<p>I'm a junior right now and I have the basic stats to potentially get into the most selective colleges, and I'm not sure what colleges to apply for.</p>
<p>I've read and heard a lot of good things about liberal arts colleges, and I definitely want to be taught by real professors, have class discussions, and get to know my professors, so that's why I've already ruled out large state universities. But I wasn't sure about the ivy leagues and other prestigious private universities, because they have significantly less undergrad students, like 5000-8000, so is that still too many for you to always be taught by professors, have class discussions, and be able to build relationships with your professors? I'm talking about universities like U. Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, and Yale.</p>
<p>I was reading Loren Pope's 40 Colleges That Change Lives. Is he saying that those 40 colleges are the best there are out of all colleges? As in better than the Ivy Leagues, and better than the more selective Liberal Arts?</p>
<p>Holistically in terms of where I would get a better education, which ones from this list are the best? And please don't reference college rankings like US News.</p>
<p>Amherst
Bryn Mawr
Carleton
Davidson
Duke
Grinnell
Haverford
Pomona
Reed
Stanford
St. John's College
Swarthmore
U Chicago
Wesleyan
Williams
Whitman
Yale</p>
<p>Look, I’ve never heard of that book but I don’t like the title. Why? Because it reinforces the idea that college is the most important decision you’ll ever make, a decision that will have far-reaching ramifications on the rest of your life. </p>
<p>While that may be true for some, it is not true for others, and it does not have to be true for anyone.</p>
<p>The entire College Confidential forum amounts to many variations on the question, “which college is best?”, with tens of thousands of responses from many perspectives. So there is no simple answer to your question. A lot depends on your interests and personal preferences, and on how much effort you put into your education (wherever you wind up).</p>
<p>Most of the schools on your list are small liberal arts colleges. Almost all of them are very similar in size and academic programs. There are differences in geographic setting and social atmosphere, which may or may not matter to you. A few of these small schools are noted for strength in one or more departments (like Williams in Art History, Bryn Mawr in Anthropology and Classics). St. Johns is different from all the others by virtue of its Great Books curriculum. Amherst, Bryn Mawr/Haverford, and Pomona participate in multi-college consortiums, which expand the number of available course offerings.</p>
<p>Duke, Chicago, Stanford and Yale are private research universities. All have some of the features of a LAC (relatively small classes, primary focus on the arts & sciences not pre-professional training.) Chicago is a little more LAC-like than the other 3 (with smaller average class sizes, and total focus on liberal arts & sciences). However, no major research university offers quite the undergraduate focus of a LAC. No major research university caps ALL undergraduate classes at 30 or 50 students, as some LACs do; most university professors are devoting at least some of their attention to graduate students. On the flip side, a university generally offers more courses in more disciplines. The libraries and other research facilities are larger. They will tend to attract more famous professors (who may or may not teach undergrads, but who probably influence other faculty in any case). They may have more opportunities for significant research. Selective research universities generally are better-known and more prestigious than LACs (at least to the general public). </p>
<p>There is no end of personal opinion and arguments about colleges on CC. My personal opinion is that the University of Chicago combines the best features of a LAC and a major research university. However, it’s not for everyone, and it may not be right at all for you.</p>
<p>I am a big supporter of liberal arts colleges, not because I believe that taking some silly class or two in the arts of social sciences makes you more well rounded or a better person…but because at a small liberal arts college your professor is not running a super sized lab with grad students who come at the front of the line . your highly qualified LAC bio professor can and will spend time teaching you in a smaller supportive environment…so when you are ready to go to grad school or med school etc… you have a great base.
