I never really considered LACs until spending time on this site. Mostly because I haven’t heard of them. How well respected are colleges like Amherst and Williams, and what majors are they strong in?
What are some less selective LACs that offer merit aid but are still prestigious? I’m from VA and have only considered VA and NC schools for the most part bc they are the only ones my parents and I know.
My parents also aren’t very trusting of LACs bc they haven’t heard of many of them and (wrongly?) assume that means that future employers won’t have heard of them. Should I consider Washington and Lee or U of Richmond? How well regarded are they?
Williams and Amherst are VERY well respected and are fairly strong across the board. At Williams, I’d say specific strengths are in math and art history but I don’t think they have academic weaknesses really.
Employers definitely know LACs. I think it is just a matter of educating your folks.
What are you interested in studying? What are your stats? Geographical preference? Campus vibe/student type that appeals to you? Urban, suburban, rural preference?
Elite liberal arts colleges like Amherst and Williams are very well-respected among graduate programs and employers alike. They are well-rounded colleges and tend to have strengths in a lot of fields/areas. Washington and Lee and University of Richmond are also very strong, very well-regarded LACs.
Remember - and tell your parents - that people whose job it is to be familiar with colleges are often way more familiar with many colleges than the lay public. At big companies (and smaller ones, too, sometimes) HR and recruiting have one or several people who literally get paid to go out and find the best talent. They make it their business to be familiar with a wide range of schools where they can find bright, talented graduates.
Some still excellent but less selective LACs where you might get some scholarship money (depending on your student profile) are Dickinson (PA), Whitman (WA), Lewis & Clark (OR), University of the Puget Sound (WA), Occidental (CA), Rhodes (TN), Franklin & Marshall (PA), Sewanee-The University of the South (TN), Denison (PA), Gettysburg (PA), DePauw (IN), Furman (SC), Wofford (SC), St. Olaf (MN), Berea (KY)*, Lawrence (WI), Wooster (OH), Beloit (WI), Earlham (IN), Kalamazoo (MI), Hendrix (AR), and Willamette (OR). If you’re a young woman, there’s also Agnes Scott (GA).
There are some good LACs in NC and VA too: Davidson is an elite/top college in NC, and you’ve also got Guilford College, Greensboro College and Warren Wilson College (which is a work college, so the tuition is free in exchange for something like 15 hours of work a week). If you’re a young woman, Salem College is also an option. In VA, aside from W&L and UR, there’s also Emory and Henry College, Randolph College and Randolph-Macon College. If you’re a young man, Hampden-Sydney College is an option; if you are a young woman, there are Sweet Briar College and Hollins University. In Virginia there is also a state-supported public liberal arts college in the University of Virginia at Wise.
*Berea is also a work college like Warren Wilson.
Amongst the very best LACs, there are several that will give merit to Ivy calibre students. Refer to the schools I mentioned on your post yesterday. Of those, Kenyon and Carleton will give merit to very top students. Oberlin also gives merit, and probably some of the others. Many of the most selective LACs do not give merit because they want to use their endowments to help finance lower-income students, much the same as some of the most selective universities. Every college I listed yesterday is highly respected and people who need to know, know.
These colleges’ graduates do very well in grad and med school placement. They have great careers. They go on to phD’s. The big difference is that most LACs do not have graduate studies. Some do, like Wesleyan. Generally, this means there are a lot of opportunities for undergrads to do research.
There have been quite a few presidents from LACs and many other famous and successful people have graduated from LACs. The service academies are also LACs. Harvey Mudd has the highest earning potential of any college in the nation, or it did last year at least. There are plenty of great LACs in @juillet 's post too. Most people would say that WAS are the equivalent of HYP. You are not going to get an inferiro education at an LAC and you will not lack opportunities by attending one.
(Sorry, hit post too soon @agentaquastar )
Davidson in NC is well well respected. For Amherst Williams and LACs in general, well they are well known by grad schools and by some employers (Finance, etc).
