I think you have a misconception about how college courses are “taught”. In high school it may be mostly a matter of a teacher presenting information at a pace targeted to the students and then giving exams based on the course content, and graded accordingly. In college, especially in a LAC environment, the class dynamic is much more fluid and interactive. The student is far more likely to be graded on essays or term papers, and exams are more likely to be essay-style – providing an opportunity for students to explore topics in depth as well as to do independent reading and research. Plus course selection is also more flexible and wide-ranging – students have much more freedom to select courses that meet whatever appetite they have for challenge.
And the professors are very aware that they are teaching young adults, so not nearly as concerned about adjusting their teaching to anyone’s “level” – they are more focused on structuring the course the way the want to cover the material that should be covered.
And teaching takes place at all “levels” – I am sure of that because my daughter’s school had a particularly good on-campus system for students to post faculty & course reviews, as well as their opinions about the relative burden of reading assignments and grading practices.
One of the attractions of LAC’s is that class size tends to be smaller and the profs are focused on undergraduate teaching, which also provides more opportunties for professors to get to know their students and tailor their teaching appropriately – and not everything take place in class. I am sure most professors are delighted when they have a student who demonstrates a strong interest or aptitude in their subject.
The assumption that profs are teaching at a higher level is just that…an assumption and one that may or may not be true because as someone pointed out the intellectual capability and difference between the top 10 or even 15% of test scorers is not very meaningful and I doubt there are very many profs dumbing down because they aren’t teaching at Amherst.
I suppose it depends how one defines “better education.”
My spouse is a professor, and what matters in his mind is whether faculty are well-trained – did they get the Ph.D from strong graduate programs, are they active in the profession. I spent a lot of time on school websites identifying where faculty in a range of disciplines got their Ph.D at a range of LACs – because we know a lot of faculty, we know broadly what are strong departments in certain fields. The surprise to me was discovering that, for the most part, faculty at the tippy top LACs were coming out of the same types of programs as the faculty at 20-60+ LACs.
Of course, there are other elements to “quality of education” and reasonable minds can differ about what that might be. We identified “faculty training” as a factor which mattered in our search. As long as a family can identify the criteria which matter for them, then they can research and compare what specific schools offer. If someone defines “better” in terms of funded research opportunities, then build a list of schools which includes that. I’m personally not that invested in the “input” of the scores and gpas of admitted students, since on our (many) visits, we were comfortable that the peer group at a wide variety of schools was pretty impressive. But other people may find that more meaningful. There is a wealth of information available beyond the scores and methodology of US News.
Lastly, after researching, visiting etc. scores of LACs ranked from 10-75 I don’t think we came across any which had separate Honors programs (except for Swat, which is a different kind of beast).
That’s because there are a lot more highly qualified PhD’s than job opening for them. A recently minted PhD looking for an academic posting can’t really afford to be choosy, and it also probably makes more sense financially to accept a tenure-track position at a lesser known LAC than to try to make ends meet as an adjunct at a more prestigious college. See https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/02/27/388443923/a-glut-of-ph-d-s-means-long-odds-of-getting-jobs
My child is at a LAC ranked about 40. He loves it and it’s a perfect fit for him. He is doing well academically to the point he has been a tutor since freshman year. I get the sense that he is ahead of the curve in a way that I would not have predicted based on his performance in high school relative to peers. It’s as if his high school was more competitive. He also says college friends say this college was not a first choice for many of them, like they did not get in elsewhere*, though it was a first choice for him. Now perhaps he would be doing just as well at Swarthmore or Williams, and it’s the flexibility of schedule in college that lets him do well. But based on what I saw with his brother who went to a top 20 university, it’s seems he has it easier in that he is not in the muddle of the pack of a lot of really talented kids. But perhaps that is just LAC vs non-LAC. I do expect he will get in to a PhD program. It seems that is where he is headed.
*i am not sure how this can be true since half of the class is admitted through ED!
Instead of comparing ACT scores, dig out those Common Data Sets and take a look at percent of students in the top 10% of the high school class. I think you’ll see a bigger difference in top ten vs 40-50.
@calmom – I agree. As the spouse of a Humanities professor, we are surrounded by friends and colleagues whose careers have been shaped by the paltry number of tenure track jobs available. As I dug into my research, I was surprised because I just figured that profs at Amherst or Swat would be somehow a different caliber than those at Skidmore or Dickinson or Lawrence. For us, an academic family, our starting point is “where did the faculty train.” And we found that there are not dramatic or even meaningful differences across these LACs. Disclaimer – my kids are not STEMy, so we looked at core humanities and social science fields, as well as arts, but not natural and physical sciences.
Other families could identify other factors that can have significant impact on student experience, such as support for faculty research, how many classes taught a term, class size – all kinds of other things go into “quality” of the student’s experience with the faculty member. And we looked at those too, pouring through CDS info on how many classes/percentage of classes at various sizes. But the revelation was that, in terms of faculty graduate training, there are not meaningful differences.
@momofthreeboys Good point – metro areas will have more job opportunities for the spouse, making those areas more desirable. A common dynamic is a two-professor family, and it can be very tough to get two tenure track jobs in a remote LAC. Then there is the professor we know who turned down tenure track job at a top LAC because it was too far from NYC.
I have no doubt there is little difference n professor quality, and all the points about quality of life, “two body problem” (as the science profs call it) are absolutely true.
