<p>Thank you for clarifying how LITTLE you know about half the schools you mentioned. How many undergraduates are there at Caltech or at Stanford? Compare that to the Claremont consortium. And remember that you do not need a bus system to travel to the school next door. There is a reason why the CC schools can AFFORD to stay small and focus on their individual specialty and dedication. The sums of the parts exceed the total!</p>
<p>A friend of mine attended Wharton -Penn’s jewel- and we spent four years comparing classes and schedules. In the end, there were hardly any differences. Hard to believe as it is!</p>
In my major, there are maybe 11 LACs which offer even 1/4 the variety of courses that my university does every year. Almost all of them, save for perhaps two schools on the opposite side of the country, would not have admitted me as a freshman. </p>
<p>That being said, excepting business, most LACs are perfectly fine for most of the common majors.</p>
I don’t claim that you can’t/shouldn’t got to Smith or Reed, only that you should be aware that cutting edge research isn’t being done there if that’s an important factor for you. I should add that while cutting edge research may or may not be done at a university, my nephew (at Rice) got his name on “the paper of the century” (according to dh) while doing summer research in the DC area not at Rice. But he had a great experience at Rice! And was doing research starting before classes started freshman year!</p>
<p>Caltech is in sort of a class of its own - it’s tiny undergrad size means it has many similarities to an LAC, but it’s got at least twice as many grad students and also is a science institute and doesn’t exactly pretend to be terribly well rounded.</p>
<p>Except for business. How are the business programs different from economics programs offered everywhere? How many business programs are there at the top schools in the country? Compared to the degrees in quant or economics. </p>
<p>Again, all schools are not the same. You have to look at the faculty and size of the specialty programs.</p>
<p>My kids aren’t parallel majors, but I know enough about the course offerings to know that there isn’t much difference between being an economics major at Wellesley and an economics major at Northwestern, except that one is plopped down in the middle of a larger university than the other. The differences I see between their experiences are more related to the specifics of <em>that particular college</em> (Chicago vs Boston, co-ed vs all-female, one place takes itself far more seriously than the other) but I don’t think they are categorical “RU vs LAC” differences, just differences between those two places. In other words, if you want to compare experiences at different schools, compare those experiences, instead of trying to compare the categories.</p>
<p>I know on CC it’s fashionable pretentiousness to say that one’s kid absolutely <em>has</em> to have the <em>absolute cutting-edge</em> of research else His Beautiful Mind will be utterly wasted, but in reality, I think the number of kids for which this is truly an issue is vanishingly small.</p>
<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>
<p>BC- I wasn’t denigrating, I was paraphrasing. For the typical undergrad, it will make no difference whether the research budget is 1.2 billion or 10 million- because that kid has no interest in research, cutting edge or otherwise.</p>
<p>Moreover, one of my kid ended up doing a two year research stint for a professor in a non-science discipline (no equipment required whatsoever… but both a National Endowment type funding AND a commercial publisher’s advance- still a time honored way to pay for research) and that’s probably MORE typical than the cure for cancer/advanced materials science research going on. And can be done virtually anywhere!</p>
<p>And of course, research in, say, history or foreign language or English is a far different thing than research in scientific fields that require labs, equipment and machines that go ping. But on CC, you know that science is the default assumption for everything.</p>
<p>Not sure why, but this LAC vs RU discussion is starting to remind me of the greek life/no greek life discussion. There are strong opinions on both sides.</p>
<p>FWIW, having attended both an LAC and a RU, I can’t imagine having done it any other way. This was best for me. Can’t say for others but was best for me. The research opportunities, financial and and faculty support that I had as an undergrad at the LAC would not have existed in a RU. In turn, at the graduate level, the opportunities I had there were what one would expect for a graduate level RU, and I did have undergrads work with me on my research, so they had some experience as well, though at a lighter (for lack of a better word) level than what my undergrad research was like.</p>
<p>And as an aside, several of the undergrad faculty were doing joint research with faculty at Rockefeller U, I had the opportunity to be involved in that as well. </p>
<p>So yes, Virginia, there are real research opportunities at a LAC.</p>
<p>Mathmom, Sometimes I feel only you and I are Caltech fans. (And as you know, I was equally in favor of the worm attending CMU"S CS program). I felt Caltech was a perfect fit for a small school, lots of opportunities for research, getting to know professors, being able to be a star in ECs, and the most lenient attitude to dropping classes at last minute, or last week of semester. I can also gush about Wellesley, where I was on faculty, but that is for another thread.</p>
<p>Yeah, Caltech has a special place in my heart. I saw it mostly from the girlfriend of a grad student point of view, but spent one of the most enjoyable six months of my life working for the professor of African studies as the librarian for his collection. I helped find readings for the each week’s lectures, maintained the newspaper files and helped kids find materials for research papers. I’m also pretty familiar with the wild parties!</p>
<p>“Read Douthat’s book about his Harvard experience.”</p>
<p>Good lord, if your goal is to understand a top research university, do anything but that. No one sells any books writing “Harvard is awesome.” He’s no fool. Ditto Scott Turow, William F. Buckley, and everyone else who’s ever had a successful book about the Ivy League.</p>