<p>I've tried to research it but I always come out short. What is the difference between a LAC and other colleges? I know they're generally smaller, but what else? Are there any stereotypes for LACs In specific areas?
Enlighten me, please! I really don't know anything about LACs.</p>
<p>My simple answer is that LACs only grant bachelor degrees; universities also grant masters and doctorate degrees. LACs are usually quite small — around 1200 to 3500 students on average. LACs are generally considered much more nurturing, tight nit communities. They also have small class sizes and tout close relationships with professors. Universities tend to offer more pre-professional degrees like business, teaching, engineering, etc.</p>
<p>A LAC is a college that is focused very specifically on teaching the liberal arts to undergraduates. Your typical large university has many different objectives, some of them competing–they want super-famous professors, brilliant research, a top-ranked hospital, the best graduate and professional programs, the best football team. I’m not saying these are bad, by any means, but it does tend to divert the emphasis away from teaching undergraduates. At a lot of great universities, professors are too busy doing research or getting interviewed on talk shows to actually teach the courses, so many courses are taught in a large lecture hall format or by graduate students.</p>
<p>LACs, on the other hand, are focused much more on teaching. They usually have few, if any, graduate programs or preprofessional schools like business or engineering. Instead of doing research, their professors actually teach undergraduate courses, and the classes are usually under 25 students. Sports is usually Division III, so no famous teams with big scholarships. LACs usually have fewer than 4000 students, although small size alone does not make a college a LAC.</p>
<p>Some of the most prestigious LACs include Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan, Swarthmore, Middlebury, Vassar, Pomona, Bates, Bowdoin, and Colby (and I’m sure the people on this forum can name hundreds more). These top LACs are sometimes referred to as the “Little Ivies”. There is also another group of LACs that come close to the Little Ivies in academic excellence and selectivity but are known for having a more offbeat, unconventional campus culture. These include Bard, Hampshire, Sarah Lawrence, Reed, Oberlin, Bennington, and Skidmore. Many of these colleges reject traditional college mainstays like majors, core requirements, grades, and SATs to some extent, although their students are not less serious academically, they just appreciate greater flexibility and nonconformity. Finally, top women’s colleges like Barnard, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Bryn Mawr, are also a type of LAC.</p>
<p>I’m totally in favor of LACs, and my son’s thrilled to be at a LAC, but I wanted to add some balance. </p>
<p>(Stereo)Typical Advantages: smaller class sizes, personal relationships with professors, better teachers who are focused on teaching, any research options are available to undergrads because there are no better-qualified grad students to steal them away.</p>
<p>(Stereo)Typical Disadvantages: Limited course selection, not all classes offered all semesters, can get bored with the small student body (though I can’t imagine knowing and being bored with 2000 people!), no fancy majors (biology but not biochemistry), less research options for research-inclined students.</p>
<p>OP: please note that mmmgirl, with one exception, has listed only eastern US LACs. While it is true that the northeast is home to a majority of the country’s LACs, there are many others that are as good or better in other parts of the country. </p>
<p>Just off the top of my head: College College (CO), Carleton (MN), Macalester (MN), Rhodes (TN), Grinnell (IA) are some of the top. Whether you believe in rankings or not, U.S. News and World Report would be a good site for you to check out for a more comprehensive list.</p>
<p>I think the above posters have done a good job in explaining what small LACs are all about, but I’d just like to add that all LACs are not created equal. Some are academically rigorous and very selective; some are academically average and easy to get into. Some are excellent in sciences (including research) and some are go-to places for the arts. Even within the arts you get specializations among music, studio art, theater etc. </p>
<p>The point is that once you decide to investigate LACs you need to drill deeper into the personalities of the individual schools. They tend to be narrower in character and ambience than larger universities are.</p>
<p>Another point of differentiation between LACs and larger universities is name recognition and prestige. Though you may get the same quality of education at (for example) Harvard or Swarthmore you will find that while everyone, everywhere knows Harvard, Swarthmore is less universally known. </p>
