<p>If you have an advanced STEM-type student, you should look carefully at the course offerings and make sure they are not going to hit the ceiling of available coursework. Also, if they have any interest in research opportunities, a professor who doesn’t have graduate students may want to give them more attention, but you also have to consider that the liberal arts college professor will have a far higher teaching load, so less overall time for research. The smaller departments, and faculty with a high teaching load and no graduate program means that many areas of research simply won’t be available on campus due to lack of facilities or funding. If your child is interested in anything really expensive, whether the cost arises from equipment, facilities, or animal housing, they might be disappointed. That doesn’t mean your child can’t have a good research experience, but you should find out specifically what research is going on in the departments of interest.</p>
<p>If you want to go to grad school, it can help to pick an undergrad school (no matter what size) that requires a masters-level thesis of all undergrads; such schools are sometimes called grad school prep colleges. It shows grad schools that you already know how to do research and write about it; it also helps to keep you from slacking off (re schools where thesis is optional) since your peers are all in the same boat with the same goal.</p>
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<p>Those very attitudes was what made many university alums…including most undergrad UPenn alums unhappy with their undergraduate academic experience. </p>
<p>Ironic considering the vast majority of the ones I’ve met actually went on to elite grad schools in their fields and all excelled academically. </p>
<p>It’s also a reason why they tend to steer their kids towards more undergrad centered institutions…whether LACs or LAC-like universities like UChicago, Princeton, or Tufts and advice their kids to regard their respective university alma maters later on as possibilities for grad school.</p>
<p>To be clear, I wrote the paragraph quoted by cobrat above, and I was thrilled by my undergraduate academic experience – including really meaningful engagement with some of the most famous scholars in the world in my field – at an institution where all of the above applied. I understood my place in the pecking order, and worked within it. I took full advantage of grad students as intermediaries between students on my level and faculty who defined the cutting edge of scholarship. (I agree with Poeme – I always saw grad students as a plus, not as unwanted competitors for attention.) And I worked hard at building those relationships, and was pretty aggressive about it.</p>
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<p>Not everyone wants or feels the need to move in lockstep within the “pecking order” within a research university to do the research or get access to cutting edge scholars as needed to become grad students/scholars…including STEM fields </p>
<p>Several LAC classmates who were STEM majors have more than demonstrated this by going on to elite grad schools for PhDs…including Harvard and MIT. </p>
<p>Some who I know are glad they bypassed being the undergrad in the research university “pecking order” you have described after seeing it in action as grad students in those very research universities. Instead, being grad students felt like a continuation of what they experienced working directly with their professors.</p>
<p>The generalization you made Cobrat is completely unfounded. I actually go to Penn, and most of the students I know are very happy with the teaching and research experience if that applies to them. Like I have said, many who have demonstrated high aptitude in research are essentially treated like graduate students.
I am sure that many LAC students are very happy with their experience. However, the fact still remains that most cutting edge research is done at universities and that LACs in general do not have nearly the breadth of courses offered as universities. Many LAC do go on to great graduate programs. But honestly If you want to be in academia and do research, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to be at a university for undergrad.</p>
<p>Cobrat, I agree completely (and say all the time) that LACs are a perfectly valid way to get an undergraduate education, including (and perhaps even especially) if your goal is to get a PhD. But you are wildly overinterpreting my reference to a “pecking order”, and you are off base if you think that the research university structure does not also produce very satisfactory undergraduate experiences.</p>
<p>In my view – and with a lot of oversimplification here – the main educational difference comes down to this: At a top research university, it’s relatively easy for undergraduates to spend time on the cutting edge and to develop relationships with leading faculty, and relatively hard to make sure that they have a really solid base of knowledge beyond whatever is taught in introductory courses. No one’s job description includes taking responsibility for that. At an LAC, the faculty DOES take responsibility for making certain every student who wants it has a really solid base of knowledge. It takes some effort, but is usually do-able, to find cutting-edge research involvement, which will usually come during the summers or semesters away from the LAC. There isn’t an incredible smorgasbord of advanced courses available, and students are basically stuck studying what their teachers want to teach. But in the end that’s not such a difference vs. the university undergraduates, and the LAC students may come out better served. </p>
<p>“May” not “do”. It really depends on the individual, and for the most part it’s the qualities of the individual student that determine success, not whether the student went to a good LAC or a good university. For most students with the intelligence to succeed on the PhD level, either path can work, and it’s a matter of personality which path will be more preferred.</p>
<p>I will also add that for kids who are not heading off to a PhD program (or at least not immediately) the opportunities to work for faculty in both the grad programs AND the professional schools is a big advantage of a research U. One of my kids who majored in a humanities subject at a research U worked as an editor, researcher, ghost writer, and fact-checker for a professor in one of the professional schools (the job was posted on the online U job board). A fantastic opportunity- financially, intellectually (a completely foreign topic) and professionally (this guy knows everyone and continues to be generous with his rolodex). </p>
<p>The presence of the law/med/business/journalism grad programs can be a real boon for undergrads.</p>
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<p>Poeme,</p>
<p>It is a generalization based on recounted experiences of many undergrad research university alums…including several from your very university. </p>
<p>Granted, everyone’s experience is individual. However, considering the numbers of alums I’ve encountered who’ve recounted experiences confirming that generalization, it wasn’t formed on the basis of isolated cases. </p>
<p>It’s especially interesting that many of them came from your very university and they would strongly encourage their children to only consider that institution for graduate school and recommend their kids go elsewhere where Professors will give undergraduates more attention in the academic area. </p>
