<p>If your son or daughter chose an Ivy league college over a top liberal arts college, why did s/he make that choice? It seems like a student would get a better education in a smaller school focused on undergraduates but there must be some good reasons beyond the "name".</p>
<p>Feel free to refer me to an older thread - I did a quick search but didn't see one.</p>
<p>I am not trying to start or restart a quarrel; I am truly curious about different points of view. A couple of my kids may have credentials that would give them a shot at either but my tendency is to discourage them from considering Ivies. I wonder if I am wrong.</p>
<p>Both have advantages. LACs offer smaller classes and more contact with professors; research universities offer more choices in classes, majors, and extracurriculars. I think some kids will be more comfortable in one environment over the other. If your kids have the credientials for both, they should visit both and see what appeals to them more. My daughter visited both, and decided that LACs were too small for her. Other people decide the opposite.</p>
<p>S chose Dartmouth. In my view, D really is the nation’s #1 LAC with some great professional schools and a limited array of grad programs, not a true research university. One advantage it has is that it is significantly larger than the other elite LACs.</p>
<p>I agree with Hunt. In my small sample of kids and their friends, one kid chose Brown over Amherst, but another chose Williams over Brown and Dartmouth. My S chose Williams over Brown. Another kid chose Brown over Colgate. Someone chose Vassar over U of Chicago, but someone chose Chapel Hill over Wesleyan. Different strokes for different folks.</p>
<p>I think unis can generate more excitement, too. There are famous people coming and going, and important lectures for grad students undergrads can attend and the enticing opportunity to take a graduate class as an undergraduate. There is also the possibility of playing music with even more advanced players or dating someone older in grad school. Lots of fun things.</p>
<p>My D went to Barnard/Columbia (2/3 of her classes at Barnard and 1/3 at Columbia) and had the best of both worlds. Lots of intimacy, small classes and excitement. Well, even without Columbia, NYC is pretty exciting.</p>
<p>Apollo, If you take size as the point of comparison you’d have to include a wider range of medium sized privates for a valid comparison to all small liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>Small LACs, like medium sized privates and large sized publics, span a wide range of academic standards and personalities. The most academically rigorous (and most selective) compare favorably to the most academically rigorous (and most selective) medium sized privates, including the ivies.</p>
<p>The eight ivies plus other super selectives in the same selectivity/prestige category have very different personalities. Rather than compare by size I’d suggest that your kids develop their lists along the fit or personality corridor. It’s quite possible to be sincerely interested in two or three ivies in addition to several LACs, but it’s not likely to be a good fit for all ivies, unless prestige is the key criterion.</p>
<p>My son had a wonderful experience at a small, rural LAC and is now in graduate school at the largest ivy, also rural. He was very interested in two other ivies for undergraduate but chose to apply ED to his LAC because he was drawn to several aspects of the environment and ambience – physical, academic and social. A visit sealed the deal and five years out he’d make the same decision again. The relationships with faculty and peers, connections and reputation were everything they were touted to be. But most important is the intangible factor of the right fit.</p>
<p>My d. did her undergraduate at Smith, and is graduate school at Princeton. Now that she has seen the undergraduate education offered by both, she’d make the same choice.</p>
<p>It’s about fit. DS is about to choose an Ivy over Williams and Pomona. He is certain Williams is not right for him and he wants to leave CA. He likes the energy of the university and some of the things a university can offer and the Ivy he is choosing is strong for undergrad. My older son has been happy as a clam at Pomona and had a great experience.</p>
<p>It depends on the fields of study. Is your child interested in getting a core education in many different areas? Or is he or she just interested in one or two major areas? Also, if you child wants to study science related subjects, LACs may be weaker in sciences (STEM fields) although not always.</p>
<p>Small LACs (and small universities) are often weak in specific subjects that are not their emphases, but the weak subjects are not the same at all schools. Harvey Mudd emphasizes sciences, but students cannot even major in humanities and social studies there (although there are extensive breadth requirements in these subjects). Sarah Lawrence emphasizes arts, some humanities, and psychology, but is weak in other subjects.</p>
<p>Note that a student who has interests in a wide variety of subjects may find more course availability at big universities, contrary to the conventional wisdom here that small LACs are a better choice for this type of student.</p>
<p>Highly advanced students who may want to take graduate level courses as undergraduates may find undergraduate-only schools to be too limiting.</p>
<p>Depends on the university/LAC. I’ve known undergrad classmates who transferred into my LAC from T-30 and even a few T-20 universities because my LAC offered more courses and greater depth than the universities they transferred from at the time. </p>
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<p>This is a YMMV…especially considering what may be a “Graduate-level” university course may actually be closer in equivalence to an advanced or sometimes…even an intermediate-level undergrad course at a respectable LAC or university with more critically engaged undergrads/Profs. </p>
<p>This even exists at schools considered academically equivalent or sometimes even superior to the LAC concerned. I’ve sat in on a few grad-level courses at an Ivy in which the workload, readings, and level of student discussion was lower than equivalent upper-division or even some intermediate courses I’ve had in the same field. What’s more…I was befuddled by grad students complaining about “heavy reading loads” that would have been standard for an intermediate undergrad course at LACs like mine (180-300+ pages/week).</p>
