An Economics major from a top-LAC will have no problem competing against a business major in employment opportunities with large companies that understand overlap.
Random sampling (we are an academic family) – the STEM faculty we know, their kids have gone to public flagships and top 20 universities. The humanities/social sciences faculty we know, their kids have largely gone to LACs, though the tuition benefit at the home institution – a university – was quite a pull away from LACs as well.
This statement was been thoroughly repudiated when you made it on another thread here in CC.
Especially if quant skills are involved as with the possible exception of those who attended elite undergrad b-schools(Wharton, NYU-Stern, UVA-McIntire, etc) with heavy quant requirements, most undergrad b-schools don’t have nearly the same degree of quant requirements as econ majors. Especially those who follow the Econ PhD aspirant track.
- And even then, some Econ major I know from some of those universities with elite undergrad b-school programs scoff at their quant requirements as they feel it's lower than the requirements they are subjected to...especially those in the Econ PhD aspirant track.
** This track requires so much math that it’s nearly/practically adds a second major in math.
Only to those who are already predisposed to believing undergrad business majors regardless of university/college are just as good/better than any “Liberal Arts major”.
And few bothered to meaningfully engage that NYT/Chronicle article in any depth.
I think that in our case that LAC’s tend to focus on areas of study that are not directly related to STEM or business related career paths. There has been such a push to focus on STEM and Business that education in Liberal Arts is less of a draw in many cases to late teenagers. Also being in Texas there are not many LAC’s local that have top tier name recognition. My kids all want larger than the typical LAC as well as many of the traditional NE and Midwest LAc’s are nearly the same size of their HS.
While my student (HS class 2017) was admitted to several LACs, she chose to not to enroll. Here are reasons:
- Size (limited and/or restrictive social circles): She comes from a small, but highly-ranked suburban high school that was very clique-y and isolating for kids who don’t fit the normal mold. She didn’t want to duplicate her HS experience where there are limited and/or stereotypical tribes/cliques and be left out on the off chance she wasn’t accepted into one of those said tribes/cliques.
- Urbanicity: She wanted big city exposure with lots of movers/shakers - and a steady stream of world-renown speakers/entertainers/newsmakers/writers blowing into town for appearances/performances (on or off campus)
- Exposure to ‘real people:’ She wanted an edgier, less-predictable experience where she would cross paths with unconventional students with life experience different than hers -more ‘salt of the earth’ types. There are many first-generation and URM students at LACs of course, but overall the vibe does not match the worldly vibe of a research university. LACs seem to be more conceptual and deliberately elitist, while research universities seem more practical, accessible, hands-on – referring to both academic and social perceptions and opportunities.
You can get non-cliquey, urban experiences and “real people” at LACs. You just need to find the ones that offer that experience. 
This point isn’t really an LAC vs research university issue so much as a YMMV depending on each individual LAC or research university.
It’s really odd considering many research universities…especially private ones have campus cultures are IME…much more elitist conceptually and deliberately than what I or many other alums from our LAC(Oberlin) experienced.
This is especially something those of us who attended research universities for grad schools noticed in the undergrad campus cultures at our respective university campuses.
@doschicos: Yes you can, but let’s face it: Most LACs (that have a student body comparable to a good flagship or better) are in rural/exurban areas and very few are in the middle of a big city.
In fact, can you even get to 10? Macalester, Barnard, Rhodes . . . Richmond (if you consider that a big city). . . . any others? That’s not exactly a big list to choose from.
@PurpleTitan Macalester, Barnard, Rhodes, Simmons, Trinity, Morehouse, Oglethorpe, Colorado C, Lewis and Clark, Reed, Occidental, Mills, ST Johns, Westminster, Spelman, Eugene Lang
Lots in near suburbs like Swat,-Haverford-Bryn Mawr and Wellesley, etc.
But yeah, they tend to be more rural and suburban I agree. Many universities are in rural/suburban areas as well, of course, but definitely more in cities than LACs.
Still it’s POSSIBLE. And LACs have plenty of people from urban areas.
@OHMomof2, OK, I missed the LACs in Portland and Atlanta but I don’t consider Colorado Springs a major city and where Oxy is isn’t exactly the middle of LA. The rest (besides the ones I named) are so unknown that I’ve never heard of them (and I know a lot of LACs) and definitely don’t have a student body at least on par with a good flagship.
Plus, add them all together and they have as many slots as NYU does by itself. Maybe?
Just saying they’re “urban”. I don’t think how big the city is was specified. And of course the slots are less than NYU. LACs are generally small. NYU has 25K undergrads. I’d guess it takes about 10 LACs to get to that number of students.
You were looking for 10 so I found 'em plus a few extra
@OHMomof2: this is what @PragmaticMom said:
“2. Urbanicity: She wanted big city exposure with lots of movers/shakers - and a steady stream of world-renown speakers/entertainers/newsmakers/writers blowing into town for appearances/performances (on or off campus)”
I don’t think Colorado Springs would provide that big city exposure.
Probably not.
Colorado Springs is a big city (with malls and everything) but it’s not a liberal college city. It is heavily military with an air force base, and army base, and the AFA, has many mega churches and businesses around those, and it has tourism. The AFA cadets aren’t your typical college students. UC-CS is getting bigger, but many students live at home.
