No, the poster said 20-40% of student at at LAC’s are athletes and attendance at sporting events tends to be friends of athletes.
Very true. I attended a LAC for 4 years and never went to a football game. Our team was pretty decent too. But I didn’t know any players, so why go?
Many people assume that the course offerings at LACs are much more limited than at RUs.
Certainly, LACs do offer fewer majors (particularly in pre-professional fields).
However, in the past few days I’ve been comparing the scale of several majors at LACs and RUs. A few findings:
I haven’t made enough of these comparisons to draw any strong conclusions, but they do suggest to me that if you focus only on comparable arts & science programs, the scale of some RU departments at the undergraduate level isn’t necessarily much greater than it is at some LACs.
I’d like to see a comparison on percentages of 400 and higher level classes at LACs compared to small and medium sized universities.
@tk21769: Try the same thing with CS at Cal/UIUC/GTech vs. any LAC and don’t just look at the course catalog but list the number of courses offered in an academic term.
The problem isn’t that courses aren’t listed in the catalog but that many are taught once every 2 years or less often.
@PurpleTitan I was just about to write the same thing. Catalogs are deceptive… its not just the infrequency of offerings, it’s the limited amount of sections. Most of the time you don’t figure this out until you are a student there.
On the other hand, you rarely hear about kids at LACs not being able to get into classes. I know one of my kids signed up for classes late and was able to talk his way into the two classes he really wanted despite the fact that they were officially filled.
I’m not sure comparing courses by number would make sense because there is no standardization across curricula.
Kenyon will offer 49 discrete English courses this fall and 44 in the spring. IOW the school offers more English courses each semester than than the entirety of courses a student would have the ability to take over 4 years. Somehow I don’t think students will have a hard time finding enough courses.
As for courses only being offered every 2 years, are you talking about core courses for a given major or an elective within a major? Major electives change all the time regardless of research or LAC. Upper level 300+ courses also change on a regular basis particularly for Arts & Science majors, so choice of major plays a large part in regularity of offering. And, I would guess, the availability and willingness of a professor to teach a specific speciality course also plays a factor. If Professor X always teaches Quantum Duck Theory and this year Professor X is on sabbatical studying pintail ducks, Quantum Duck Theory is not going to be taught and Johnny Student will have to take Duck Flocking Rituals instead. It happens all the time at both large research universities and LACs. More choice doesn’t always equal better choice.
At my liberal arts college there were at the time, 10-15 chemistry majors a year, Everyone took the same core sequence that is pretty standard at most colleges- g chem/ochem/p chem/ inroganic and analytical. There were also the standard elective chem courses of environmental and biochem.
Beyond that the advanced elective courses were all listed in the catalog and offered on request. So two of us wanted quantum theory my senior year, we went ot Dr. P and said we want to take quantum, and he created a section and enrolled us.
I don’t doubt that many state flagships will offer more CS courses (both catalog listings and actual offerings per term) than nearly any LAC. What I’m suggesting is that you can’t necessarily assume that for every traditional arts & science major, the undergraduate course offerings are much more numerous at an RU than they are at a LAC. Of course, most LACs don’t offer graduate-level courses, so at that level you’ll definitely find more options at an RU.
FWIW, I count 10 Classics department courses in the Williams College Fall 2017 schedule, and 12 undergraduate Classics courses in the Berkeley Fall 2017 schedule. The undergraduate offerings at Williams may actually be richer in some topic areas (like Latin lit, maybe).
I count 27 geology courses in the Colorado College 2017-18 schedule and 13 undergraduate Geology courses in the CU-Boulder Fall 2017 schedule. I don’t see Boulder’s Spring 2018 schedule yet, but assuming it offers about the same number of courses in Fall and Spring, then this 27K-student RU will offer almost exactly the same number of geology courses next year as a ~nearby LAC less than 1/10th its size.
I count 49 English department courses in the Kenyon College Fall 2017 schedule. So it appears nearly half its catalog is covered in this one term (which admittedly may not be typical coverage). I count 10 distinct lower division English department courses in the Berkeley Fall 2017 schedule, and 50 distinct upper division English department courses. Kenyon has ~1700 undergrads v. Berkeley’s 29K.
YMMV. Geology seems to be a strong department at Colorado College; English definitely is at Kenyon.
And I’m counting courses (subjects of study), not classes. You’ll see multiple offerings of “Reading and Composition” at Berkeley in Fall 2017, which I suppose increases your scheduling flexibility. Presumably the same thing happens in high-demand intro CS courses or pre-med courses.
Let me fix this for you: ‘Somehow I don’t think students will have a hard time finding enough English courses.’
Of course, if kenyon is offering so many sections in English, that means, but definition (and budget) they are not offering a full slate in other departments. For example, they clearly could not afford to do the same in a lab class.
fwiw: Holy Cross, an excellent NESCAC school, has (or used to, since I haven’t followed it recently) a premed track where the students accepted into the track as Frosh has priority for the intro lab classes. Those students who desire pre-health that were not accepted into the premed track initially, are essentially on a priority WL for lab classes.
