<p>My D has looked at private college so far and we are now going to look at a few public universities. I have two questions.</p>
<li><p>How does the Chemistry program stack up against the big names.</p></li>
<li><p>Can a student on the big IU campus still feel part of a smaller community. Can they get the private college feeling in the public setting?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>US News and World Report only ranks the chemistry programs at the graduate level--and only every four years. Their last ranking was in 2006.
At that time, IU-Bloomington's program was ranked 24th overall nationally--and the analytical chemistry program was ranked 6th overall (pretty good in my opinion).</p>
<p>Here's the link to IU's press release on this:</p>
<p>Broad</a> range of IU graduate programs ranked by U.S. News: IU News Room: Indiana University</p>
<p>Note: USNW usually charges for you to access this info on their website, which is why I listed the IU link instead.</p>
<p>As far as whether you can get the "small college" feel at IU, I'll leave it for actual students to answer this question for you--since I'm a parent and not a student.</p>
<p>Chemistry is a well-established discipline. Therefore, the rankings do not mean much since curriculums are mostly the same across United States. The answer to your question will base on several factors. What's your D's career goal? Very few chemistry majors stop at bachelor's or even master's degree. If she is interested in getting a Ph.D. in chemistry, then an undergraduate degree from IU is a good value and would not prevent her from getting into big-name graduate schools. If she is interested in other careers such as medicine, then other factors need to be considered.</p>
<p>I personally think it will be hard to get the private college feeling at IU. Simply because most of her classes (at least in the first two years) will be huge. Big state universities such as IU has an average student and teacher ratio three times the number of small liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are a couple of mitigating factors. One, if your daughter qualifies for the Hutton Honors College, it is possible to live in an honors residential community which gives the smaller college feel, at least in terms of resident life. Moreover she can take honors classes, which are typically much smaller than the huge lecture sections. Also, one of the great advantages to the big university situation is that you usually have a huge choice of classes and class times. This can be very important in science courses, which tend to be arranged with sequences of pre-requisites.</p>
<p>Yes, having access to the classes is a BIG deal.</p>
<p>My son has lots of friends attending Cal State Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA--taking engineering majors or science majors and the number of students graduating from there in either of those disciplines in 4 years is zero percent.;--not 4% or 5%, but actually exactly zero percent. When the parents of the students asked about this the reasons they were given were:
(1) engineering requires a lot of units to graduate, and (2) classes are just very, very difficult to get.</p>
<p>Also, Indiana University has a policy on this. If your student is unable to get the classes he/she needs within the 4 year period to graduate and it is the school's fault, the school will pay the tuition for the additional semester or year that it takes to get the courses needed to graduate. I forget where it is located on the website--but it is still offered (although my understanding is that they've only had to "pay up" on this to about 6 students in the past four years--mostly because the school offers over 5,000 class sessions per semester).</p>
<p>To demonstrate, here's the schedule of classes for Fall 2008 listed by department:
Indiana</a> University Course Browser</p>
<p>and here are the courses for just one department--Business:
Indiana</a> University Course Browser</p>
<p>and here are how many sessions are being offered of just one class--English Composition:
Indiana</a> University Course Browser</p>
<p>Now, granted, there will be fewer course sessions in just Chemistry, but even for Chemistry they offer a lot of courses--and most have at least two class sessions:
Indiana</a> University Course Browser</p>
<p>You don't normally find that at the small schools.</p>