I’m wondering if any current students at smaller LACs can comment on whether or not they felt they were happy with the choices of majors. My D is undecided but has been accepted to several schools in their Arts & Sciences. Each college has about 40 majors which seems like plenty until you actually start going through the list and crossing off what you think you are not at all interested in. In comparison, a larger university may have 200 majors or more. She truly is undecided. Should we be worried at all that a liberal arts school may not offer enough options or is this just an odd parent concern?
When I was in college, my then-boyfriend saw that his exact precise desired major wasn’t there, so he made it up. He spoke to the two relevant departments and wrote a short proposal and it was okayed. What you get an smaller LACs is that kind of attention.
Maybe one should be concerned. If there is a specific major that a student wants to pursue a set career path, then yes it is cause for concern.
It kind of depends on what major you’re looking for. If it’s forensic science, actuary, or some other very pre-professional degree, then yes, you probably won’t find it. But as @JenJenJenJen said, if you have an idea and can make it work in an interdisciplinary way, then a LAC can be just the right place.
It’s something to consider. There are some very good LACs that have surprising deficiencies in the arts & science. Grinnell does not offer geology, for example, although it is otherwise fairly strong in the sciences and is by far one of the wealthiest LACs.
If she has even vague interests in some of the harder to find subjects (e.g. geography or linguistics), she should look more carefully than if she’s focused on commonly offered subjects like psychology and English.
I am a big fan of the undergraduate attention at LACs, but ultimately I applied to only one because of their insufficient offerings in my areas of interest. I suspect you’ll get a range of opinions on this question, as there’s no right answer.
Not only do you need to look at the majors offered, but the number of professors in that department and the courses offered each semester. Smaller LAC in a consortium may have a better answer than the school that is very rural, all alone.
We stopped looking at LACs because most were just too small for my kids. Even if the school has the exact major, say Art History, it often didn’t have the concentration she wanted (Japanese art, or 14th century, or Flemish painters), and I wasn’t sure a 16 year old really knew exactly what she wanted (not that I’m a mind reader or anything, but she’s on her third major).
On the other hand, I think some people are too picky and a more general degree might be better in the long run. My STEM kid was never going to wander far from STEM classes. If she hadn’t stuck with engineering, she would have ended up in chemistry or math, so a STEM school was fine even if small.
I agree about the profs- and making sure if the courses are offered, they’re taught by true subject specialists. We went through the “looking for her major” and lots of LACs don’t have it or teach it properly. But hey, nor do many big universities. She ended up at an LAC that had all 3 of her interests covered.
Sometimes, I think the quest for an exact match misses that many depts can satisfy your needs. Sometimes, one or two intensive courses can satisfy the desire for depth and you also work on related breadth.
Does the undecided student have any areas of more likely interest than others? If so, that can help determine what to look for in terms of what is offered (both as majors and within major departments). For example, Harvey Mudd may be suitable for a student undecided between engineering, computer science, math, and physics, while Sarah Lawrence may be suitable for a student undecided between visual arts, performing arts, and psychology, even though these schools may be less suitable for an undecided student considering economics, political science, and sociology.
Be aware that some majors may be named differently at different schools, and some majors may be commonly included under another department as a subarea option to another major (e.g. international relations as a subarea of political science).
Some majors are merely an extension of what used to be part of an older, traditional major. One thing you can do is to look at the actual course offerings for a couple of semesters at the school, and see if the TYPE of courses you are interested in are being offered only just under a more traditional label. For example, a bigger university may split up political science into political science, political economy, government, international relations, etc. If all you see at an LAC is “Politics” as a major, see if those other types of courses are being offered—if they are, then it might be easy for you to devise your own major, whereas if there aren’t many such maybe the offerings are indeed too limited for your tastes.
Universities love bureaucracy, and at their greater size in number of faculty there is perhaps a perverse incentive at times to create new departments, with their own websites, secretaries, travel budgets, etc. An LAC is less likely to go down that road, both due to smaller size and less interested in that sort of thing.
LACs struggle with the idea of specialization and normally it is something I would associate with STEM subjects. The proliferation of academic “peaks” in the humanities is a more subtle problem. I think most places work the same way: if a student is truly undecided going in, a kind of “streetlight effect” takes place and you find what you want based on what you are exposed to. OTOH, I’ve also seen instances where there just wasn’t enough to satisfy an initial burst of curiosity. This happened to a friend of mine who took an excellent class at Wesleyan on “The Philosophy of Evil” (I may be getting the title wrong, but it was something close to that) and decided he needed something like a Holocaust Studies major which Wesleyan didn’t have. A senior thesis wouldn’t do. He eventually found something satisfactory along those lines at Cornell. But, that sort of thing can happen anywhere.
Thank you for all of the feedback; that was exactly what I was looking for. Sounds like a smaller liberal arts school could work out.
All it takes is one major… the one you want.
You’ve gotten good feedback, and maybe this is obvious but – a university may offer degrees in elementary education, nursing, athletic training, kinesiology, accounting, and other majors through various colleges within the university. If your student is focused on programs like those, a LAC would not generally offer what you need. But if your student is interested in variations of Poli Sci or Anthropology or English/Creative Writing, or creating an interdisciplinary major based on your own interests which cross LAC departments, then most LACs will offer the flexibility you want. I agree that looking through the course catalog online (keeping in mind that ALL those classes may not be offered the same semester or same year), and the department webpages of interest, to see what faculty tend to teach in what areas, and what courses are offered specifically in a semester, can be helpful.