<p>S is a current Vassar student majoring in bio. He is certainly not rich and does not have a car. Most of his friends receive financial aid and come from average income families.</p>
<p>He took a course in the astronomy dept and loved it. He got to go to an overnight astronomy conference just because he asked if he could. The school paid for the whole thing.</p>
<p>Most of his friends are not science majors. There is very little labeling- most students have friends from many different academic areas. </p>
<p>There have been some cuts this year due to the economy so some classes are only offered every other semester. Some advance planning is required.</p>
<p>The personal attention from the profs. is a very big part of the experience at Vassar. S calls most of them by first name. </p>
<p>When your D does her overnight tell her to check out All Shook Up–a new Fifties style malt shop that just opened on Raymond Ave.</p>
<p>Thanks, everyone. I’m passing this all onto my daughter.</p>
<p>Her list has been a mix of LACs and universities, but I think she is just coming to realize how much an LAC may be a better experience for her. She’s at a small high school and realizes how much the size suits her. Thanks for making the point about cuts and less frequent course offerings, joesboy. With already somewhat limited course offerings, this is something she will need to look at. But it may not be much different at other LACs (Swarthmore is the main contender). Time to dig through the course listings.</p>
<p>jym626–good to hear from a Vassar science grad.</p>
<p>Vassar, unlike most LACs, has an “open curriculum”. Students are attracted to open curriculum schools for varying reasons, but one of the most biggest reasons – though this is rarely acknowledged openly – is that it allows them to avoid math and science courses. Of course, different people dislike different subjects, but math and science seem to generate particular antipathy. </p>
<p>This is obviously not the case with astromom’s daughter; in fact, a demonstrated interest in math/science may boost her chances for admission. However, it is apparent that Vassar has a significantly lower percentage of math/science majors than most other selective LACs. Furthermore, it is quite possible that a large percentage of the Vassar student body use the open curriculum to take minimal (or even zero) math/science coursework. Given the low percentages of math/science majors and the (likely) low non-major math/science enrollment, you will probably find fewer math/science faculty and fewer resources at Vassar compared to most other top LACs. </p>
<p>This doesn’t mean that you can’t get a solid math/science education at Vassar, but you should look carefully to make sure that your interests are covered, because Vassar’s offerings may be limited even by LAC standards. On the other hand, Vassar is a large school by LAC standards, which may compensate to some extent.</p>
<p>Corbett–thanks for responding. It’s really helpful have a variety of ideas of how to look at this. I’m hoping it will help my D to ask the right questions. She’ll be on her own so I think it’s good to think this through and do lots of research before the visit.</p>
<p>My son is taking a math class this semester. Tonight I asked him about math and science. He does not know many (if any math majors) but feels that his math prof is amazing. He has one friend who is a physics major. He says the astronomy dept has a great reputation - and a great observatory.</p>
<p>The stats above on the number of math/science majors is a great one to gauge the interests of the students anywhere. Please remember that Vassar (and Wesleyan I will point out) is bigger at 24-2500 students than many other LAC’s so the smaller % does not necessarily mean dramatically fewer students in those areas though and, possibly like other schools, Psychology is a very popular major at Vassar that is considered a Social Science there, unlike some other schools. I remember see a statistic somewhere on the percentage of students in each major but cannot find that link right now. You might look for that stat at other places as well.</p>
<p>The course offerings at Vassar are very similar to the other LAC’s I have looked at in Math/Science. The upper level Science courses at Vassar may have fewer majors than at some places but they are all offered regularly. You can use this site - </p>
<p>to look at what courses have run in recent years and their enrollments. I am sure other schools have similar systems and they are very useful to study class size and offerings. </p>
<p>Please note that at many/most schools the pre-meds major in bio-chemitry these days so the “straight” Bio and Chem. upper level enrollments look to me to be lower than I remembered from years ago.</p>
