LAC...why doesn't everyone want to go there?

<p>kathiep, I could not have said it better. And many lacs do offer generous merit aid. I forgot that aspect of it. My son's girlfriend got very generous merit aid from Colgate.</p>

<p>EK, Rice might be as small as an LAC or LAC-like but it is a research university, techically. It does graduate research and confers PhD degrees.</p>

<p>First, I thought RICE was like a LAC,but I certainly could be incorrect. However, how many LACs have either nuclear reactors and/or cyclotrons: I would bet not many. If you count all the LACs in existance, there would only be a handful of them that have these top facilities. This is NOT to say that LACs give a poor science education because many do quite well such as Harvey Mudd, Williams, Grinnel etc; however, if you check out the list of all the LACs, and not just the top 40), many are into liberal arts and not that strong in science ( i.e. Goucher). </p>

<p>Yes, a number of LACs are good at science but certainly not all and I don't believe even the majority of them.</p>

<p>Also, They do offer more limited offerings than their big school counterparts.</p>

<p>In answer to Achat, yes, there are LACs in good weather situation besides Cleremont school. I was using that as an example. However, many of the ones on the LAC list in this forum are in areas that don't have great weather such as Amhearst, Williams, etc. Maybe the same can be said for the top schools overall.</p>

<p>I also know a number of kids who got into top LACS and VERT FEW got merit aid! It is almost like the Ivys in that regard.
'
You also mention 'great alumni network." Yes, I think LACs have a good alumni network,but it simply is a matter of numbers. Michigan, which has about 150,000 living alumni ( when I last saw the figures) has probably 10 times that of most LACS. This is a lot more people in high places that can help out graduates. Same can be said for other top big schools such as Berkeley, UCLA, UVA etc.</p>

<p>By the way, I can see the argument now: "It's not quantity but quality." That is only partially correct. Large numbers of graduates from good schools will generally result in larger number of connections for the graduates from those schools. Based on the statistics that I have seen, LACS have a higher percentage of grads going on to graduate and professional schools. However, even if that percentage is double what a Michigan or UVA or Columbia would produce, logic tells me that it doesn't make up for the much larger numbers of these schools.</p>

<p>Again, before this gets into a flaming match, I like LACs. I think that they, as a whole, provide a superior education. However, as someone said: it's a matter of fit. There are kids that thrive on a big school atmosphere with lots of course offerings and facilites and great sport spirit. For some kids that would not be the way to go. They would get lost in the impersonal shuffle.</p>

<p>taxguy, this will not disintegrate into a flaming match, this is the Parents' forum and we have standards to uphold! You hit the nail on the head: this is a matter of fit. I've seen this discussion ad-infinitum in this forum, LACs versus non-LACs. People need to know all sides of the argument. And most parents and students haven't heard of LACs and that is a good thing! If everyone knew, my son would have never got into the LAC he is attending.</p>

<p>And actually, I was only saying that it is understandable why someone would not want to go to an NorthEast LAC because of suburban/rural location/bad weather. I was not saying that all LACs are in bad-weather locations; I hadn't forgotten about Claremont schools in California or Davidson. Location, size, school spirit generated because of big sports are extremely valid reasons for not choosing an LAC.</p>

<p>I tottally love LAC's. All of the schools I'm applying to are LAC's or top unis with LAC principles.</p>

<p>Adding my two cents...</p>

<p>I don't think the argument is so much about size here. There seems to be an assumption that a LAC is always small and a university is always very large. And thus the debate is being drawn between big and small schools, when the question was originally why a LAC (vs. university). </p>

<p>For my D, the question of a LAC vs. a university, NEVER came up! Funny but until I read this forum, that notion just did not occur to me. What DID come up was size of the college/university. She wanted under 6000 undergraduates approximately and that was true of all her schools but Penn (which was ONE drawback of Penn for her in fact). So, she did have a size preference but there are both LACS and universities in that size range. Ya know, until this very moment, I did not even think about the breakdown of how many LACs she had vs. universities but now that I think about it, she had some of each. </p>

<p>Also, in all due respect KathieP, I don't think the "debate" is between LAC and STATE universities. There is much between those two. Examples of universities on my D's list that are not state schools (as well as not being huge in terms of undergraduate enrollment): Tufts, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Lehigh. </p>