LACs are unique to the US, with very few exceptions. If your parents are not from here they may not know them, or the model of education in general. LACs are also small, so many US-born folks might not know people who choose them.
Your education will probably be superior at a top LAC than at an Ivy. You’ll have small classes with professors motivated to be there to teach undergraduates.
Many smaller colleges of course tend to be as or more selective than their university counterparts:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-smartest-colleges-in-america-2016-10
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-610-smartest-colleges-in-america-2015-9
LACs receive significant recognition as well in publications such as Forbes:
However, many schools have established name recognition through a combination of sheer size and D1 sports, areas in which LACs neither compete nor typically want to compete.
In terms of strong programs at some liberal arts colleges, think of math, physics, geosciences, economics, government, sociology, history, classics, philosophy, religious studies, literature, linguistics, Chinese and many others.
Also, to address your concern about not knowing about LACs, my husband is a foreigner and was initially distrusting. However, our daughter really wanted to attend an LAC and so she and I basically force-fed him a lot of info about various reputable colleges. He now fully understands that his skepticism was not warranted. Our daughter attends an LAC and he is very pleased with the college’s career center and the work of the current president.
Good companies know about LACs. You will not have trouble getting a job because you attended an LAC, and in fact, I would say the opposite is true. Many LACs have very devoted alumni and active career centers. They do very well with job placement. Even outside the US, good companies will have some knowledge of American LACs. Some LACs have high percentages of international students. Unsurprisingly, the most selective LACs, like the most selective universities, are able to choose the cream of the crop of international students.
If you want to talk to your parents to familiarize them, ask them if they have heard of Kofi Annan, president of the UN, Harrison Ford the actor, John Glenn the astronaut, Olaf Palme, PM of Sweden, Meryl Streep the actress, Hillary Clinton, presdential candidate, and Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice. Plus, a bucketful of US presidents as I mentioned before, as well as many famous scientists, authors, businessmen, musicians, and actors.
The great thing about LACs is that because they are small, students get a lot more interaction with professors and other students. I know a girl at Amherst who just finished her first year. Halfway through the year, she was given a paid job by a prof to mark papers, and this summer she is already doing research on campus with a physics prof. It’s probably fair to say that it would be very unusual for a student at most universities to have opportunities like that.
@merc81 , just saw your post. At Bates, there is a relatively new neuroscience major and the college will be adding a new science and math building, and new profs. Some schools, such as Harvey Mudd, are extremely strong in STEM. Many LACs are beefing up their STEM departments because they understand the demand is there.
Thank you everyone!
@Lindagaf yup my parents are immigrants. While they are thankfully not Ivy League driven, they maintain that smaller schools are less prestigious and provide less opportunities. Hopefully with your fun list of successful graduates I can convince them otherwise. I’m starting to really like the fact that LACs are smaller (which means I will have more meaningful teacher and peer relationships), especially since I’m an introvert who doesn’t stand out much…
The US News & World Report lists for National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges are a source for general reputation (though differences of a few spots in rankings are meaningless). In LACs, Amherst and Williams are #1 and #2, and are generally as respected as any school of any size. Other LACs in the top 10 (Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Middlebury) could be at least as highly regarded as any top 20 schools in the university list (like Johns Hopkins or Vanderbilt). And top 20 LACs (like Washington & Lee) could certainly be considered as good as many universities in the top 20 to 40 range of universities (like UVa, UNC, W&M).
Schools in the 20-40 range of the LACs list (like Richmond) are all very good to excellent, though some don’t have as much of a national reputation as others. But some of them could have merit aid. And, going by your other thread, a number of them in this range would be matches for you, while top 20 schools would probably be reaches. (Top 10 schools are reaches for pretty much everybody.)
Since I think the point is to convince your parents these schools are prestigious enough, you might use this and other rankings (and maybe your guidance counselor) to convince them that any top 10 LAC would be at least as prestigious (and often more so) than UVa, and you’d be very fortunate to go to one. Any top 20 LAC would be at least in the ballpark of UVa and W&M, and more prestigious than any other Virginia state school. And a lot of those LACs further down the list have reputations higher than any Virginia state schools outside of UVa, W&M, and possibly Virginia Tech in certain areas.
