@cobrat Your posts always make me happy about my daughter’s choice for college!
To stick to the topic at hand, my D applied mostly to LACs. She went to a very small HS, so any LAC would be bigger. She prefers small towns to cities. For my “life of the mind” kid, LACs are a great choice.
Priority registration doesn’t matter when everyone is getting the classes she needs. The schools my kids attend serve everyone.
My daughter would actually prefer the ‘other’ lab sometimes but her coach doesn’t allow it. Daughter wanted the 8 am lab, coach didn’t allow and required her to take the Friday afternoon one. Being an athlete is not always a perk.
My daughter just graduated from a high school with close to 4,000 students. However, she was generally with the same group of kids all the way through and there was not much variability in in their schedules, so most of them took the same IB and AP classes. The big diverse school didn’t seem so big after all. Even though the LAC where she will start in the fall will be quite a bit smaller, I think she will be exposed to a much larger variety of bright students and have no shortage of courses to interest her.
Both of my daughters chose LACs, and neither they nor I have any regrets about that. They’re both humanities types–one classics, the other history and art history–and they both got outstanding, rigorous undergraduate educations in their respective fields and more broadly across the curriculum, as good or better than any research university in the country could have offered them, bar none. It might have been a different story if they were into engineering or business, but that’s just not them. They wanted small and heavily participatory classes (as opposed to big lectures), academic rigor, an academic environment in which the intrinsic value of a liberal education is held in high regard, and close relationships with their professors. They got all that and more. Both my wife and I are graduates of the University of Michigan and we both felt we got excellent undergraduate educations. We always said we wanted to give our daughters as good as we got. I have no doubt we met or exceeded that mark.
I have no bias for or against LACs; I’ve always said it’s possible to get a great education at a large public research university, at a smaller private research university, or at a LAC, and which one makes the most sense depends on personal preferences, the personality and learning style of the student, and to some extent the field of study (as well as more practical considerations like affordability). It’s notable, though, that a disproportionately high percentage of college and university professors (and I’m one) end up sending their kids to LACs. I think most academics recognize the value of a top-tier LAC education, and while they may not intentionally steer their kids toward LACs, they tend to inculcate the kinds of academic values that make LACs an attractive option in many cases, and the parents have probably a greater awareness of the range of options than the public at large, as well as an open mind as to whether a LAC might be the best fit for their kid.
Re: #155
UCB has long had a system where departments may specify registration priorities based on major, class standing, class level, instructor approval, and/or status (new or continuing).
Some examples from departments which have extremely popular courses:
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/resources/undergrads/cs/degree-reqs/enrollment-policy
https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/undergrad/home/enrollment-procedures
http://haas.berkeley.edu/Undergrad/current/course/enrollment.html
https://english.berkeley.edu/course_semesters/38
In addition, UCB uses a multiphase registration system, where all students are given the opportunity to enroll in about half of their schedules in the first phase before any students get to complete their schedules in the second phase.
This means that the common meme about “not being able to get the courses you need to graduate on time” is unlikely to happen if one declares a major in a timely manner and chooses the important courses for major requirements and sequencing in the first phase of registration each semester.
People in the higher education industry may be more likely to know that small LACs exist. For example, for many people in California, mentioning “Pomona” as a college may cause them to assume you mean the California State Polytechnic University (“Cal Poly Pomona”), not the private small LAC.
And many professors have tuition exchange, which makes some LACs affordable to them where they wouldn’t be affordable to another family with a similar income.
LACs are also sometimes more affordable for lower-income students who require need-based FA than OOS or sometimes even in-state public Us.
That was the case with yours truly and several younger Oberlin alums I know…including recent graduates.
This is probably mostly the case for the most selective private colleges (LAC or otherwise) that are accessible (from an admissions standpoint) by the top end high school students. It is rather likely that a more typical college ready high school student (3.0-3.5 range with “matching” SAT/ACT scores) will find that most of the private college (including private LAC) options that will admit him/her are rather expensive with insufficient need-based financial aid.
@ucbalumnus , you are so right. I grew up in So Cal. I knew of Cal Poly Pomona. Then I left So Cal, moved overseas, came back, and had no idea the Claremont Consortium existed until three years ago. Oddly enough, I knew just the names of Whittier and Occidental in my early college years because I lived close by, but LACs were simply never on my radar until I had a kid who wanted that kind of environment.
