<p>Five 2007 Nobel Laureates and their undergraduate alma mater:</p>
<p>Mario R. Capecchi (medicine) - Antioch College - 300 students
Oliver Smithies (medicine) - Balliol College (Oxford) - 400 students
Sir Martin J. Evans (medicine) - Christ's College (Cambridge) - 395 students
Albert Fert (Physics) - </p>
<p>Oxford and Cambridge have over 20,000 students each and the Ecole Normale Superieure is a major research think tank. Those schools hardly qualify as "LACs".</p>
<p>Oxford a LAC? hahahahahahahaha</p>
<p>SarahsDad,</p>
<p>What are you smoking?</p>
<p>Balliol and Christ's are two residential colleges within the universities of Oxford and Cambridge respectively, both of which are large research universities. The </p>
<p>Why the "but?"
And afterwards, he got his Ph.D. degree at Harvard.</p>
<p>If residence colleges within Oxford and Cambridge somehow qualify as LACs then a lot of US university students, such at those at Yale, Harvard, and even big state schools like UCSD, are attending "LACs" also.</p>
<p>LACs have more than enough to recommend them on their own merit without resorting to nonsense in defining an LAC.</p>
<p>How about Poet Laureate? Billy Collins, a Holy Cross alum, was Poet Laureate of the US a couple of years back.</p>
<p>Al Gore, Harvard
Roger Myerson, Harvard</p>
<p>It would, however, make sense that there would be a lot of laureates from LACs since LACs are most likely to produce students who obtain doctorates.</p>
<p>Re: Oxbridge</p>
<p>In defence, Oxbridge's blessing and bane is the college system--all tutorials are done in the residential college, so it's unlike the residential colleges at HYP. Everything (except for once a year exams and degree ceremony) is administered by each individual college, so even courses for the same subject vary from college to college. Oxford is kind of like a tightly knit Cambridge, MA.</p>
<p>Re: Gore, ew -- next it'll be Bono. Sir Stern should be getting more love than a man with an overdone powerpoint.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In defence, Oxbridge's blessing and bane is the college system--all tutorials are done in the residential college, so it's unlike the residential colleges at HYP. Everything (except for once a year exams and degree ceremony) is administered by each individual college, so even courses for the same subject vary from college to college
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Not really. Lectures and practicals (labs) are given by university departments and they are the same for all students who are enrolled in a specific course of study, regardless of their college of origin. Tutorials on the other hand are under the responsibility of the colleges and, accordingly, vary from college to college.</p>
<p>As far as I understand, humanities courses tend to have fewer lectures and most students don't attend them anyway on a regular basis. For a typical English or History major at Oxbridge, most of the learning is actually done through tutorials and independent study, hence the importance of the colleges. For an engineering or science major, college tutorials are also important (especially in the freshman and sophomore years), but university-organized lectures and labs play comparatively a much bigger role than in the humanities courses.</p>
<p>In any case, your final degree classification and whether you graduate or not will only depend on your results in the (comprehensive) final exams, which are the same for all students in a given major (barring only a possible limited choice of optional papers, especially in the final years). At Oxford, most students take the preliminary examinations/moderations at the end of the freshman year and the final university exams only two years later (at the end of the third year). In the Cambridge tripos systemhowever (and in some Oxford math/science/engineering courses), students are normally examined every year, usually taking between five and eight three-hour papers per year, with a few "half papers" lasting one hour and a half. </p>
<p>Note that Oxbridge students are required to turn in work (solutions to problem sheets or essays) ** on a weekly basis ** for their tutorial sessions (something between one to four hours a week) , but that work is not graded for credit as it is case in America and does not change your final "course grade" .</p>
<p>Amazing that one of them is from Antioch. The school, regretably, closed this year. May it yet be saved.</p>