233 from fee-paying schools. There is nothing like such a high percentage of privately educated students on any other course; there is no similarly high chance of admission – at around 45%. Classics applicants have a comparable chance of getting into Cambridge, at 45%; Cambridge has only a slightly better ratio of state-sector students.*
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/20/classics-for-the-people-ancient-greeks
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“But it is easier to get into Oxbridge to read the long-established classics courses, requiring an ancient language A-level, than any other subject: between 2012 and 2014, for the traditional classics “Course I” at Oxford, 51 students were accepted from the state sector and 233 from fee-paying schools.“
To put this in context, almost no state school in the UK has teaching staff able to offer Ancient Greek at GCSE or A-level. Even Latin A-level is quite rare. In strong private schools the situation is quite different, for example if I’d chosen those subjects I could have studied 7 years of Latin and 5 years of Ancient Greek before attending university. So any American candidate (who might only have 4 years of high school Latin up to AP level) is likely to find the competition quite tough.
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I think the OP should consider the IPEDS figures (post #8) at his/her discretion. As stated in post #11, more majors wouldn’t necessarily be better in all cases, but too few could be a source of concern. In this sense, either Penn or Stanford might be fine, but the figure for Duke could raise some doubts.