Anecdotally,…
My rising sophomore daughter attends a top #100 ranked national research university. She must take either abnormal pysch or developmental psych for her biomedical sci major. She wanted to take developmental pysch this fall but the class was full of upper classmen and she was shut out. The University did not open another section, 1 class offered 1x a year (and in fact it was not offered at all this past year, for whatever reason, which explained why it filled so quickly) Emailed the professor to plead her case to no avail. She is on a pretty tight pre-determined schedule because she is doing a direct entry DPT program and there is not much room to re arrange or take things in different semesters. She opted to wait to see if she can squeeze it in later. So not seeing the “value” in her attending this research university in this instance
DD also looked at Pitt and upon further investigation (talking with current students and alumni family) discovered that getting the necessary classes to graduated isn’t easy there either simply based on sheer volume of students. There is a value to smaller class size and access to professors on a personal level.
DD was shut out of an upper level music theory class for her minor and was able to talk to the professor, who she had for a different class,and easily gained a spot. DD’s uni is in the 10k -14k student range with a $551M endowment, but functions more on an LAC mentality. I absolutely see the value in smaller class sizes and personalized interaction, something the LACs certainly have to offer and factors that DD considered in her admissions decisions.
When it comes right down to it every student needs to individually evaluate their choice of school. There are so many variables including some that are intangible and unknowable until you are actually in the thick of things that they can’t be evaluated. There is no reason that an LAC should be dismissed out of hand. I, for one, definately think that LACs should be on the radar for ALL students.
@bluebayou did you count the other courses before you “fixed” that?
Here: http://registrar.kenyon.edu/sep17_dept.htm
Holy Cross is not in the NESCAC.
My kids, one at a 10,000 student school, the other at a 3500 student school, have never had a problem getting into any class. One was unable to sign up for the lab section she wanted, but her coach fixed that.
An LAC might have more chemistry or physics majors because they don’t have engineering or other specific major the student would take at a bigger school. My daughter was offered the ‘3+2’ major at many schools, and told that she’d receive the physics major from the LAC plus the engineering degree when she completed the program.
My friend just graduated with an applied math degree from Colorado school of Mines. There were 15 who received that degree, but of course there were many more who received related degrees and had taken almost the same classes. Would the grad from an LAC have received that same degree, or ‘math’ or some kind of combined degree?
@twoinanddone you mentioned “her coach fixed that”…does your DD receive priority registration because of athletics also? Some school give athletes and honors students priority.
I noticed this on the UCB course listing. I thought it was curious but perhaps this is how some schools make sure majors are able to get the courses they need. At the same time I would find it irritating not to know if I’d get into a class until the last minute. This listing was for Organic Chemistry but apparently the same policy applies to other departments, as it was the case in a couple of English courses I looked at as well.
@Sue22 - D’s school has that too. Each class lists what category of kids get priority if the class is over enrolled. Usually a specific class level or major or both.
She does, but she didn’t that semester. There was a screw up in her files and they kept telling her that they didn’t have a final hs transcript. We had the hs send it two more times, and they still didn’t have it by the registration date, so everyone in the entire school got to register before her. Registration started on a Friday night, couldn’t fix the problem until Monday morning, and by then the lab section she wanted (coach wanted) was full. I told her to sign up for the other lab section, which still had room She did, and the coach moved her. I think it just meant she was moved to the top of the waitlist so got the next slot, or perhaps they hold out 1-2 spots in the labs for this kind of problem. There are a set number of lab stations so they can’t just squeeze another person in.
She’s in one of the smallest majors her school has (civil eng) so often a course is only offered in one section. It’s not been a problem to get classes. Other daughter has used drop/add to get a course or section she wanted.
@Sue22, my daughter who was in theater had that same issue. The department puts a hold on almost ALL courses that are open to the general student population, then after orientation when freshmen register, they release them if there are any extra slots to non-majors. Some other courses require a prof to sign off to make sure the student has the right pre-reqs (art, foreign language).
Another good thing about LACs - can’t think of one where athletes get priority registration. 
Meaningless as from the experience I and many college classmates experienced at a wide variety of graduate programs(MA/MS/PhD), many of the 400(4000)-600(6000) grad classes were comparable or sometimes even lower in depth of coverage, rigor, and reading/assignment loads compared with the 300-400 or sometimes even some 200 level undergrad courses at my LAC. And some of the 400/4000 and up graduate classes at lower-tiered university wouldn’t even pass for an intro-intermediate level class at my and comparable LACs…much less those with greater rigor such as Swat. Reed. etc.
It was even more mind boggling to hear of and witness grad classmates complain of 200 page/week reading loads and the “difficulty” of the works being covered when that weekly reading load is actually comparable to an exceedingly light 200-level or even some 100 level courses at my LAC when I attended. And the monographs/books they considered difficult…read most of them during undergrad and didn’t find them to be very difficult/demanding.