Hello everyone!
I was wondering if there are any larger universities (8000-18000 students) that have a more liberal arts focus? Do any come to mind?
Notre Dame has 11,000 but 8,000, or about 75% are undergrads. Wake Forest is another, as is William & Mary.
These have attributes of LACs.
Fordham
College of Charleston
Tufts University in MA.
Emory has a liberal arts feel.
Boston college. Indiana u. & u of north Carolina are 2 big schools that don’t have engineering, which gives them a different feel from other universities their size.
No engineering does not equate with a LAC feel. None of those 3 feel like a LAC.
Many mid-sized private universities focus primarily on the liberal arts. Princeton has no graduate law, business, or medical schools. Like most other Ivies (Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale), Princeton does offer undergraduate engineering degrees but none in agriculture, business or nursing.
The University of Chicago does not offer undergraduate degrees in agriculture, architecture, communications/journalism, business, nursing, or engineering (other than a new program in molecular engineering). Average class sizes at UChicago are about as small as at many LACs (although some lecture classes there are bigger than any you’d find at most LACs.)
I would think that a majority of undergrads major in liberal arts fields at many large universities (although most of them also do have some pre-professional degree programs.) But no, that doesn’t necessarily mean any of them are very much like a typical LAC in other respects.
Am I missing something? why do you think that UNC doesn’t have engineering?
Because UNC, Chapel Hill doesn’t have an engineering school. NC State in Raleigh is the flagship engineering school
True, UNC-CH doesn’t (and that is the campus people usually refer to), but UNC-Charlotte has the Lee College of Engineering.
I think many of the Jesuit schools would fit the bill. Mainly mid sized universities with small classes and strong liberal arts focus (including a core curriculum). A few (Fordham, BC) have been mentioned already. You can look at this list and see which, if any, might be fits for your academic stats, geographic preferences etc.
http://www.ajcunet.edu/institutions/
Intparent, the op clearly isn’t looking for an “LAC” if he’s looking for schools in the 8k-18k range. He wants a school with more of a “liberal arts focus”… I’m intimately familiar with the 3 schools I mentioned, all of which.are among the larger universities in the country where you can study English or theater or chemistry without an engineer telling you are wasting your time. No, a lack of engineering doesnt automatically mean a school has a liberal arts focus, but nothing puts a damper on late-night discussions of Plato like an engineering student who scoffs at anything that can’t be quantified.
Ithaca, Geneseo, UDayton, Saint Louis University, Elon, Fordham.
Not sure they have a “LAC feel” but they’re smaller universities with strong Liberal Arts and a definite sense of community.
University of Scranton, but I think they have a bit less than 8000 students, maybe 6500.
Here are the schools with an Arts and Science Focus (i.e less than 20% of the undergrad student body is enrolled in professional majors) I don’t know that any have an undergrad program the size you want.
If you are willing to go with 20-40% professional majors, there will be less of a liberal arts feel, but there will be more options. BC would be one of the schools in this category because of its large business school, nursing school and journalism related majors.
Large — Total grad plus undergrad greater than 10,000
Medium — Total grad plus undergrad than around 3,000
@mooop - You might want to consider broadening your knowledge of engineering a little bit, based on the fact that Chemistry is a core requirement for just about every Engineering discipline…
With a truly liberal education, there is no artificial boundary between the the arts, sciences and engineering. Remember Leonardo DaVinci?
http://www.excollege.tufts.edu/mma/About_The_Program.html
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/history-of-mechanical-engineering/leonardo-da-vinci
Are you aware of the research area called Novel Engineering?
http://www.novelengineering.org/what-is-novel-engineering/
Have you explored any of the the areas of Artificial Intelligence, the Philosophy of Science, Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Engineering Psychology, Biotechnology, Environmental Health, Architectural Studies or Entrepreneurial Leadership?
In a truly liberal (free thinking) environment, Engineering is viewed as both an applied art and an applied science that evolved out of a desire to improve the human condition through the pursuit and application of knowledge.
^ I doubt that, by Liberal Arts, OP meant engineering. Its meaning for education professionals can be debated but typically hs kids who speak about it mean something like Kenyon.
Mastadon, so when the OP said he was looking for a “liberal arts focus,” he meant somwhere like RPI? Ok. Now I understand.