<p>I also think that I am reading many posts on various threads that assume in a university setting, you don't have professors all the time and I know that my child does at Brown and I did at Tufts. </p>

<p>I personally think the idea of size of school is more of issue compared to whether it is a LAC or a small university. Some LACs and universities are of similar size. But size of school can be a big difference in experience. Clearly attending a school with 4000 is different than one with 40,000. But I am not convinced that it need to be all that diferent if comparing a 4000 LAC to a 5000 university.</p>

<p>The question framed in this thread was : why DOESN'T everyone want to go to an LAC? In that context size came up. That's why I don't think taxguy's argument is wrong. I don't think there are large sized (40,000 student) LACs.</p>

<p>If the question was 'Why choose an LAC over a research university' then we could have debated other issues you have discussed such as being taught by professors etc.</p>

<p>SoosieVT:</p>

<p>Offhand, I can't think of an LAC with 4000 students. Most are in the range of 1500 to 2500.</p>

<p>Our son applied to 3 LAC's(Oberlin, Wooster, Allegheny) and 3 universities(Case, Rensselaer, state flagship university) because he saw advantages to each type of college. He ultimately chose a university(Rensselaer) because of the merit scholarship offered but also for several other reasons keeping in mind that he intends to be a compsci major.</p>

<p>First, the number of course offerings at the LAC's were very small compared to the universities, particularly when most universities allow their qualified seniors to take graduate level courses. The number of CompSci courses will allow him to begin developing a deeper competency in a particular area of CompSci.</p>

<p>Second the curricula are significantly different. Most LAC have a greater degree of course requirements across the curriculum to the extent that typically about 25% of his coursework would be in his CompSci major. The university curricula allowed for a greater concentration on his major which he preferred.</p>

<p>Thirdly, the size of the faculty was an issue. For most of the LAC's that he was looking at, the CompSci faculty was typically limited to 3 or 4 tenured facullty. What if one or two were less than ideal, what would be the impact if one went on sabatical during his senior year? Could 3 or 4 be competent in the various special areas of compsci existant and in emerging new areas like bioinformatics, computational science, computer vision?</p>

<p>Fourth, universities have the academic resources to offer some unique interdisciplinary options for their undergrads. In compsci, some students pursue a double compsci/comp eng interdisciplinary major. RPI offers an interdisciplinary compsci/cogsci major called Minds and Machines which goes into interesting areas of AI. Rensselaer also offers an Information Technology option which allows compsci majors to pursue interdisciplinary programs in areas of biology, management, visual arts, communication, most engineering majors, and even pre-law among many others. None of these are currently offered by LAC's.</p>

<p>The resources available at a university are far greater than at a typical LAC. Rensselaer has its Rensselaer Artificial Intellingence and Reasoning lab open to undergrads equiped with robotic equipment, computer vision equipment, and SunMicrosystem work stations. Also available are the department's Sparc, OOT, and Sunray labs, its parallel computing SGI Origin 2000 machine and a Cisco Academy certification lab. The CogSci department also has its virtual reality, vision and action, eye tracking and human abilities and learning labs.</p>

<p>Some universities allow qualified undergrads to enter excellerated BS-MS programs. Most of these require students to maintain a minimum gpa, typically 3.2+ to be considered for such a program. Some may claim that a compsci degree from a university such as Case or Rensselaer would give a student some advantage in grad school admissions vs a LAC grad. I do NOT think that this is true however.</p>

<p>Finally, some students may consider what opportunities await them at graduation. I think there is no doubt that many more companies are recuriting compsci majors at universities like Rensselaer than any LAC. Also, there is a larger community of compsci grads working in industry and in consulting from Rensselaer vs any LAC.</p>

<p>Do these advantages come at some cost? Certainly. LAC's mission is to focus solely on its undergraduate students. Their smaller size provides for a more intimate community among students and faculty. Faculty are tenured because of their teaching ability and not their research accomplishments. Classes will typically be smaller and students will receive more individual attention. Students will be far more likely to be able to participate in varsity sports and assume leadership roles in major campus organizations. These were all things that appealed to my son too.</p>

<p>It is really a matter of prioritizing the factors which are important to each individual student. One size does not fit all!!</p>