Many of the best schools are LACs. They offer smaller classes and closer interactions with professors (of course you can also find close interaction with professors at larger universities.) Often intro classes have 40-80 students at an LAC and 100+ or 200+ at a national university. Student/faculty ratios are often 8:1 to 12:1 versus 14:1 or more at many national universities (but not all). LACs often don’t have the large research facilities of larger universities but also have fewer (if any) grad students. So professors often work with undergrads rather than grad students. It’s not that either LACs or larger universities are better, just that they offer somewhat different opportunities and prospective students might find one suits better than another.
Here’s the Forbes list of top colleges. I use Forbes rather than USNWR because the latter puts LACs and national universities in separate lists. When using rankings, always remember that they are based on specific criteria and can vary greatly with different criteria. The criteria used might not fit well with your interests. But the list does give you a good idea of how well LACs stack up with national universities. The total undergrad population is given in the right column. Pretty much all of those under 4000 undergrads are LACs.
https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/#tab:rank
You’ll notice that the price of most of these schools is $60k, which is an enormous sum to pay per year. The key thing, though, is that this total is often discounted. I think families often see this number and write off the schools. This can be a mistake, depending on the student and family circumstances. Some of these schools might very well be less expensive than an in-state public university. The challenge for families is to realistically explore if these might be a good fit and which ones specifically might be a good fit and affordable because the school will give need-based financial aid and/or merit aid. I included that link to Miami of Ohio in your other thread as an example. It is more of a larger/mid-size public university, but you can see from that table that it would be conceivable that it would cost you less to go there than UVA, William and Mary, VCU, or ODU. I would guess (very, very roughly) that the cost at Denison would be similar to an in-state school for you. It could be higher or much lower. The same with a Kenyon, Amherst, etc. So it can turn into an exercise in price shopping among schools that are a good fit. As I noted, the difficulty, as I see it, is that unlike price shopping a washer/dryer, a student can fall in love with a school, be accepted, and then find out it will be too expensive to attend. This is difficult and a pitfall.
But it is important to understand that the “sticker price” you see on that Forbes list is just that. it is very often (most of the time) discounted by aid. Here’s an article from another CC thread that gives you some info on that.
There are very many LACs. You might think about where you would like to, and can, study. Northeast (many schools)? South? Mid-Atlantic? Would you want to be in a city or a college town? Then look at some along these lines and try to research their policies regarding aid. Do they meet full financial need? Do they give more merit money or more need-based aid?
I suggested W&L as a possible LAC to visit, mostly so you could see a campus of that size. From what you said about yourself, I don’t think it would probably be a good fit for culturally (obviously not based on much). I think of W&L (especially), Richmond, and Davidson as being on the preppier side, which you said you didn’t like about UVA. Less preppy, I think (but don’t know them all very well), Denison, Kenyon, Bates, Oberlin, Dickinson, Middlebury and women’s colleges including Wellesley and Mount Holyoke. Wellesley is a spectacularly beautiful campus. I know a recent grad who had a incredible experience there, including classes at MIT and Harvard. There aid might be need focused though.
VA and NC have public LACs also, much less $ for instate residents especially: University of North Carolina at Asheville and University of Mary Washington. NY has SUNY Geneseo and FL has New College of Florida.
When was the last time you set foot in a classroom at an Ivy or top LAC? You can find small classes at top universities as well. I attended a university for undergrad, but only 3 of my classes had more than 30 students, and the vast majority had fewer than 15. Professors were engaged and more than happy to work with motivated students.
In any case, the poor job market in academia these days means PhDs apply to any and all jobs open in their field. First, that means applicants are applying to a mix of universities and LACs and will take any job they can get. A couple of decades ago, teaching-focused PhDs applied to LACs while research-centered PhDs applied to universities…but that hasn’t been applicable for quite some time. Second, it means colleges have the luxury of choosing applicants who are both amazing at teaching AND have a strong record of research.