It’s a conservative place, but it depends on what a student seeking an urban experience wants. Malls, movie theaters, concerts, broadway shows? Those are all there. Farmer’s markets, cafes, bars, clubs? Yep. Internships at businesses? Many available. There is the Broadmoor and the US Olympic headquarters, there are ‘natural wonders’ nearby like Garden of the Gods and Cave of the Winds. One of the cities in Colorado that allows gambling is nearby. Pike’s Peak.
It certainly has enough traffic to be a Big City.
Plenty of different eateries and coffee shops within walking distance as well, stuff that college students like.
And Denver is 1 hour away so provides another outlet.
I think that this is so much a matter of numbers. First, as was noted above, the overall enrollment at universities is much greater than it is at LACs. Penn State, for example, enrolled about 23,000 freshmen last year. Most of the LACs in PA enroll 500-600, so you’d need the enrollment of 40 LACs to “balance” PSU alone! So it makes sense that many more students matriculate at non-LACs. A lot of the big universities are what make their towns – Indiana University, Penn State – there’s not a lot there without the school. While some students avoid LACs because they want an urban environment, the big schools that are somewhat remote have awfully big student populations as well so I don’t think it’s just that.
It also makes sense, based on the numbers above, that when high school students are thinking about schools, they are far more likely to know people who went to non-LACs. This impacts not only which schools are recommended by family, friends, teachers, neighbors, etc., but what the expectations are for a college experience. If college means tailgating and attending football games, fight songs, etc., few LACs are going to be as gratifying as Ohio State or Clemson. And awareness is spread by sports as well. Even I know that Wisconsin has Badgers (watched the Rose Bowl) or that Duke has Blue Devils (March Madness)! When there are so many schools out there that people have heard of to choose from, why look for more? (I realize the CC crowd may not be typical in this regard!) The LACs fight an uphill battle on this front. (Consider the difference in attendance at the NCAA lax finals on the D1 day vs the D2+D3 days…)
There are also a lot of kids who went through public districts where there were several small elementary schools that fed into a couple of middle schools and ultimately a bigger high school. Going to school smaller than your high school (a LAC) can feel like the wrong progression.
Also, for a lot f students, the relationships they had with their high school teachers may make the proposition of “getting to know your profs” a negative. I think that this is one of the reason that so many kids from private schools are more likely to gravitate toward LACs – their experiences with faculty and their classroom experiences may have made them more interested in a participative model.
Also, as noted, there are a lot of students who want to pursue programs that are few LACs offer – nursing, engineering, physical therapy, accounting, sports management…. I also think that at a bigger school, a student can “find his tribe”. At LACs, the fit is much more important because there does tend to be a dominant vibe (if not tribe.) This can make the match-making much more challenging – vibe plus academic interest have to be right.
Personally, I’m a big fan of what LACs offer (and was thrilled when my kid narrowed his options to LACs), but I can easily understand – even for a kid who fully understands what that offering is – why a bigger university might be appealing and why disproportionately, so many more kids are headed off to non-LACs.
LACs and other small schools may also be less suitable as safeties. For outliers at the top end of the student range (overall or in a particular subject), a big university may find it worthwhile to offer honors courses or other more challenging academic options, since there are enough of those students to fill those courses. But a small school may find the number of outlier students to be too small to cater to them with honors courses or other more challenging academic options.
Many top research universities are also not urban. Harvard, Columbia, Penn, MIT, and Chicago are certainly urban. Dartmouth and Cornell, not at all. Princeton has pretty easy access to New York and Philadelphia, but it’s certainly not urban. Yale? I’ve always said New Haven was big enough to have all the problems of a big city, but few of the benefits (though Yale frequently claims just the opposite). Brown is in a small city, perhaps enough to qualify as urban, but barely so. Stanford is pretty suburban.
Most state flagships are in small towns or small cities that don’t really qualify as “the middle of a big city”—places like Charlottesville, Ann Arbor, Madison, Bloomington, Boulder, Champaign/Urbana, State College, Amherst, Storrs, Iowa City, Lincoln, Tuscaloosa, Gainesville, Athens, Oxford, etc.
None of this seems to deter large numbers of students from attending these schools. I think perhaps the bigger difference is that most state flagships and major private research universities have a sufficiently large critical mass of students, faculty, and staff that they can generate and support a much deeper and broader set of cultural events and extracurricular activities than most LACs—though in my experience, some LACs do a pretty solid job in this arena.
That said, I certainly understand the attraction of proximity to a major city. My own daughters both quite intentionally chose LACs (Haverford and Bryn Mawr, respectively) within easy striking distance of Philadelphia----20 minutes to Center City by rail, which is faster than you can get from Evanston, or for that matter Hyde Park, to most places of interest in Chicago. And they both frequently took advantage of that proximity for both leisure-time, extracurricular, and academic purposes. I think it would be silly to write off all LACs because some (or many) don’t have easy access to a big city.
The problem isn’t necessarily the shrinking numbers students wanting to study at small liberal arts colleges – the problem is the dwindling number of students that want a liberal arts education – whether that education is sought out at a larger public or private university or at a smaller college. Over the past decade or two, there has been a tremendous surge in pre-professionalism in education, hence the rise of enrollment in engineering, CS, nursing, business, etc. over a more traditional liberal arts education. Large public and private universities have always attracted greater numbers of students in comparison with LACs., but this has become evermore the case because of the availability of these types of programs. Couple this with the perceived – and real – need to focus on the “return on investment” that a college education might afford and you’ve got a further assault on liberal arts education.