<p>InterestedDad...you may be right on that point of no LACS around 4000 kids. Perhaps I should just have said that attending a University as opposed to a LAC, does not necessarily mean a MUCH bigger undergraduate population. For instance, the undergraduate enrollment at Lehigh, Bucknell, Brandeis, St. Lawrence, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, Wesleyan, Dartmouth or Tufts (all universities) is not that much bigger than a feeling at a LAC the size of Oberlin, Ithaca, or even Skidmore.</p>

<p>But maybe these examples are just in the minority. I guess I am just coming from the perspective that my D's list was comprised of schools of a mid size range 2500-5000 undergraduates approx., and there was not the hugest difference in that some were LACs and some were universities. Maybe there was but it never occurred to her along that line or criteria. They just all were within the size range she preferred, with some variation. The discussion never was around it being a college vs. a university because she limited the search to this one size range. </p>

<p>My own college experience at Tufts really felt like a college, not too big, and little influence for me that there happened to be graduate programs. It felt like it was about the undergraduates, which was only about 1000 more kids than my high school.</p>

<p>But, your son didn't go to a standard university. He went to a tech school: Rensselaer Poly Tech.</p>

<p>The comparison would be to Harvey Mudd, an undergrad tech/engineering college.</p>

<p>Hi Soozie,</p>

<p>Like your daughter, my daughter really wanted to go to a small school so in the end applied to 5 LACs (Amherst, Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke & Williams) and 2 "small" universities (Dartmouth & Tufts). </p>

<p>After taking classes at NYU during H.S. she knew that she did not want to attend a big school (I know that NYU has different colleges) but there are really no warm fuzzies going on there and she did not feel connected to the college (I could not argue with her point as being an NYU graduate I knew that it would not be a good fit for her). I think a lot of it does have to do with a student’s individual preferences as one "size" does not fit all. My daughter knew that she wanted a liberal arts education in a more scaled down environment and wanted to attend a LAC for most of the reasons mentioned on this thread. While she would have been more than happy at any of the LACs, which she was accepted to (all 5) she feels that attending Dartmouth she got the best of both worlds.</p>

<p>Originaloog, I don't think an LAC necessarily will not allow one to pursue ones own interest in a subject to a greater depth. I haven't looked at my son's LAC in regard to computer science or engineering since he is a humanities kind of guy. And my son applied to this one LAC, so I can't speak for all others. But already, he is talking to a Philosophy professor in freshman year about a seminar in a topic he thinks he might be interested: Aesthetics. At this LAC I know, people can pursue any subject to any depth they want. And the professors are renowned for their research as well, not just teaching ability. One of them you yourself quoted before: Barry Schwartz.</p>

<p>Soozie: just for technicality's sake, Wes is indeed called a "university" because of a couple small grad programs, but it's classified as an LAC (it's student population is about the same as Oberlin's.)</p>

<p>As for job placement after graduation at LACs, (again, I don't know about Computer Science), my son's RA (residential advisor) a Psychology major has 3 offers already in November from Deloitte and Touche, another Wall Street firm whose name I forget and from McKinsey Consulting as a management consultant. The same is true of many seniors my son knows.</p>

<p>Garland...yeah, I also think of Wes as a LAC though it is referred to as a university. The thing is that some universities are on the smallish side such as Tufts, Lehigh, Bucknell, Brandeis, St. Lawrence, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, and Dartmouth and the feel for undergraduates still is a bit like a LAC. I have only attended one of these (Tufts) but it really felt that way there. I have been on the campus of Brandei , Dartmouth and Lehigh and in that regard, felt the same, and not that much differently than I did when at a LAC. Some LACs are very small and so in terms of size, THOSE do feel different. But some LACS and some universities are similarly sized (not all I realize). </p>

<p>I guess for my D (and from what I am reading, Sybbie's as well), the choice had to do with size more than with whether it was a LAC vs. a university. And they applied to schools in a certain size range as opposed to "type". At least that is what my daughter was going for. The issue of LAC vs. university never arose for her but the issue of size did. </p>

<p>Susan</p>

<p>Achat, I agree with you that job and grad school placement is just as good coming from a LAC as from a university. I cannot imagine that being the deciding factor among these options.
Susan</p>

<p>I'm not sure how USNews decides, but it puts WEs on the LAC side of the ledger, while Tufts et al are on the other side. (not that they're the final arbiters of everything....:) )</p>

<p>Amendment to that: Bucknell is also considered an LAC, as are Colgate, Washington and Lee, and quite a number of institutions which have the word "university" in the title.</p>