<p>Graduate and professional school admissions and large employers will appreciate a degree from a top rated LAC, but casual friends and relations may never have heard of your school. This shouldn’t matter, but it does to many students and their parents.</p>
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<p>Some LACs are more selective than others. Other than that, their characteristics are relatively consistent. Most of them offer pretty much the same academic programs. Most of them offer consistently small classes. Many of them are in rural, suburban, or small town locations, with beautiful old Gothic buildings and quadrangles that look superficially similar from school to school.</p>
<p>There are subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) differences in atmosphere. However, if you visited my state’s public honors college (USNWR rank = 90), you’d be hard-pressed to tell much of a difference in look and feel from an older, private, higher-ranked New England liberal arts college. Every other LAC these days seems to have a new science center. Look at the NSSE “engagement” surveys, which include a few highly ranked schools like Middlebury and Claremont McKenna. Some of the much less selective “Colleges That Change Lives” do about as well as or better than the higher-ranked schools in measurements of work loads, student-faculty interaction, or the “supportive campus environment”.</p>
<p>I’d say Carleton (#6 LAC) and Kenyon (#33 LAC), for example, are much more similar than Stanford (#5 university) and NYU (#33 university). The LAC formula is rather straightforward and repeatable from school to school. When you get into campuses with 10,000 or more students, pre-professional majors and professional schools, big-time sports programs, etc., there is far more room for variation.</p>
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<p>Seems that browsing some web sites indicates a lot of variation in the strength of departments (breadth and depth of course offerings and faculty interests), where the variation gets greater in smaller schools (including LACs).</p>
<p>Sure, almost all of them have (for example) computer science departments, but the range from extremely limited (unsuitable for someone intending to major in the subject) to very strong and “complete” in terms of course offerings that one expects a student majoring in the subject to take.</p>
<p>Another example: Harvey Mudd and Sarah Lawrence are both described as LACs, but their academic programs and offerings could not be more different.</p>
<p>lac’s teach under grad and are much much much more likely to care about you as a freshman, sophomore, junior etc…then a big teaching university! IMO pick an lac undergrad!</p>
<p>haverford, williams,muhlenberg,hendrix or one of many others!</p>
<p>^^ Haverford is small even for a LAC (< 1200 students). Its “Core” CS courses include:</p>
<p>Discrete Mathematics
Human/Computer Interaction
Principles of Computer Organization
Principles of Programming Languages
Analysis of Algorithms
Theory of Computation
Compiler Design
Concurrency and Co-Design in Operating Systems </p>
<p>A number of electives (in addition to introductory courses) round out the offerings. This doesn’t include what you can take at neighboring Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore. The Haverford CS courses pretty much cover the basic CS curriculum recommendations of the ACM ([Curricula</a> Recommendations - Association for Computing Machinery](<a href=“http://www.acm.org/education/curricula-recommendations]Curricula”>Curricula Recommendations)). </p>
<p>Browse the CS courses at Williams, Wesleyan, Vassar, Colby, Connecticut College, Hendrix, Centre, Earlham, or St. Mary’s College of Maryland. They all offer a similar run-down of standard, ACM-recommended courses. True, this is not so at every LAC. However, it is the case at many LACs ranging in selectivity from the #1 USNWR ranked LAC to the #90-something. There may be curriculum gaps here and there, but keep in mind, the purpose of liberal arts education is not to train specialists.</p>
<p>Look at Holy Cross, Davidson and Bucknell as top LAC’S that also offer great school spirit and athletics.</p>
<p>@cbug: You’re absolutely right, and I’m a huge fan of western, midwestern and southern LACs. I mentioned Pomona, Reed and Oberlin. I would have mentioned Carleton (which I’ve heard great things about) and Claremont McKenna (which I’m actually applying to based on its amazing Poli Sci program), but I didn’t think anyone had heard of them! </p>
<p>I also agree that not all LACs are created equal. Yes, there are a lot of similarities, just as community colleges, state universities, tech schools, etc will have similarities and differences. But there is a world of difference between, say, Bard and Davidson and I doubt the student who dreams of attending one would really enjoy the other. Two schools with similar sizes and academic offerings can be very different in terms of campus life and culture.</p>
