<p>Compare and contrast AMHERST, WILLIAMS and SWARTHMORE to HYPS. DO yuo feel the education , overall experience including social and ultimately graduate school and/or job placement equal, better or worse? Thanks</p>
<p>Quite different schools. Swat has no sports or frats. Williams and Amherst are heavy in spprts, and although they supposedly don't have frats, the culture still exists. HYPS are very different as well. Houses rule at HY. P has eating clubs. S is a big time sports schools, division 1. Grad school placement won't be that much different between any of them. Job placement might be depending on the field and location.</p>
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Swat has no sports or frats.
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<p>Swarthmore certainly does have varsity sports. About 20% or so of the students play on a varsity sports team. Swarthmore also has two non-residential fraternities that rent lodges on campus for their parties, etc. They are not large, maybe about 5% of the student body, drawn mostly from the ranks of athletic teams.</p>
<p>To answer the original question, there is no "better", just different. Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore all have huge per student endowments and 100% focused on undergraduate education and the undergraduate experience. Professors are focused on teaching rather than research, class sizes are small, and the style of education is typically very interactive and discussion oriented. Professors direct discussion groups, grade papers, meet with students.</p>
<p>The larger private universities devote only a portion of their focus and resources on undergraduate education. Professors are required to devote more of their time to research and publishing. Introductory and core classes are often very large. On the plus side, there is a greater breadth of courses and options. And, of course, the larger schools have more brand-name recognition.</p>
<p>Visit both, along with very large public universities. Sit in on some classes. Hang out on campus. Decide for yourself.</p>
<p>Well, if getting in to all of them was no problem, Princeton is kinda a combo of LAC and university. I personally think it's the best :-)</p>
<p>You're lucky enough to have the colleges in your area. Visit/overnight a couple universities (Yale, Columbia, Brown) and then a few LACs (Trinity, Wesleyan). It's likely one type will fit you better than the other. Apply to mix of both if you're really unsure.</p>
<p>LACs vs. the "LAC-like" Ivies (i.e. Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth) is a more appropriate apples-to-apples comparison than just comparing all of the Ivies at large.</p>
<p>P / B / D all have undergrad-to-grad ratios roughly about 4:1 and all three do not have the "big three" professional grad schools (law, medicine and business). All three also have locations / campuses which are not dominated by large metropolitan / urban settings.</p>
<p>bump.........</p>
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The larger private universities devote only a portion of their focus and resources on undergraduate education. Professors are required to devote more of their time to research and publishing. Introductory and core classes are often very large.
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Not necessarily. At Harvard, my daughter has exactly 4 people in her major, with 2 instructors for that sophmore tutorial. As a junior, she will have a one on one tutorial in her major field. Just because a school is a research instituion does not mean you won't have close contact with world class professors. So far she has had classes of less than 30 with Harvey Mansfield and Jamaica Kincaid (freshman year), as well as other top lecturers.</p>
<p>The graduate and professional schools are not co-located with the undergraduate population at Harvard and in general do not share the faculty.</p>
<p>And I should have said the Swarthmore does not have major team sports like football and hockey. They do play basketball, lacrosse, and baseball. In general, athletics is de-emphasized at Swat.</p>
<p>"The larger private universities devote only a portion of their focus and resources on undergraduate education. Professors are required to devote more of their time to research and publishing. Introductory and core classes are often very large."</p>
<p>Not true AT ALL. And, certainly, not true at Yale.</p>
<p>Bandit, it's the introductory and core courses at the research universities that can be out of hand sizewise -- Harvard has a significant number of courses with hundreds and hundreds of students in a lecture hall. The profs lecture. TA's lead discusssion sections and grade the papers. It's a matter of scale. The out-of-control courses at a small boutique school are the handul of lecture classes with more than 50 students. At a larger university, out-of-control might start at 250, 500, or even 750 in a lecture class.</p>
<p>As you get farther along and/or move into less popular fields, the interactive nature of the eductation improves.</p>
<p>I agree that, once past the intro and core courses, a motivated student at a larger university (be it Harvard-sized or UMich-sized) can certainly get the same kind of interaction with professors that is available at a small boutique school. A less motivated student? Probably not so much.</p>