<p>Moreover, I’ve known several advanced STEM majors who had few issues with this and ended up skipping some “required” intro grad courses at their respective elite grad schools for their PhD programs.</p>
<p>In a perfect world, a student would attend a LAC for two years, then transfer to a university - I’m only half kidding. </p>
<p>Serendipity plays a role in many students’ college choice. my D chose her smaller Ivy because she was WL at what she thought was her first choice LAC and chose not to stay on the WL. Others have said it, but most unis offer smaller seminars, some limited to freshman, she’s only had a couple large classes and the opportunities at her U have been
incredible. Both of mine applied to both LACs and Us. It’s a long way from application to May 1st and it’s nice not to have blocked yourself out of a choice. I think it’s a little easier to think about when you’re weighing two specific LACs or Us. D went to her U aware of the potential drawbacks and is very pleased with her choice. So was S at his tiny LAC.</p>
<p>D certainly had the stats to go just about anywhere, but chose to only apply to small LACs despite my urging to add 1-2 Ivys to her list. She wanted an education where all the students and faculty were engaged in the “life of the mind.” Additionally, she wanted the opportunity to play in a varsity sport. It a bit insular at this point for her, but that will be cured with her semester abroad next year. Certainly, she could not get a better undergrad experience than Williams.</p>
<p>I think you can overthink this, too. We looked at both unis and LACs. S is happy as a clam at his uni, but his second choice was an LAC and I’m pretty confident he’d have been happy there too. It’s the school, not the arbitrary distinction.</p>
<p>After four years in the fishbowl of an IB program that had only 100 students in each grade, my daughter specifically wanted the more anonymous environment of a large university. She didn’t even apply to any liberal arts colleges. She ended up at Cornell.</p>
<p>Although she was in the College of Arts and Sciences, majoring in economics, she found she had more in common with the students in Cornell’s professional schools, such as Engineering and Hotel Administration, than with the students who were majoring in liberal arts. She realized that she was more interested in practical career preparation than in the life of the mind, and she became friends with others who felt the same way. In addition, she was able to take courses in subjects outside the College of Arts and Sciences, which helped her turn her economics major into more of a career-oriented major than a liberal arts one.</p>
<p>So Cornell turned out to be a good choice for her for multiple reasons.</p>
<p>Just to add a small dose of reality to this thread. All of the colleges/universities being discussed on this thread have very low admit percentages. The phrase “My son/daughter chose Z over Y” is applicable to very few kids when discussing this highly selective group pf schools. Discussing thus as though anyone realistically can expect to be able to choose between multiple offers between ivies and the very top LACs isn’t realistic.</p>
<p>My wife, a Williams grad, would kill me for saying this, but Amherst has the advantage of its relationship with UMASS and the other three colleges in the five college program–also small lacs. You can fill in any gaps in course offerings at the big uni down the street. One example is the astronomy department, which is a five-college department.The major requires coursework at different schools–to avoid duplication of offerings. I know too that it’s not only the students who benefit. The uni has facilities much greater in scope than the individuals lacs, and profs collaborate too. </p>
<p>And everyone shows up at the UMASS parties. </p>
<p>There are similar arrangements elsewhere. Wheaton students can take courses at Brown. Macalester has a joint engineering program with U Minnesota I’m sure there are others.</p>
<p>There are similar arrangements elsewhere – including one among Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Penn – but often they are clumsy and difficult to use. If one of those programs makes a big difference to you, you ought to investigate how many students actually use it, and what the barriers to use might be.</p>
<p>By the way, the difference between elite private universities and elite LACs is often overstated. Yale, with about 1,250 students/class, is a lot closer in size to Wesleyan (~700) than to Michigan (~4,000), and a lot closer in philosophy, too (everyone takes a liberal arts curriculum; no business or professional programs at the undergraduate level). The student-faculty ratio at Yale is actually better than at Williams, even taking into account graduate students (6-1 vs. 7-1), and again very different from Michigan (12-1). While it’s true that Yale undergraduates have grad student TAs, that hardly shut the undergraduates off from the faculty; as much contact as you want is available, although it takes a little more work than it would at Amherst.</p>
<p>My point is that Ivy vs. LAC is something of a false dichotomy (really false in Dartmouth’s case). Most of the Ivies are first cousins of LACs, if not full siblings.</p>
<p>^I agree JHS, even on their websites, the UG programs at most of the Ivy’s are at Harvard COLLEGE or Yale COLLEGE, etc. not the “university”. I also think you will find more transition into the LAC mindset for more and more careers. The new MCAT test is strongly weighted toward kids with a LAC background now, for example. Even most universities have some LA components to their course requirements.</p>
<p>My younger son applied to one (largish) LAC and the rest were medium sized research universities - the reason? He wanted something bigger than his high school. He thought an LAC would just seem too small. He applied to a couple of Ivies, but not with any expectations of being accepted - they were uber reaches for him. He ended up at Tufts which has an excellent reputation in the field he’s interested in.</p>
<p>Older son applied to a couple of smaller engineering programs, but given that he was positive he’d be majoring in comp sci the only Ivy he actually applied to was Harvard, because as a double legacy and based on the evidence of our high school’s Naviance, it looked like he had at least a 50% chance of being accepted. He got in, but ended up deciding for his major Carnegie Mellon was a better fit for him. I don’t know of any LAC that has the computer science offerings of the top research universities.</p>