If I even knew LACs existed, they were something that existed in New England, and something that people in mythical “Back East” knew about. They were places that rich, fancy people who played polo and lived in a totally different world knew about. To a student like me, there would have literally been no recognition. I hope these days it isn’t that way. At your average American high school, I suspect the LAC is not in seniors’ lists because a lot of kids just don’t know they are there, especially outside of the regions that have a lot of them, such as the Mid Atlantic and North East.
I think this really depends on the HS concerned and the degree of academic rigor as some of those recent graduates I’ve talked with didn’t graduate in the top portion of their HS classes either. All had reasonable/high board scores that most here would likely consider far outmatching their HS GPAs.
For instance, in the mid-90s, I had an older cousin(by a few weeks) who wanted to attend Oberlin and was rejected twice despite graduating somewhere in the top 20% of his LA area private HS class(His SATs were lower than mine) whereas I was accepted with a near full-ride FA/scholarship(some of it was merit) despite graduating in the bottom quarter of my public magnet HS class.
Earlham College is one of the so-called “Colleges That Change Lives”.
A 3.0-3.5 student with “matching” test scores should have a decent shot at admission to Earlham.
Below is a net price estimate I generated for a below-median-income family.
Family Income: $40,000
Cash Savings: $10,000
1 child
Indiana resident
Estimated Total Cost of Attendance $ 58,810
Estimated Total Grant/Gift Aid $ 42,920
Estimated Federal Pell Grant $ 4670
Indiana Grant or Federal SEOG $ 2500
Earlham College Grant Aid $ 35750
**ESTIMATED NET PRICE $ 15,890 ***
Estimated Total Self Help $ 14650
Student Loan $ 5500
Student Work $ 2300
Parent Loan $ 6850
ESTIMATED REMAINING COST: $ 1240
- The Earlham ESTIMATED NET PRICE is $2,196 higher than the figure I get for the state flagship $13,694 Indiana-Bloomington (in state) Net prices I get for a few other schools: $33,581 University of Minnesota - Twin Cities (out of state) $10,351 Macalester $9,251 Grinnell $6,228 Notre Dame $2,327 UChicago
Students at academically elite high schools may be more aware of additional college options, and more admissible to good-financial-aid private colleges for a given high school GPA, compared to those in more typical high schools. My comment was more based on more typical high schools, rather than the small number of academically elite high schools.
When I was in high school in California, about a third of graduates went to four year colleges, with a bunch more going to the local community college. Most of the four year colleges were state universities (no, not just UCB and UCLA). I only recall two students who went to LACs. One was a politically-far-left hippie who went to Evergreen State.
Interesting commentary from a large ivy professor - http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/17/go-ahead-get-a-liberal-arts-degree-commentary.html
^ Liberal arts degrees can be pursued at many different types of schools, of course.
Just how large is the professor?
Huuuge
If John Urschel finishes his PhD in math at MIT and gets hired as a professor, he will be a very large one. He is also an offensive lineman on the Baltimore Ravens.
I am also an academic, and have seen that my colleagues are way more likely to send their kids to a LAC than the population at large. However, I have a different view of why than expressed above. My anecdatal view is kids of professors are much less likely to plan to major in engineering or especially business than kids with similar stats but non-academic parents. I think this idea that people outside of academia and the arts don’t know about LACs is sort of funny given the combination of the internet and mass college mailings. What is more likely is if the parents don’t work in academia or the arts, they and their kids may not know very many graduates of LACs, and thus don’t connect them to their future path.
Regarding business, some of that has to do with a perception that with a few notable exceptions, business is the default major for those who aren’t the best students or those who aren’t serious/interested in academic learning/intellectualism.
It isn’t helped when there have been recent articles confirming this as shown in this example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html
This attitude was especially prevalent in the academic side of my family. Only thing was…at least in my family’s case, there’s no such stigma regarding engineering.
I am aware that there is such a stigma among some in the older generations of well-off WASP families as demonstrated by an account from a former supervisor turned friend who recounted how a former colleague and Princeton engineering graduate(graduated sometime in the early '70s) nearly got disinherited by his domineering wealthy WASP father for having the temerity to insist on engineering even though his father snootily felt it was “too blue collar” for a family of their SES and one which sent at least 2-3 generations through Princeton.