I like schools like haverford on your list as well as hendrix, muhlenberg and davidson…also on your list(if you do not mind a heavy greek influence)</p>
<p>If you want small classes, look at the class schedules on each college’s web site to see how many are enrolled in each class, and who the instructor is (regular faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate student), rather than making assumptions based on the school’s size.</p>
<p>As noted above, Dartmouth is more like a LAC, even though it is in the Ivy League. (However, it does have an unusually high percentage of students in fraternities and sororities.)</p>
<p>LACs with convenient cross-registration with research universities can be a way to break through the common limitations of LACs with respect to limited upper-level course offerings. But check how convenient the cross-registration is, both from an administrative point of view and a commuting point of view.</p>
<p>Of course, at the other end of the selectivity spectrum, you have community colleges and less selective state universities with few or no PhD students which are often organized to have small faculty-taught classes at all levels, just like LACs are generally thought of as having. However, they may have a higher percentage of adjunct faculty and a higher percentage of classes in pre-professional subjects than what one would normally think of a LAC as offering. But students who start at community colleges and transfer to research universities may get the benefit of smaller classes at all levels of undergraduate study and the larger upper level course selection of a research university.</p>
<p>Loren Pope’s whole premise is that smaller, less well known colleges can, and do, provide their students with excellent educations and are a better social and academic fit for some students than the most prestigious schools that most applicants strive to get into. His mission was to open people’s minds to the myriad of possibilities for getting an excellent college education. The schools in the book cover a broad range of geography and levels of selectivity, but all have attributes that he thought made them worthy of further investigation. All the schools you’ve listed can offer you an excellent education, you must decide if the social structure, local environment, strength of majors and level of selectivity match your criteria. It’s great that your looking beyond the USNWR! Remember the best philosophy is to apply to a range of reaches, matches and safeties. If you need financial aid, that’s another conversation. I suggest some visits.</p>
I don’t really see much difference between Chicago and Yale, actually. Interestingly, both fare better than Dartmouth in class sizes. </p>
<p>Percentages of classes with 50+ students:</p>
<p>12% Stanford
8% Dartmouth
7% Columbia
6% Duke / Yale
5% Chicago / Wesleyan
4% Williams
3% Bryn Mawr
2% Amherst / Swarthmore
1% Carleton
1% Haverford / Pomona
0.3% Grinnell / Whitman
0% Davidson</p>
<p>Percentages of classes with 1-20 students:</p>
<p>80.7% Columbia
78.9% Haverford
77.2% Yale
75.1% Chicago
74% Bryn Mawr / Swarthmore
71.6% Duke
70.8% Williams
69.7% Pomona
69.2% Amherst
69.1% Davidson
68.9% Stanford
67.7% Wesleyan
64.8% Carleton
64.7% Dartmouth
62.4% Whitman
62.3% Grinnell</p>
<p>
I always try not to sound overly critical of SJC, but I always do anyway. Suffice it to say that it has mastered the “jack of all trades, master of none” approach to education and is best suited for (a) people interested in career fields that don’t require specific skills/knowledge from undergrad or (b) people interested in graduate study in law, business, or other subjects open to many undergraduate backgrounds. I’ve found that its graduates have an extremely superficial view of classical literature, and their grasp of later literature probably isn’t much better. The paucity of good language and math/science offerings, combined with (in my opinion) inadequate lab and library facilities makes SJC an inferior option to some of the others on this list (e.g. Columbia’s Core, Yale DS, Reed’s humanities sequence, etc.). YMMV. </p>
<p>
Jenn, my first question to you is whether you have a safety school. You need to have at least one or two colleges that (a) you can get into and (b) you can afford. For many people, this is one of their state universities. If you are fortunate enough to live in a state with a small public college - UNC Asheville or the New College of Florida, for example - then you are all set. If you’re not, you need to pick your safety very carefully. </p>
<p>As for your question, I think you need to keep two things in mind. One, research universities can sometimes replicate a LAC classroom. Some universities offer very small classes in most subjects, and unpopular subjects can have very few students indeed. For example, I majored in classics and geology at Duke, and virtually all of my classes had fewer than 15 students, and many had fewer than 10. </p>
<p>That said, class sizes are NOT everything! The fundamental focus of a major university is wholly different from any LAC. Duke - along with others like Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, etc. - is a research university, and research is one of its highest priorities. That doesn’t mean they totally neglect their undergraduates, of course, and undergraduates often get quite a lot of attention. It does mean, however, that undergraduates are not their one and only overriding concern, as they are at most liberal arts colleges. </p>
<p>Additionally, the overall size of a college affects everything from extracurricular offerings to diversity to the atmosphere on campus. A 15 student classroom is one thing, but you can’t work around a 6000 student body (or 9000+ with grad students), which feels very, very different from a small liberal arts college. Large universities have much more diversity than smaller colleges - for example, here at UCLA there’s groups like Pilipinos for Community Health, Turkish Cultural Club, Persian-American Jewish Organization, etc. These are very specialized groups that you wouldn’t have sufficient people for at most liberal arts colleges or even some of the smaller private universities. On the other hand, liberal arts colleges do a fantastic job of offering small, tight-knit communities, where many students know each other. (After all, most liberal arts colleges are about the size of an average high school or even smaller.) For students wanting to work themselves into such a community - a shy student, for example - liberal arts colleges can be the way to go. Traditions like Tinker Day at Hollins and Renn Fayre at Reed serve to unite the whole student bodies in a way that you don’t really get at larger universities, though many have traditions of their own that some students choose to participate in. </p>
<p>If you’re undecided about which size of college you prefer, I think your first step should be visiting representatives of each size, which should give you an idea of where you feel comfortable. If you’re still undecided after that, your best tactic is to simply include both LACs and smaller private universities in your application list.</p>
<p>I second the advice of visiting several examples of each type of school that interests you. My observation is that most kids have a pretty strong reaction to liberal arts colleges–either “too small” or “just right.” It is true that at the Ivies and similar private schools you will get some of the advantages of LACs, but in a larger setting.</p>
<p>As far as class sizes go, look at the schools’ actual class schedules to determine the class sizes of the classes you want to take.</p>
<p>If you are in a popular major (e.g. biology, economics, psychology), you should expect to find the largest classes for any given school. The same would apply for introductory level courses commonly taken by students in other majors (e.g. math, chemistry), although upper level courses may be much smaller if the major is less popular relative to faculty size there.</p>
<p>Some schools have small honors versions of some otherwise large introductory level courses.</p>
<p>Here’s a listing of class sizes at Williams College for past 4 years :
[Spring</a> 2013 Class Size Info](<a href=“Williams College”>Williams College)
I see one class with an average of over 100 students (PSYCH 101 with 108 students).
