<p>Many British schools have specific physics and philosophy majors, usually three years long, and some are decent, such as: UCL, Oxford and Cambridge</p>
<p>might look at Holy Cross, Tufts.</p>
<p>“Maybe the torture of those semesters of foreign language locked in a small room with a grad student are overwelming my memory…”</p>
<p>…or it could be that things have changed in the past forty years since you were a student in Ann Arbor intparent.</p>
<p>Sorry, less than 40 years, rj. And yes, some things have changed since I was there – they have more adjunct professors than they used to vs. full professors – but the number of grad students has not changed. And many of them are still earning their way by teaching even if that is not really what they are most interested in.</p>
<p>Oh?</p>
<p>“Sorry, less than 40 years, rj”</p>
<p>Your comments. I quote:</p>
<p>“Oh, absolutely! 40 years ago I was taken in by a marketing professor in the intro marketing class at University of Michigan business school (now Ross). The marketing department wasn’t dumb – they put their best professor in front of the first year students. Still remember the guy, C. Merle Crawford, saw in the alumni magazine that he died a few months ago and felt sad. I went on to be a marketing major, although it actually was not a great fit for me and I never worked in the field after graduating.”</p>
<p>Things change over 40 something years.</p>
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<p>The LAC model likely works better for non-advanced students who are not likely to run out of courses and who do not want to study something esoteric that is hard to find at smaller schools. Pre-meds who prefer small classes may find LACs to be of particular benefit, since typical pre-med courses are often among the largest courses in any given school.</p>
<p>Advanced students who will get into upper division courses in frosh or soph year, perhaps eventually taking graduate level courses as undergraduates, are more likely to find the advantages of LACs less useful and the limitations more of a problem.</p>
<p>LACs conveniently near research universities that they have convenient cross registration agreements with can reduce some of the usual disadvantages of limited course offerings. A lower cost way for non-advanced students to get smaller frosh and soph level courses but have access to the greater upper division offerings of a research university is to start at a community college, then transfer to a research university as a junior. However, that means going through a competitive admissions process then.</p>
<p>At issue for the OP is the strategy for choosing “good colleges for a physics and philosophy double major”. One strategy is to look for the schools with “top” departments in both. That will tend to steer him to research universities with strong graduate programs in both, including large state universities (Michigan, Maryland, UC Irvine) and super-selective private universities (such as the Ivies). Is that necessarily the best (or even a very good) strategy for this individual?</p>
<p>The OP may not be a strong candidate for the Ivies (which are reaches for most applicants). The issue with OOS public universities isn’t only the average class sizes (to the extent that’s an issue at all), it’s also financial aid. Ohio State (his in-state flagship) certainly is worth a look (for costs but also for breadth of course offerings). So, too, are small LACs. </p>
<p>The limitations ucbalumnus mentions are worth considering. Naturally, LACs do offer fewer courses than big research universities. A LAC also is less likely to attract a stable of influential scholars covering many of the major sub-fields in physics, philosophy, and other disciplines. Are these limitations major handicaps for strong students? Maybe … but compare PhD production rates for LACs against private & public research universities, adjusted for institution size:
Source: NSF/webcaspar
Year: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007<br>
Carnegie Classification (standardized): Research I, Baccalaureate/Liberal Arts I<br>
Academic Institution (standardized): All values<br>
Academic Discipline, Detailed (standardized): Physics</p>
<p>**School ... 5 yr PhD total ...Undergrads ....Rate**<br>
CalTech ............. 82 978 0.083844581
Harvey Mudd College 37 771 0.047989624 (LAC)
MIT .................. 85 4384 0.019388686
Swarthmore College 18 1545 0.011650485 (LAC)
Reed College........ 16 1442 0.0110957 (LAC)
Bryn Mawr College 12 1307 0.009181331 (LAC)
Harvard University 61 6655 0.009166041
Lawrence University 13 1566 0.008301405 (LAC)
Williams College 17 2052 0.0082846 (LAC)
University of Chicago 40 5369 0.007450177
Haverford College 8 1190 0.006722689 (LAC)
Princeton University 33 5113 0.006454137
Carleton College 12 2055 0.005839416 (LAC)
Stanford University 38 6999 0.005429347
Cornell University 68 13935 0.004879799
Grinnell College.... 8 1688 0.004739336 (LAC)
Vassar College..... 10 2400 0.004166667 (LAC)
UC-Berkeley........ 106 25574 0.004144835
Colorado College... 8 2011 0.00397812 (LAC)
Johns Hopkins .... 18 5066 0.003553099
Columbia University 27 8274 0.003263234
Oberlin College.... 9 2900 0.003103448 (LAC)
Brown University... 18 6133 0.002934942
Yale University..... 15 5414 0.002770595
Wesleyan University 5 2870 0.00174216 (LAC)
University of Arizona 49 30867 0.001587456
University of Michigan 40 27979 0.001429644
University of Illinois 42 31932 0.001315295
University of Washington 40 30790 0.001299123
University of Texas .. 44 38463 0.001143957
University of Maryland 27 26826 0.001006486
</p>
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<p>Can anyone produce data to demonstrate this?