<p>The shame of it is that freshmen would probably benefit the most from that sort of interaction as they are most at risk of getting lost in the crowd early on. I don't think the back of a lecture hall is the best way to get a brand-new college student taking his or her first wobbly steps fully engaged.</p>
<p>It seems like the education ia excellent at all of these schools, it may depend upon the learning style of the student. My other question is if the post graduation options are equal? THANKS</p>
<p>The post grad career tracks are slightly different. The liberal arts colleges tend to send a higher percentage of their total graduates on to research and academic PhD programs. This is noticeable at the very top of the rankings, but probably even more so down the ranking lists a bit. It is most likely related to the close mentoring relationships between professor and student at these schools.</p>
<p>Of course, there is also quite a bit of variation among schools of the same type. For example, University of Chicago has more future PhDs than Northwestern.</p>
<p>Do the LACS open the door to the same quality grad program (PhD,LAW, MED) as the Ivy League school?</p>
<p>Just want to clarify: Professors at LACs publish and research just as much as Professors at Universities. They must, in order to be hired at top schools and to get tenure once they are employed. Profs at LACS are not any less respected or renowned in their fields than their counterparts at Universities.</p>
<p>The difference between types of school is that Profs at LACs focus their teaching solely on undergraduate students. Undergrads do not have to compete with grad students for attention or opportunities. </p>
<p>Profs at Universities are often divided between graduate and undergrad courses, and sometimes have more energy for and interest in the graduate students. At Universities, graduate students actually teach some of the courses. This is often viewed as negative, but in fact, can be extremely valuable for undergraduates. Having significant contact with graduate students along with Professors makes for a very rich experience.</p>
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Not necessarily. At Harvard, my daughter has exactly 4 people in her major, with 2 instructors for that sophmore tutorial. As a junior, she will have a one on one tutorial in her major field. Just because a school is a research instituion does not mean you won't have close contact with world class professors. So far she has had classes of less than 30 with Harvey Mansfield and Jamaica Kincaid (freshman year), as well as other top lecturers.
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"The larger private universities devote only a portion of their focus and resources on undergraduate education. Professors are required to devote more of their time to research and publishing. Introductory and core classes are often very large."</p>
<p>Not true AT ALL. And, certainly, not true at Yale.
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<p>I think what the poster meant to say is that a spectrum exists. IN GENERAL, the research universities tend to offer larger class sizes and a more impersonal education than the LAC's. I think this is especially clear if you take a look at the truly huge behemoth research universities such as UCBerkeley, UCLA, or Michigan. For example, I know many former undergrads at Berkeley who have reported to NEVER having had a class that had fewer than 50 students. Not even once. In contrast, I know alumni of the LAC's who have reported not even once having had a class that had more than 50 students. </p>
<p>Obviously you will find exceptions to this. But the general truism holds. </p>
<p>What makes the analysis difficult here is that some of the research universities are, in my opinion, really LAC's. Let's face it. Princeton is really a LAC. It's a LAC that just happens to have a bunch of top-notch PhD programs, but at the end of the day, it's still a LAC. Yale too is somewhat LAC-ish. Even Harvard and Stanford have some LAC qualities to them.</p>
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Just want to clarify: Professors at LACs publish and research just as much as Professors at Universities.
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<p>Actually, I find this doubtful. That's because, simply put, university profs are often times placed in publish-or-perish tracks that cause many of them to neglect their teaching duties. The truth is, you don't really need to be a good teacher in order to get tenure at a research university. In fact, you can be a terrible teacher. Heck, I know quite a few tenured university profs who are absolutely terrible teachers. </p>
<p>But you generally need to be at least a passable teacher to win tenure at a LAC (or to even get hired into the tenure-track at a LAC in the first place). Teaching is not a 'free good'. It takes time and effort to become a good teacher. Many profs at the research universities are simply unwilling to spend that time, again, because they know that it won't really help them secure tenure. </p>
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Profs at LACS are not any less respected or renowned in their fields than their counterparts at Universities.