For all economics courses, the largest 4-year average class size is 40 students. </p>
<p>At a large public flagship, introductory courses can be very large indeed.
Introduction to Economics at Berkeley shows an enrollment of 647 students.
General Psychology shows 467.
However, many other Psych courses show enrollments of less than 30 students.
[Search</a> Spring - Online Schedule Of Classes](<a href=“http://schedule.berkeley.edu/srchsprg.html]Search”>http://schedule.berkeley.edu/srchsprg.html)</p>
<p>Actually, many of the upper division psychology courses at Berkeley are pretty big as well, reflecting the popularity of the major. Psychology majors may not have that many small classes in their major, unless they take some graduate level or special topics courses.</p>
<p>On the other hand, math majors find that most upper division math courses are relatively small, and honors lower division math courses are also small (in contrast to the huge regular lower division math courses that lots of other majors need).</p>
<p>Another heavily enrolled course in many schools is general chemistry.</p>
<p>Thank you Warblersrule for the data, on the percentages of class sizes, I found that really helpful, can I ask where you got the data so I can look at some other schools too?</p>
<p>The top LACs are just as hard to get into as most of the Ivies. Their student populations are just as bright and one suspects that if you track them through life, they will do just as well. </p>
<p>You will, however, get a different educational experience. Not better, not worse, but different.</p>
<p>So, do your research and determne what’s best for you.</p>
<p>Another way is to Google [school name] + CDS. This will take you to the school’s Common Data Set file (if the school posts one, as many schools do). Section I has class size distributions.</p>
<p>However, if you are digging around the college’s web site for the common data set, you may as well look at the on-line schedules there to see what the actual class sizes are for the courses you are likely to take. It doesn’t matter if the school has small classes in Greek vase painting, nuclear fusion engineering, rhetoric of poetry, relativistic astrophysics and cosmology, etc. if you will be taking courses like introductory chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics, which are often the largest classes on any college campus.</p>
<p>You’ve really done your homework. I mean really. You have a terrific list. I wouldn’t add anything if St Johns College is your safety and you would be happy with a single Great Books curriculum with no majors. </p>
<p>I would start to delve more deeply and try to figure out the vibe of each school on your list and what you like and don’t like. For example Chicago and Columbia have very intellectual core curricula that really appeal to a lot of people. At Chicago, the entire school would have read Plato’s Republic and Karl Marx. </p>
<p>However, the universities on your list also have research faculty and you can likely go deeper into more diverse areas than you could at a LAC. Also, there are some subjects, such as linguistics, where there is very little offered at LACs. (Swarthmore is the only LAC with a real Linguistics department with bona fide linguists on the faculty). Sometimes that really gives you a jump if you are interested in pursuing graduate school in an academic subject.</p>
<p>I would definitely do both UChicago and St Johns Early Action so hopefully you’ll have bagged a safety by mid December. I’m not implying that UChicago is a safety, but if you get in, it becomes one, and that’s a pretty nice safety and could significantly reduce the number of applications that you need to file by January.</p>
<p>Nice catch. None of these schools had more than 2 permanent professors 4 years ago when my D was looking. Only Swarthmore. Maybe someone read my posts :-).</p>