Enrollment numbers on the Berkeley, UCLA, and Wisconsin course registration pages suggest intparent is on the mark. They show lots of very big classes through the 200 level, with discussion sections led by grad students. </p>
<p>I have no doubt that many strong students thrive at large public research universities.<br>
The question for me is whether you’d want to pay premium OOS rates to attend one of these schools when alternatives are available with smaller classes and better FA, or when your own in-state flagship offers a very similar experience at a much lower cost.</p>
<p>tk,one thing that definitely changed in recent years is the english speaking skills of graduate student instructors. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was not uncommon for graduate student instructors to have difficulty communicating content to undergrads, not just at Michigan, but at most major research universities. In recent years, however, most universities, including Michigan, restricted instructor positions to graduate students who spoke english well enough to communicate the content effectively. </p>
<p>Also, if classes at major research universities (private and public) are large, it is not because they lack the resources to make them small, but because it is a waste of resources to make them small. There just is no justification for having an elementary class monopolise the time of several key faculty when the material being taught can be just as effectively communicated in a large class setting by one professor. Large freshman lectures are not purely restricted to public universities. There are many (and I mean many) lectures with 300 and 400 students at several Ivy League schools and other top private universities. Do you really think that Harvard cannot completely eliminate classes with 300 students if it wanted to? It certainly has the faculty and resources to do so. But would it make sense to allocate more faculty to reduce class size for intro-level classes? Perhaps not. Even advanced Econ, History, Political Science and Psychology classes at most top private universities will almost always enrol many students.</p>
<p>I do agree, however, that some students learn better in a more intimate environment, while others learn better in a larger setting. It is a question of preference. It is clear that students who attend universities with large-ish classes (schools like Cal, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Notre Dame, Princeton, Stanford, Virginia, Washington University etc…with 10-20% of their classes with 50 students or more students) do just as well as students who attend universities with small classes (like LACs etc…). What really matters is whether or not the material is effectively communicated, and if help is readily available to students needing additional explanation.</p>
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<p>Institution size is not a good denominator, since an institution with a lot of students majoring in pre-professional subjects (engineering, business, agriculture / natural resources, hotel administration. etc.) will have more students who never intended to go on to PhD study (whereas someone who is passionate about a liberal arts subject like physics or philosophy may find that getting a PhD is the main route to a career in that subject). LACs may also have fewer students drawn into employment at the bachelor’s degree level, since employers may not bother recruiting at smaller schools.</p>
<p>Also, the LACs you have listed are generally quite selective compared to most of the public research universities you list. So most of the public research universities have a lot of students who are “not PhD material” so that the percentage of those going on to PhD study is small.</p>
<p>Sorry, mistaken post in the marketing post you referred to. It was actually about 30 years ago… but I see no evidence that big research universities have changed their model at all in that timeframe. And for all your arguing that this model might be best for students who have done a lot of advanced college/coursework before getting to college, I don’t get the impression that the OP falls in that category. So save your cheerleading for the research universities for other threads where it might be more appropriate for the OP. And given that this OP has been attending an alternative high school, which tends to be a smaller class environment with closer relationships with instructors, that is another reason why an LAC environment might be the better environment for this poster.</p>
<p>That’s correct UCB. For example, Michigan has approximately 30-35 undergrads graduating with degrees in Physics each year. That includes Astrophysics/Astronomy and Biophysics majors. In other words, of the 27,000 undergrads at Michigan, only 150-200 (less than 1%) will be Physics majors. I am fairly certainly that MIT, which only has 4,400 undergrads, will probably have significantly more Physics concentrators in absolute terms. Heck, even Caltech and Harvey Midd, which have only 1,000 and 800 undergrads respectively, will likely have more (or at least as many) Physics majors than Michigan. </p>
<p>The only way a PhD productivity rating is telling is to look at the total number of PhDs over a period of time as a ratio of the total number of students who received an undergraduate degree in that major in the same period of time.</p>
<p>intparent, I am sorry that you feel that you received a poor education at a research university, and I appreciate that you are convinced that LACs offer superior undergraduate experiences and education. But it really comes down to personal preference. Some students definitely perform better in a LAC environment, while others do better in a research university setting. Nobody has denigrated LACs in anyway, so I am not sure why you are accusing anyone of “cheerleading for research universities” or of misleading the OP in any way. I am sure the OP understands the difference between research universities and LACs (they have been openly discussed in this thread) and can decide on his own what is best for him.</p>