<p>I have written lots of posts about this topic, so I am not going to give the full treatment.</p>
<p>I went to one of HYPS, as did my spouse. We loved that style of education, and we encouraged our children to value the same thing, which they did (both at the University of Chicago). On the other hand, having spent a great deal of my working life with LAC graduates, and now seeing what has gone on with my kids’ friends and friends’ kids, and knowing a bunch of LAC faculty, I am convinced that good LACs represent a different, but perfectly valid path to the same educational goals as you would find at an elite research university. At most, it’s a question of which style fits your style rather than is one better than the other. But most kids could easily adapt to either style and flourish.</p>
<p>I viewed the presence of grad student TAs as a plus, not a minus, at least in the context of a top university. They are a great bridge between the professors and the undergraduates, and they model the transformation from general education to career. The TAs in courses I cared about in college all went on to distinguished academic careers, not less distinguished than the professors they were working for at the time.</p>
<p>Grad students also add a lot of intellectual vitality to a department. They are around a lot, they are working all the time, writing papers, doing research.</p>
<p>That’s really one of the big differences between going to Harvard and going to, say, Williams. A small-medium department at Williams may have five faculty members (some of whom may be on leave at any point, and maybe/maybe not replaced by a visitor) and 10-15 majors. It’s super-intimate, and everyone knows everyone else really well but . . . everyone knows everyone else really well. The equivalent department at a research university may have 15-20 faculty members (some tenured, some not), an emeritus or two, 40-50 grad students, and an equal number of undergraduate majors. Plus regular visitors and job applicants. There’s a LOT more going on, people working on different things, surprises popping up. For an undergraduate who wants a lot of recognition and faculty attention, that’s a challenge (though not an insuperable one at all); but for someone who wants to immerse himself in the flow of information it’s heaven.</p>
<p>At Williams, all students will know their teachers better than they would at Harvard. No question about that. What’s more, no one gets tenure at Williams without being an absolutely stellar teacher, and Lord knows that’s not the case at Harvard, where pedagogical ability is fairly randomly distributed. (Not surprising, since it doesn’t actually enter into hiring and tenure decisions.) Realistically, though, at Harvard what a student does is to look for 2-4 faculty whom he or she likes, and who are good teachers and more or less work in a field that interests the student. And then the student takes all the classes they offer, and gets to know them, and gets interested in what interests them. The same thing happens at Williams, but that 2-4 faculty may be all or almost all the faculty in a department, and students effectively have no choice but to learn what they are teaching.</p>
<p>I think LACs do a better job of breadth, and research universities of depth. At LACs, every teacher feels a personal responsibility to make certain that all of his or her students have a solid command of the basics in a field, with no gaps in their preparation. The faculty devotes real time and attention to teaching things they don’t happen to be working on at the moment. At research universities, no one has that responsibility, and no one takes it. For the most part, faculty want to talk about the most important, interesting topic available, which invariably is “What I am working on right now.” So students get a lot of cutting edge, but they have to fill in the foundation themselves.</p>
<p>Top LACs send a higher percentage of students to PhD programs than the equivalent research universities. That reflects (a) their excellent preparation, (b) their intellectual tone, and (c) their ignorance of what grad students’ lives are really like.</p>
<p>The ideal at a research university is to major in something not insanely popular. One of my children was in a large department, and never really got close to any faculty, although her education was fine. (She did have close, and valuable, relationships with some graduate students, though.) My other child was in a medium-size department and knew absolutely everyone, worked with and for faculty members, and felt very much like part of the team.</p>
<p>I would note that, or all the twenty-somethings I know now, the ones who are finding the most success pursuing their unique dreams post-college all went to LACs. It’s not a large enough n to be more than anecdotal, but it impresses me. All received enormous support (some of it financial) and encouragement from their departments and alumni networks. If they needed to get involved in university-level research that wasn’t happening at their college, there were lots of ways to do that during the summers, and the colleges really worked with them to make it happen. Just as important, they didn’t get enticed into some easy, well-trodden career path because lots of other people were doing it, or it was prestigious. They stuck to their dreams, and it’s paying off for them, at least this far. The research university types – who were always perhaps more conformist – tend to be following fairly tried-and-true paths, which may not have been the ones they started out with.</p>
<p>A final difference between Harvard and Williams is the relative importance of extra-curricular activities. At Harvard, they are more important than classroom work, far, far more important for many students. They can be the equivalent of full-time jobs, and they are more important to people’s careers than their class work. That is rarely if ever the case at LACs. The extra-curriculars are more amateurish and “fun,” not career-openers.</p>