This is just a little question that I have been thinking about (and it doesn’t really apply to me specifically as a person who is aiming for a STEM degree).
How much do employers value a liberal arts education at a LAC compared to a liberal arts education at a public university?
For instance, in my case (the state of Texas), there are the two main public schools (UT Austin and Texas A&M), both of which have liberal arts departments. Meanwhile, there are schools such as Rice University, Midwestern State (albeit Public), University of Dallas, Southwestern, Austin College etc. etc.
Do private Liberal Arts schools stack up well against the publics, and if not, what justifies their cost?
You seem to be confusing two debates, public vs. private and universities vs. LACs. They are not the same issue, and there are private universities and public LACs. Rice is a university like UT Austin rather than a LAC like Austin, for instance, despite its small size.
Universities and LACs are similar in a few respects. Some liberal arts colleges are strong across the board; others have a mix of strong and weak programs. The same goes for universities. Some liberal arts colleges have extensive distribution requirements that require courses in different academic areas; some have no distribution requirements whatsoever (open curriculum). The same goes for universities. The primary distinguishing features of LACs:
[ul][]They are usually fairly small (500-3000 undergrads).
[]They focus on the liberal arts disciplines (math, sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts) rather than professional fields (engineering, nursing, business, education, etc.), although some do have the latter.
[]The vast majority of the best liberal arts colleges are private colleges.
[]For the most part, they lack graduate programs.[/ul]
Neither LACs nor universities are better than the other; it’s a matter of personal preference.
That depends on the specific colleges in question. There are very prestigious LACs and mediocre universities and vice versa.
Any generalization you make about this is unlikely to hold up very well because there are so many different employers, LACs, public universities, and markets. It’s not clear what the basis for comparison would be.
Some large national firms do seem to favor big state universities in their on-campus recruiting (https://www.collegeatlas.org/recruiters-college-picks.html). This may be a practical matter of convenience as much as anything else. It takes just as much time and money to travel to any equally distant school, but once you get there you can reach a bigger audience at a larger one. But then, once a hiring decision is made, employers won’t pay more for the same degree from one or the other.
LACs offer more consistently small classes and total focus on undergrads. Virtually all classes at LACs are taught by faculty, not TAs. However, there are trade-offs. Big universities can support more courses, more majors, and more cutting-edge research projects.
As for costs, the pricing models are completely different.
For a median income family, the average cost to attend Amherst or Williams is actually lower than the average cost to attend Berkeley or Michigan (according to College Scorecard). Still, about half of students pay full sticker price at many top private colleges, which usually means they’re paying more (often much more) than the full OOS sticker prices charged by state universities. You’d need to run the net price calculators to compare estimates for your own family situation.
What I mean to be comparing (I suppose) is the Liberal Arts department at a public university vs a private LAC then. I understand that there are public liberal arts colleges (I probably just didn’t explain my point well enough).
I was just wondering about the prices (since I will be studying engineering, this has nothing to do with me personally). I was just curious about why someone might pay the large price for a private LAC, when there might be a cheap public that also offers liberal arts.
Certain private colleges just have a cachet among the very wealthy. You can see evidence of this among the number of parents who contribute to capital campaigns while their children are still students, in effect, donating money to a college they are already paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to. They are willing to pay the full sticker price - which itself does not cover the entire cost of educating one student - despite or perhaps even because other, less affluent, families are being given significant discounts. What are they getting in return? To a large extent, expensive private college tuition is part of a bundle of widely accepted costs of being upper middle-class and is seen as integral to the ability of members of that class to pass that status on to their children. At least, that’s the theory expounded by author Richard Reeves in his book, “The Dream Hoarders”
Well, the problem is that there is no “liberal arts department” at Berkeley.
There are a number of departments at Berkeley that cover fields within the traditional liberal arts.
There is a College of Letters & Humanities at Berkeley, where most of those departments are housed (plus a few more).
Or you might be asking about the whole idea of a “liberal arts education”, which is excruciatingly hazily defined, but is generally thought to mean a broad-based education designed to developed a baseline expertise (or at least exposure) to several different fields within the liberal arts alongside one’s major specialization. There the issue wouldn’t be a Berkeley department or college covering any of the liberal arts, but rather the entire general education program at the university (as it compares to Knox’s), or perhaps Berkeley’s College of Letters & Humanities’s “breadth requirement”.
Or perhaps something entirely else.
As others have pointed out, you’re asking something that can’t be answered, because you haven’t really defined what you’re asking. It seems, from your most recent response, that part of this may be because you’re asking about something using the wrong terms, quite possibly because you aren’t fully familiar with the terminology used for whatever you’re after. So maybe you should back up a bit and be more specific, while being completely non-telegraphic about it? Absent that, I don’t think we can help you with your inquiry.
My bad, I didn’t realize that. I was thinking of certain schools where all the liberal arts majors are combined under a single umbrella.
I guess a more specific comparison could be Roman History (lets just take that as the liberal arts major) at a state university, compared to a small private LAC.
What advantage, if any, can a private liberal Arts college offer that could explain their large ticket price (even with aid) in comparison to the cheaper public state colleges that offer the same liberal arts major?
