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Now you know why all these LAC grads are heading for grad school and have such high PhD rates- they can't get a job!!!! </p>
<p>Like mini said there may be reasons --good ones -- to attend LACs but jobs/connections/alumni base are not one of them</p>
<p>Admittedly this was a tech sector not i-banking, and I guess there aren't too many computer science/engineering/(?)business majors coming from LACs but I thought there'd be more representation for LACs as a group
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<p>I believe some of these quotes are pretty provocative. Consider this quote from Harvey-Mudd, the preeminent technical LAC.</p>
<p>"Average salary upon graduation in 2003 was $53,900."</p>
<p>Note that that salary includes people who graduated with many kinds of technical degrees available at Mudd - engineering, science, math, etc. This compares extremely favorably with the big-name research universities. For example, contrast that with the salaries of the engineers from Berkeley in 2003.</p>
<p>I've also noticed that people here have concentrated on the absolute number of recruiters that come knocking on the door of the LAC's, and have used that as a cudgel against them. While I do see some passing acknowledgement that the size of the program is also a factor, I don't think that has been given enough consideration. As an individual student, that does it really matter if a lot of recruiters come to your school with lots of jobs if you still can't get hired because there are too many other students competing with you for those jobs. It reminds me of the whole doctors vs. cashiers debate. There are far far more jobs for cashiers than for doctors in the world, but that doesn't mean that it's better for you to be a cashier. Economics is not just about demand, but rather about the interaction of supply and demand. You can't just look at the demand for labor, you also have to look at the supply. Big schools have a lot of recruiters and jobs available, but they also have lots of students competing for those jobs. </p>
<p>* The alumni networking thing *</p>
<p>As far as alumni networks go, probably the strongest I have ever seen is Harvard. Harvard alumni are legendary for their incestuousness. So I would put Harvard in a class all by itself in terms of alumni contacts.</p>
<p>The second strongest are almost certainly the service academies, especially West Point and Annapolis. You talk about alumni who go out of their way to help each other out, it's hard to beat the former military officers. </p>
<p>Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and Caltech are also quite tight. Some of the top LAC's, are also extremely tight. I would put them in the third category. </p>
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But if it were me, I'd rather take my chances with the 400 recruiters at Brown. More choices. Even if the recruiters also have more choices. After all, the more choices are exactly what induced more than half of them to show up at Brown, and not at Wellesley
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<p>The problem with that logic is simple. If the 400 recruiters at Brown are good, then why stop there? Why not go to a really really huge school like Ohio State where there can be literally thousands of recruiters?</p>