<p>Re: #10</p>
<p>Of course, you can pick LACs that have decent selections of CS courses as examples to make your point. But some others, like Amherst and Franklin & Marshall, have rather limited CS course offerings. For a student interested in a particular major, or majors within some category of subjects, it would be best to check the schools’ offerings in those subjects before deciding to attend, rather than assuming that they are all the same in their offerings.</p>
<p>Note that this does not just apply to CS, but to any other subject one might major in. For example, neither Harvey Mudd nor Sarah Lawrence would be suitable for a student interested in majoring in a social studies subject (except Sarah Lawrence for psychology).</p>
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<p>I did not have to try very hard. I simply marched down the USNWR LAC rankings more or less at random, starting with the first top-ten college the preceding poster had mentioned (Haverford), and stopping at a 90-something public LAC in my region.</p>
<p>As for ucb’s counter-examples, Amherst offers pretty much the same range of CS courses as all the other LACs I mentioned. They cover algorithms, data structures, programming language theory, compilers, networks, cryptography, AI, operating systems, plus seminars and “special topics” that vary in subject matter. No course in discrete mathematics is shown, but it’s offered in the Math department. Not to mention, you get to take courses at neighboring schools in a 5-college consortium</p>
<p>F&M, I agree, appears to be rather limited. If you want to major in CS, o.k., don’t pick that one. However, while it may be true that “not all LACs are created equal” with respect to CS offerings, it’s not as though you’re out of luck if you don’t get into one of the top 10 on the US News hit parade. Many LACs (varying widely in selectivity) offer similar programs.</p>
<p>Amherst’s CS courses beyond the introductory level for the 2012-2013 academic year appear to be limited to:</p>
<p>COSC-301 Data Structures and Algorithms II (fall)
COSC-450 Seminar in Computer Science (fall)
COSC-261 Computer Systems II (spring)
COSC-281 Networks and Cryptography (spring)
COSC-401 Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science (spring)</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/computer_science/courses[/url]”>Courses | Computer Science | Amherst College;
<p>Yes, there is the consortium, but how many students who prefer a LAC would go to a LAC to attend classes at the nearby big state school that is the one that has the most CS course offerings?</p>
<p>College College, Cbug?</p>
<p>They should have put it in New York, New York, instead of Colorado.</p>
<p>I think RPI’s Hall Hall is on the wrong campus.</p>
<p>Is Colgate a unique destination for students who are capable of high achievement in Colgate academics and Division I athletic competition ?</p>
<p>Among its many distinguishing characteristics, Colgate is among a dozen small schools of national repute with long athletic histories of competing in Division I athletics. With the recent addition of football scholarships, Colgate now provides athletic scholarships to some participants in all of the mens and womens major sports. Student athletes, scholarship or otherwise, must qualify under the Academic Index established by the Patriot League and Colgate. The objective of the Academic Index is to assure that athletes are truly representative of the student body. As a requirement of only a handful of these 12 small Division I institutions, it further defines Colgate a niche destination for students capable of performing at high levels in academics and athletics. As an example, Colgate is an alternative for student-athletes who can compete academically at Northwestern or Williams but, may find the Big 10 or NESCAC level of athletic competition inappropriate. As a school with less than 3,000 students and twenty three varsity sports, student athletes represent nearly 20% of the student body. Most other aspects of the school are similar to the other elite LAC’s.</p>
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This is a common misconception; the focus is also on sciences. Have a look at <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/965093-how-swarthmore-amherst-williams-dartmouth-haverford-science.html#post10869949[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/965093-how-swarthmore-amherst-williams-dartmouth-haverford-science.html#post10869949</a> post #4 to see how well LACs prepare undergrads for advanced science degrees.</p>
<p>I think the “common misconception” is in the definition of “the liberal arts.” The liberal arts actually includes sciences and many liberal arts colleges have excellent science departments.</p>
<p>Ah, good point. Wikipedia also mentions that the sciences are included in the modern definition for LACs.</p>