LACs offer small, close-knit student bodies, small class sizes, and strong professor-student relations. Whether that’s “worth it” is up to you, but LACs, private universities, and out-of-state public universities all have high tuition and fees, so you must weigh any of those schools against your in-state public options. Also note that financial aid and merit scholarships can make LACs cheaper than an in-state public university.
If you want to draw comparisons, I think you can really only do so with specific programs. Majoring in a field like classics (to use your Roman history example) or other less popular majors like geology or linguistics at a university is often the best of both worlds – you get a great variety of classes, professors doing innovative research, and small seminars. Even at the largest universities, you won’t find a German class with 80 students!
For super popular majors like econ, biology, or computer science, however, universities can be overwhelming places for shy students, with large introductory courses and overworked and underpaid TAs. If you’re a go-getter who’s willing to seek out opportunities, a university can take you far. For others, especially those who don’t want to compete with graduate students for faculty attention, the more intimate setting of a LAC is preferable.
In Roman history, you picked a major that’s actually not available at any LACs with which I’m familiar. Common LAC majors might include economics, math, government, psychology, international relations, biology, neoroscience, literature and history (general).
Good question. For many people, this wouldn’t make much sense at all. For others, especially those who can easily afford it, a LAC may offer greater prestige (depending on the school) but also smaller classes and more focus on undergrads. Many top private schools (including LACs) do seem to spend more on instruction per student than state universities typically do. On a per capita basis, top private schools tend to draw more students from out of state, and more wealthy students, than typical state universities do. This (and other factors such as a total focus on liberal arts) may create a different social/intellectual atmosphere that some people find appealing.
One more more thing that is perhaps more relevant to OP, STEM (Engineering included) is a big part of many LACs, you can’t really separate it like you are doing. From a 2015 Forbes article (note there are countless other articles and threads about STEM and LACs here and elsewhere…):
“The country’s liberal arts colleges serve only a tiny fraction of the total college-age population, but are probably over-represented in science grad schools”.
I guess a bit of a definition of “liberal arts” is warranted, then: The liberal arts are those fields that were considered necessary for a free person (the concept dates back, in the Western tradition, to the Classical Romans and even the Ancient Greeks) to take part fully in civil society. These fields were historically difficult to firmly pin down until a firm trivium (the humanities side) and the quadrivium (more or less the science side) were settled on ~1500 years ago.
The trivium was grammar, logic, and rhetoric; the quadrivium was arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. (Yes, music was grouped with the sciences.)
Of course, we don’t divide things up this way anymore, but you can see how it all traces back to that—so the languages (including English) trace back to grammar and rhetoric, physics to astronomy and arithmetic, philosophy to logic, the life sciences to astronomy and logic (a more meandering path, but still), the qualitative social sciences to rhetoric and logic, the quantitative ones to arithmetic and logic, the non-musical fine arts to music and rhetoric…
This is why the common formulation of “STEM vs. liberal arts” is silly—the liberal arts contain both the M and S parts of STEM.
(Defining liberal arts colleges, that’s kind of a different issue, but still, the foundation of them is in broad-based liberal arts training.)
“There is a College of Letters & Humanities at Berkeley, where most of those departments are housed (plus a few more).”
It’s actually College of Arts and Sciences of which Arts and Humanities is an academic program. The Social Sciences academic program has History, but not sure it it has any Roman history courses. lol
It’s a tough comparison, if the costs are the same, you’d have to investigate the professors there and their areas of research. If the costs are not, then for sure Berkeley.
Plenty of liberal arts colleges - even most - also have the “T” when that means computer science.
A small handful also include the “E” - Smith College, Harvey Mudd College, to name two.
And even you, @RMNiMiTz , a future engineer, will be taking “liberal arts” courses. Lots of math and science but also history, government, art, social science, composition and literature. At least at UT. http://www.engr.utexas.edu/attachments/ECE16-18-SAC.pdf
For many people, LACs will be cheaper than large state schools.
For people who can be full pay, parents typically know the value of the LAC’s name to employers, the strength of their network, etc.
Most people pay more because, especially in Humanities and Social Sciences, seminars and discussions are paramount (vs. just a lecture) - they’re as important as labs for the sciences. At a large university you’ll get one discussion section for two lectures per week, at a LAC you’ll have three discussion sections. Because the seminars are so small, it means you’ll write more, and will have to peer edit and work on your writing much more.
For premeds and future lawyers, for whom GPA matters, LACs can have the benefit of not “weeding” (in that it’s rarer to have a fixed number or percentage of A’s allotted.) This does NOT mean the classes are easy, just that there’s no artificial “weeding” because out of the 270 students in Intro Bio there can only be 90 premeds remaining to continue to the next level, which will “cull” half of them.
They’re “over-producers” of students who get into funded PHD’s, continue on to grad school,etc, in part because they don’t have to compete with grad students for research experience.
There’s also a sense that the Liberal Arts at a LAC have their own ethos and pride - whereas they may just be the poor cousin at a large university with Engineering and Business schools.