As a professor, you want to maintain high standards. At the same time, you get satisfaction from students understanding the material. So maybe it’s not dumbing down, but perhaps restating more times in different ways and gearing the pace to the uptake. I have taught at the undergrad level as a tenured professor, and in adult education and at grad level as an adjunct. To be effective you need to know your audience. That said, will it hinder a person going to where they are not middle of the pack but at the top? Probably not, as it’s what you make of it.
With admission rates of less than 10% and elite colleges stating they could fill their classes several times over with qualified students, it is hard to imagine that schools just below the top 20 or even in the top 50 to 75 (or lower) are filled with students who are not capable of high level understanding of complex material. Not every student at a LAC is studying humanities, some are studying chem, bio or math. If you are comparing a top 20 to a school that admits pretty much anyone that shows up, of course that will matter, but a school that admits 30% instead of 10% will still have a lot of motivated, smart, capable students.
Larger schools may also provide an excellent education and small class sizes in some majors. For example, University of Pittsburgh and Rutgers both have very high level philosophy departments even though their overall ranking is in the 60s. Undergraduate students, beyond the intro level, get the benefit of that in small classes and great professors and graduate students. A philosophy major at either would likely get a very good education.
Certainly for more popular majors class sizes may remain larger for upper level courses and it is harder to stand out if there are several hundred students in a major.
:That said, will it hinder a person going to where they are not middle of the pack but at the top? Probably not, as it’s what you make of it."
@LBowie In some cases it’s going be better for them. My oldest is a smart kid who went to a competitive high school that was full of smart kids and REALLY smart kids, who could be a bit intimidating. Going to college where she was at the top academically gave her to confidence to seek out opportunities she might not have if she felt continually overshadowed by her peers. It’s the question of whether it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond or the other way round.
@lastone03 you could just do the check I suggested. Since most schools take rigor of curriculum into consideration as perhaps most important, I would expect it’s comparing apples to apples. Or are you suggesting that the top LACs have classes with 80-90% of students in the top 10% of their high school class who took easy classes in high school? I would find that hard to believe.
And I agree @cb4bowie , for my son it is a great confidence builder to be doing well. It’s definitely the right place and I think he’d be less happy at a more competitive LAC.
I’ve come across at least a couple - Albright in PA ( https://www.albright.edu/academic/honors-program/ ) and Capital U (it has a law and nursing school but undergrad is very lac-like in size and everything else). Like at large Us I think it’s a way for somewhat less selective schools to distinguish themselves.
Graduating “with honors” is what I understand to be thesis writing or other advanced work undertaken senior year.
“No, the original question was NOT only asking about LACs. Please re-read it.”
@tutumom2001 Actually, I was asking about the difference in instruction between LACs. I may not have spelled that out as clearly as I should have in the first question, though I did clarify in a later post. Whether or not you get a better education at a large university vs a small LAC is a good question, just not the question I was asking.
I agree with @PurpleTitan and others that say it’s a mistake to assume the highest ranked school is automatically the best for every student. It was a challenge to get our daughter to see beyond acceptance rates and name recognition to find a school that was a good fit for her. In her case, the rankings were by far a hindrance to finding where she belonged rather than a help.
I guess my answer to OP’s original question is you might - or you might not. Rankings have their place, as they are someone’s attempt at providing a scientific approach to making some sense of the higher education madness. For us we decided to throw out the rankings very early, and instead read The Princeton Review and Fiske Guide to Colleges, pretty much cover to cover.
That gave us a sense of what kinds of things are likely to make a school a potentially good fit for our twin Ds. And some of those things would not be what typically draws a high ranking. Rather than selectivity and competition, we were looking for a collaborative environment that would bring out their best. Being in southeastern PA, there are a ton of worthwhile LACs within 3 hours of us. And over two years we visited almost 20 schools, most of which were small LACs.
I’m not sure how anyone can rely on a ranking that can’t possibly incorporate every factor that would be important to making one of the biggest decisions of one’s life. Some kids are driven and ambitious and will do well wherever they end up. If they want to use pretige or selectivity as a proxy for a better education, so be it. But I’d much rather find the place my child feels good about, scholastically and socially, regardless of where it lies on someone else’s list.
@RandyErika Just recently started reviewing the Fiske Guide to Colleges, while he has some good information and insight on schools, IMO the guide tends to look at only the positive aspects of the school and downplays the negative. For example, one of negatives of USC (CA) is that the college is located in south central LA and safety/crime should be discussed in detail, not sugar coated or swept under the rug.
I personally feel that one can get a more accurate perspective about the college experience by reviewing students’ comments from sites such as College Niche, Unigo, etc. Look at the positive and negative reviews and see if there is a pattern.
So we don’t think there’s a difference in class discussions between a place like Carleton or Grinnell versus Denison or Dickinson? At the top 20 LACs, the range of SAT/ACT scores of the students is pretty tight. I think Carleton’s middle 50% for the ACT is 33-35. Having intellectual peers everywhere you look seems to be the bonus at those types of schools. If that’s not the case, I’d like to know because we could be facing a situation where S19 gets merit at other schools versus full price at somewhere else. He’s been to class at Grinnell, Carleton, Davidson, and William and Mary (his only non-LAC outlier) and he thought the discussions were fabulous. He probably needs to get to class at some of his safer schools to see what he thinks.
I do think there’s a big difference between kids who get a 29 on an ACT and a 35. At our high school, the 29 kids wouldn’t not be in many honors classes. I know that could be specific to our school since it’s a highly ranked public school with a lot of bright kids. As much as it stinks, kids compare scores and S19 doesn’t know anyone in any of his honors or AP classes with an ACT under a 32.