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<p>I’m not sure I understand the basis for this claim. </p>
<p>My D1 attends Haverford. I’ve been impressed with the degree to which science faculty there ARE doing “cutting edge research,” as are most of the undergraduate science majors for whom research opportunities are abundant both on and off campus. The Haverford science faculty get competitive NSF and NIH research grants, do collaborative research with faculty at places like Penn, Stanford. MIT and Cambridge, and publish in the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journals–just like tenured and tenure-track faculty at research universities. The difference is, their research assistants are all undergrads, their labs are mostly smaller, and they don’t have the most expensive “Big Science” facilities–but that doesn’t mean they can’t be doing cutting-edge research in areas where such mega-expenditures aren’t necessary to push the bounds of scientific knowledge. </p>
<p>To be sure, the overall scale of the research effort is much bigger at a places like Michigan, with an annual research budget of $1.2 billion, or Stanford with somewhere north of $800 million. But I wouldn’t be quite so quick to denigrate the quality or “cutting edge” character of the research that goes on at the best LACs.</p>