Hi everyone,
One of the things I’m looking for in a school is a strong undergraduate focus. Since I’m looking at top tier schools, I know of a few that really care about their undergrads - Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, etc. I also understand that some like Harvard and Yale care more about their grad students (ex. teaching fellows teach undergrads there). Can anyone provide some great schools with great undergrad emphasis>
Thanks!
Since we just had a mammoth discussion of this topic, and to clarify things, would you say, “top tier schools” include LACs (i.e., NESCAC+, the Claremonts, etc.?)
Rice, which has the smallest undergraduate enrollment of the elite research universities, is noted for its almost LAC-like emphasis on the undergraduate experience.
Currently, it is rated #5 by USNWR and #1 by Niche for the quality of its undergraduate instruction.
I don’t know how Elmira College would place against other LACs, but I just visited there and they are very undergrad based. I talked to a professor in the Political Science department and he mentioned that undergrads have lots of opportunities to work with their professors on their research/work. He had had some undergrads fact check for a textbook he wrote a bit ago! A lot of this is because they don’t have almost any graduate degrees, therefore no graduate students to take up opportunities with professors, or to teach lower level classes.
Harvey Mudd, which I understand has no grad students.
Miami University (Ohio).
Schools from the NESCACs and Claremonts, along with a very few comparable colleges, would, in principle, top any list for undergraduate focus combined with highly selective admission profiles. Of your listed choices, Princeton might come the closest to this group.
If what you’re “looking for in a school is a strong undergraduate focus,” then look for schools that do not have or with very tiny grad programs, such as top LACs with good faculty-student ratio and their pedagogical styles, such as Williams’ Oxford tutorial. Among top national universities, Princeton’s 5:1 faculty-student ratio and its undergrad Precept System is hard to beat.
“Undergraduate focus” is a hard thing to define and then to measure.
One relevant metric is average class size.
http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2015/10/20/estimated-class-sizes-more-than-90-national-universities/
(notice the way this site measures class size, though, which isn’t the same way everyone else would do it).
Another perspective emphasizes professor quality and the level of student-faculty engagement:
http://www.bestcollegereviews.org/50-schools-best-professors/
The NSSE attempts a more complex, multi-faceted assessment of student-faculty engagement
(http://nsse.indiana.edu/html/annual_results.cfm).
Every small liberal arts college. US News has two national lists: one for universities and one for small liberal arts colleges. The liberal arts colleges have either only or mostly undergraduates and use their huge endowments to provide unparalleled opportunities for the students. Look at the national liberal arts college list, then start researching those schools and seeing which is a good fit for your interests and preferences.
Note: For the sake of discussion please include LAC’s that have notable undergrad experiences (ex. very small student:faculty ratio, college consortiums, etc.)
@drwprz, take a look at the list below. As you correctly noted, it’s not surprising that the best schools have the smallest class sizes, whether they are undergraduate focused universities or LAC’s - yes there are outliers that have larger graduate populations, but it’s far from the majority.
1 California Institute of Technology 34-35
2 Harvey Mudd College 33-35
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 33-35
4 Columbia University 32-35
5 Harvard University 32-35
6 Princeton University 32-35
7 Rice University 32-35
8 University of Chicago 32-35
9 Vanderbilt University 32-35
10 Johns Hopkins University 32-34
11 University of Notre Dame 32-34
12 Washington University in St. Louis 32-34
13 Stanford University 31-35
14 Yale University 31-35
15 Amherst College 31-34
16 Brown University 31-34
17 Carnegie Mellon University 31-34
18 Duke University 31-34
19 Haverford College 31-34
20 Northeastern University 31-34
21 Northwestern University 31-34
22 University of Pennsylvania 31-34
23 Williams College 31-34
24 Bowdoin College 31-34
25 Hamilton College 31-33
26 Cooper Union 30-34
27 Cornell University 30-34
28 Dartmouth College 30-34
29 Georgetown University 30-34
30 Pomona College 30-34
31 Boston College 30-33
32 Case Western Reserve University 30-33
33 Colgate University 30-33
34 Georgia Institute of Technology 30-33
35 Grinnell College 30-33
36 Tufts University 30-33
37 University of Southern California 30-33
38 Vassar College 30-33
39 Washington and Lee University 30-33
40 Swarthmore College 29-34
41 University of California—Berkeley 29-34
42 Carleton College 29-33
43 Claremont McKenna College 29-33
44 Emory University 29-33
45 Reed College 29-33
46 University of Michigan—Ann Arbor 29-33
47 University of Virginia 29-33
48 Wellesley College 29-33
49 Middlebury College 29-33
50 University of Rochester 29-33
@Chembiodad I’ve seen you supply lists like these several times before, and I would advise you to stop doing so since they appear to be misleading. Many of these middle 50% ACT scores are outdated – for example, after I gained admission to WashU this year, I received an email from them that noted that their middle 50% for the class of 2021 was 33-35. Similarly, Tufts published an article for the class of 2021 stating that 33 was the average ACT for the class of 2021 (so the 30-33 for middle 50% couldn’t be true). If you look at Tufts’ most recent CDS, its middle 50% for the ACT is 31-34 (and that is data gathered from the class of 2020; it will likely increase this time around since the average for 2021 was 33). Don’t get me wrong, I think lists like these are a good resource for this site, but outdated ones can really augment people’s views of certain topics.
If you are concerned about class sizes, check the college’s online schedule to see if these are listed. Average class sizes may be misleadingly lower than the average class size a given student will encounter in college, since the more common and popular classes will be larger, particularly at lower levels and in more popular majors.
For example, at Princeton, some common courses (e.g. general chemistry, organic chemistry for biology majors and pre-meds, introductory economics, calculus) are provisioned for hundreds of students: https://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/search_results.xml?term=1182&coursetitle=&instructor=&distr_area=&level=&cat_number=&subject=CHM&subject=ECO&subject=MAT&sort=SYN_PS_PU_ROXEN_SOC_VW.SUBJECT%2C+SYN_PS_PU_ROXEN_SOC_VW.CATALOG_NBR%2CSYN_PS_PU_ROXEN_SOC_VW.CLASS_SECTION%2CSYN_PS_PU_ROXEN_SOC_VW.CLASS_MTG_NBR&submit=Search
@Tufts21, you are referring to accepted avg scores as compared to admitted avg scores as schools love to toot those in press releases. I don’t believe tthat the lists will change dramatically over the next handle of years, long term who knows, or the avg. continue to bump up materially as there aren’t enough US test takers that achieve a 34+ for that to happen.
I’ve heard over and over that Caltech isn’t a place you’d want to go as an undergrad. It’s very focused on its graduate students.