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<p>I don't think this is true either. Although it would be interesting to do a study on it. I strongly suspect that on the metrics that matter to academics, such as # of articles published in top journals, # of citations, major research awards (i.e. the Nobels, the National Academies, etc.), the profs at the major research universities will tend to be more prominent than the LAC profs. </p>
<p>I'll put it to you this way. I believe that of all of the Nobel Prize Winners in Economics in the entire history of the award, not a single one of them was actually serving as a faculty member of a LAC at the time of award-winning. Note, they may have GRADUATED from the LAC, but they were not serving on the faculty. Similarly, it's hard for me to think of any Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Physics, or Physiology who were serving as LAC faculty members at the time of award. True, there are obviously more profs at the research universities than at the LAC's, but I still find it hard to account for the lack of Nobels at the LAC's, if the LAC profs are just as respected as the research university profs. The same could be said for most other research awards.</p>
<p>Note, that doesn't make the LAC's bad. After all, prominence in research has little to do with skill in undergraduate teaching.</p>
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Do the LACS open the door to the same quality grad program (PhD,LAW, MED) as the Ivy League school?
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Law and medicine are professional degrees rather than graduate degrees, but yes, graduates from top LACs do as well as their Ivy League peers. Why shouldn't they? Just because the Ivy schools have grad programs doesn't mean their graduates do better.</p>
<p>Harvard College has a class size of 1684, hardly a huge school. While there are a handful of large lecture classes like Ec10, most are not. The trade off is you can almost always get into the classes you want or need. Many LAC students have posted here that classes are extremely limited and close quickly, leaving them scrambling for credits to fill their schedule. The other trade off is a small, intimate class with a non-descript lecturer, or a large auditorium with a Noble winner or a presidential advisor. You make the call. I think far too much is made of the 'personal attention' factor, based on our families experience at Harvard. Harvard has also instituted some policies aimed directly at freshmen, like freshman tutorials, limited to 12, with the top professors in the university, including the previous President of the university.</p>
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I think far too much is made of the 'personal attention' factor, based on our families experience at Harvard.
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Oh, I don't know. I have had some bad experiences with TAs, although I'm not at Harvard. Office hours can be kind of pitiful- usually an hour or two a week. I've actually had some professors tell us to go to our TAs rather than them for help.</p>
<p>I've degrees from both a little ivy LAC and big Ivy law school and though I respect both approaches to what each one does, I wouldn't want to trade degrees with either. As an undergrad, I found Wesleyan to be an enormously supportive community in almost every sense of the word; I'm still in touch with professors and administrators that I knew before I knew how much I didn't know. And, that's precisely how I would describe the feeling I have each time I go back, how many courses I wish I'd have taken (or, had the time to take) how many questions I wish I'd asked, how many conversations I wish I'd taken part in when I still had the courage to make a fool out of myself.</p>
<p>Though I did not get to know them primarily from the point of view of a fellow undergrad, my view of Ivy U. student life, particularly one located in a large metropoltan area, is that it is largely free of adult role models, the faculty invisible after 5:PM, and very much centered around what dorm, or section of the university you live in. In other words, there were vast areas of the university, even the undergraduate parts, that were transient, distant and essentially, anonymous. I don't think there was a single building at Wesleyan I did not occupy at one time or another before I graduated, but I doubt that the average Ivy graduate can make the same statement about their schools. </p>
<p>Most people at Ivy U. seemed to enjoy the constant recycling of faces and of "ownership" over various parts of the university. And, I admit that it probably contributed to a feeling of diversity. I'm not saying , that it was worse than Wesleyan, but certainly different. Rather than one big "bubble" that enveloped the entire college, there were probably hundreds of bubbles involving hundreds of hallways and dormitory corridors at Ivy U.. I suspect this free-wheeling system of association had its counterpart academically; I think people at Ivy U. tended to identify more with their individual discipline than a Wesleyan student would. When I first walked into the Ivy U. book store, I was asonished by the varieties of sweat shirts on sale for every institute, club, school and team sport, more than I could remember ever seeing at Wesleyan where I kept two good t-shirts with the Wesleyan logo pretty much for four years.</p>
<p>Again, this is not to gainsay the tremendous amount of work and play that goes on at both types of schools. That above all else is what I remember most.</p>