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<p>Agreed. I wasn’t necessarily knocking all research universities. Just that they’re not necessarily right for all undergraduates…and not necessarily because they aren’t academically advanced enough or socially proactive/aggressive enough to compete for the Professor’s attention as was implied by some commenters on this thread. </p>
<p>On the last, that certainly didn’t apply to me when I took summer/grad courses at two elite universities.</p>
<p>Cobrat we all know you know way more people than any of us - so your experience trumps all of ours. Whatever. </p>
<p>I got to know my professors at a research university very well. I did an academic thesis with two of them. Translated some texts for one professor. My roommate worked closely with one of the better known history professors on a thesis that ended up being expanded into her PhD thesis. I also really enjoyed getting to know (and living and dining with) grad and professional students in field other than my own. I think the idea that you can’t/won’t get to know your professors at a research university is grossly exaggerated.</p>
<p>The notion that an undergrad won’t get to know their professors at a research U is preposterous. Even at huge universities, juniors and seniors will be taking seminars (not huge lecture courses) and professors who teach these classes are eager for engagement with their students. I took a class at a research U which was taught by two professors (in different fields) and had 12 students in it. Even the most shy and retiring student can manage to cultivate a relationship with a professor when the class is that small.</p>
<p>Yes, cobrat. Certainly you know more about Penn than Poeme, who goes there, and JHS, who has lived there and has professional contacts there. All of us can only talk about our own experiences. But you’re able to account for soooo many more people than we all can.</p>
<p>Just wanted to point out that the “Harvard professor” cobrat had during his summer class at Harvard wasn’t necessarily a Harvard professor. Research faculty at major universities have better things to do during the summer than teach. I know that Harvard brings in people from other places to teach summer classes.</p>
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Umm, to the contrary. Of course it was formed on isolated cases. Unless you took an exit poll at Penn’s graduation for, oh say the past decade or so, the handful of complainers that you may have encountered provide nothing more than anecdotal opinion in the face of graduating classes of 2500 or so per year. Sounds like your contacts are, for the mostpart, an unhappy bunch.</p>
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<p>I took Anglo-Saxon at Harvard Summer School, and the professor was from Stanford. Not exactly “brought in” from some lower-level, non-research university, but still…not on H’s faculty. :)</p>
<p>It is my observation that whether one gets to know profs well at any institution has more to do with one’s interest in and talent for cultivating profs than anything else.</p>
<p>There is not a topic on CC where cobrat doesn’t profess to know hordes of people who have a) undergone or dealt with that particular issue and b) have chosen to talk to him about it. Cobrat, you don’t know any more people than any of the rest of us do. We all have impressions formed on isolated cases.</p>
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<p>That is true to a large extent. However, this is also dependent on the level of accessibility Professors allow for their undergrads and the institutional culture encouraging greater access or tolerating limited/no access. </p>
<p>If a given Professor doesn’t list office hours or worse, refuses in practice to honor the ones he/she lists or exhibits visible annoyance/irritation when students do drop by during office hours as advertised on the syllabus or by prior appointment, there’s not much an undergrad student can do beyond complain to the department chair/higher university officials. </p>
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<p>In that case, Poeme’s individual account is just as much of an isolated case as the ones I’ve heard from many UPenn undergrad alums I’ve met who expressed the same negative points about being placed last when it came to professors prioritizing the allocation of their attention/mentoring. </p>
<p>If it’s just one or a handful, that’s one thing. If one hears the same/similar things from a larger sample size, there is a greater likelihood that their cases are more likely to establish a pattern much closer to the average experience. </p>
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<p>Labeling complainers or critics an “unhappy bunch” is one stock response institutions with serious issues often use to dismiss complaints or criticisms and thus, avoid having to deal with them.</p>
<p>Just a data point, but surveys tend to show alums of LACs have higher levels of satisfaction with the quality of their undergraduate education than do graduates of either public or private research universities.</p>
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<p>[Annapolis</a> Group survey finds high satisfaction among liberal arts college graduates | Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/16/annapolis-group-survey-finds-high-satisfaction-among-liberal-arts-college-graduates]Annapolis”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/16/annapolis-group-survey-finds-high-satisfaction-among-liberal-arts-college-graduates)</p>
<p>Keep in mind that this particular survey was commissioned by a group of LACs, but I believe the results are broadly consistent with other survey data. I’d actually be inclined to interpret this as positive news for all three categories surveyed–a 59% "excellent’ rating by private university alums is quite positive, as is the 56% “excellent” rating by alums of top 50 public universities. What’s perhaps most striking is that the public and private university results are so similar–something many people on CC might have a hard time imagining, given the strong bias toward private institutions evident on these boards.</p>
<p>Not really, if you pay more for something, you tend to expect more.</p>
<p>Cobrat, </p>
<p>A person who CURRENTLY ATTENDS a school is going to have a larger sample size and data points than someone who claims to know some past grads who were unhappy. You made a statement that is baseless. If you’d said, as you typically do, that your “friends or aquaintances” who attended Penn were unhappy, then you can say “most alums I KNOW were unhappy…” But instead you generalized to “most alums from Penn” which is unfounded, baseless (other than supposed tertiary hearsay from a few folks), and clearly not representative of a large sampling size, which you do not have. And its offensive to current Penn students. And it could give potential students an incorrect sense of the Penn grads, whic flies in the face of what this forum is all about. </p>
<p>And sorry, but my opinion, based on the frequent, if not constant posts about your multitude of friends who were unhappy with schools or felt treated unfairly by school clubs, sorority/fraternities, professors, etc; HS peers who were bullied or alienated, and the constant complaints of classism or racism DOES, in my opinion, make you and your myriad of acquaintances, sound negative and unhappy. It is my observation and opinion. Your snarky crack about “issues” is offensive, out of line and completely uncalled for.</p>
<p>Please don’t again dominate and derail this conversation.</p>