I don’t know if I would tout this as a plus. The close faculty attention is the primary benefit of attending a LAC, so that sort of goes out the window if they’re not doing their own grading. If I were graded by another student, I’d rather it be by a grad student with several years of specialization in his/her field.
Early research is more unusual, but not as much as you’d think – in fact, my undergrad had a summer fellowship reserved specifically for rising sophomores to do science research over the summer.
Posters above have done a great job of outlining the positives of liberal arts colleges without touching upon the negatives. Liberal arts colleges are great, but they are not perfect for every student. Their small size means their academic offerings are limited; they lack specialized programs, and they have a significantly smaller selection of courses in the subjects they do offer. Diversity can be a big problem at LACs, particularly the less selective ones – many struggle to attract black and Asian students, and the dating pools for LGB students are often abysmally small.
There is no “right” college for everyone. Whether you should consider LACs depends on what you’re looking for in a college.
@warblersrule , your points are valid, and there are negatives at larger universities too. As far as the girl I mentioned, she was marking papers in a 100 level math class and she excels in math. There probably isn’t much room for error in that particular instance.
The diversity issue is a problem for many LACs, that is true. A lot of that simply has to do with the fact that many people simply haven’t heard of them. Yes, they are small, and are often located in somewhat out of the way places. The kinds of students LACs would like to attract are the same students that are not likely to have heard of those schools. Kids are reluctant to go to college in a place they may have never heard of. It’s an ongoing battle. 40 of the incoming class of 499 at my D’s college were first generation to college. I was impressed at the number. Probably quite a few of those kids were URM, but I have no idea.
It’s also hard for kids to fight against parental perceptions. “If I have never heard of it, it can’t be good.” This is especially true of immigrant parents who often have high expectations for their kids, not understanding that there are 4000 colleges in the US, and a substantial number of them will offer great educational opportunities. These parents also don’t understand that although their kid has excellent grades and tests scores, it’s insanely hard to get into tippy top colleges. They assume Junior will have no trouble getting into Yale, and then freak out when he doesn’t.
ETA: Diversity is not just skin color, btw. Colleges want stduents from different states and economic backgrounds too.
Kenyon College is a small college (2000 students) in a small town in Ohio (with a beautiful New England LAC-style campus). It always impresses me that its alumni include Paul Newman, John Green (author, The Fault in Our Stars), Bill Patterson (Calvin and Hobbes), Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit and Unbroken), Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children), Allison Janney (actress, The West Wing), E.L. Doctorow (prominent novelist), Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother), Jim Borgman (cartoon Zits), P.F. Kluge (Dog Day Afternoon), and President Rutherford B. Hayes.
Also basketball coach Shaka Smart, formerly at VCU, now the University of Texas (just saw that).
Smith college
Denison is in OH, not PA.
@ agentaquastar, wtr Williams and Amherst. You’ll also find additional excellent LACs list below.
Both are Top Feeders – Medical School Programs.
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/infographics/top-feeders-medical-school
Additionally.
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/top-pre-med-colleges/
Both are top feeders to Ph.D programs
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/infographics/top-feeders-phd-programs
Wliiiams is a top CEO producer school
Amherst is a Wall Street feeder school
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/infographics/top-wall-street-feeder-schools
Hmm I’m not sure I want to go into medical school, but that is a great list, thanks!
I’ve recently been looking into careers that involve some design but are more secure than architecture bc my parents are very against that… Are there any colleges that specialize in civil or environmental engineering? I’m starting to like those careers for their integration of stem and art, and they both give me the opportunity to build structures that can help others and/or inspire them. That’s my hope, anyways.
Also I’ve looking into Amherst college and it seems amazing, but I’m not sure where it stands regarding engineering… I realize they don’t offer any merit aid, but from their quick calculator I may qualify for half of financial aid.