<p>My D (Chemistry and Classics) has been able to find the academic intensity at Vassar that she was impressed by at Swarthmore but would have gone there if she had gotten in. I really liked our tour of Chicago but it didn’t impress my kids…what do they know!</p>
<p>Your D has a great list of schools that is simlar to what my kids looked at. I hope she has some great options to chose from in the end.</p>
<p>^^yea, I think it’s interesting how after you subtract Engineering from the tabulation (other than Swarthmore and possibly Harvey Mudd, you’d really be comparing apples to oranges) the leading research universities begin to resemble the larger LACs as far as per cent of (pure) science majors: </p>
<p>One easy conclusion one could jump to is that the percentage of science majors is inversely proportionate to the number and variety of other courses in a school’s catalogue.</p>
<p>The percentages above do not include Psychology for any school. They include all math, computer science, biological science, physical science, and engineering majors. I don’t know how you could arbitrarily pull engineering out of the equation. Certainly, at Swarthmore, engineering majors are sciency/mathy type students. The presence of engineering programs on campus attracts more math/science students and increases the size of that community in the campus culture. It would be like doing a social sciences tally and exlcuding political science.</p>
<p>i would agree with you were engineering as common a part of a traditional LAC’s curriculum as political science – but, it ain’t. There’s nothing “arbitrary” about calling engineering an outlier as far as the traditional liberal arts canon is concerned.</p>
All right then, excluding engineering from evaluation of science/math at Swarthmore would be like excluding the “Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought” program from an evaluation of social sciences at Amherst. Or it would be like excluding the “Film Studies” program from an evalution of humanities at Wesleyan. </p>
<p>LJST and Film Studies are also outliers as far as the traditional liberal arts canon is concerned, but they are still a significant part of the academic scene at their respective institutions. It’s not realistic to assume that they don’t exist.</p>
<p>Oh, I don’t agree with that, at all; LJST and FS are intrinsically interdisciplinary, deriving much of their sustenance from tranditonal liberal arts disciplines. I’d be shocked if the LJST department at Amherst did not include historians and political scientists, as well as an economist or two – just FS at Wesleyan includes faculty from the English and American Studies departments. Now, before you tell me Swarthmore’s Engineering faculty probably count among themselves their fair share physicists as well as mathematicians – I’m sure they do. But, I think their primary training would be in Engineering and that would be their profession. I don’t think the folk who teach LJST at Amherst consider themselves as lawyers or judges any more than the folk who teach FS at Wesleyan consider themselves film makers.</p>
At least three of the currently tenured faculty in the Amherst LJST department hold JD degrees. I don’t know whether they consider themselves to be “lawyers”, but they certainly have professional training as such.
According to the Wesleyan FS website, the current faculty include one assistant prof who is described as a “writer/director” of “several award-winning shorts” and one “feature film”. There is also a visiting prof who is described as an “artist, writer, and filmmaker,” with a list of venues where her films have been screened.</p>
<p>These profs are the two that teach actual film making classes as opposed to the “studies” part of film studies at Wes. It is also really recently that they’ve added a film maker (Steve) as a full time part of the staff. Basically, I think JW is right that the actual FS profs (the ones who built the major and are responsible for most of the classes) wouldn’t consider themselves filmmakers, though it is also true that production is part of the major. I’m not sure how that plays into either side of the argument, but I thought it was worth clarifying, since it is not clear from the site. [/random and a little OT, but maybe helpful, since you’re using other schools in comparison]</p>
<p>Same data with the engineering majors removed:</p>
<p>30.0% – Carleton College
26.3% – Grinnell College
26.0% – Haverford College
24.2% – Swarthmore College
23.5% – Williams College
23.1% – Bryn Mawr College
21.9% – Harvard University
17.8% – Pomona College
16.8% – Davidson College
16.6% – Bowdoin College
16.0% – Dartmouth College
15.2% – Brown University
14.8% – Amherst College
14.5% – Princeton University
13.8% – Washington and Lee University
13.6% – Smith College
13.4% – Yale University
12.2% – Wesleyan University
11.7% – Wellesley College
11.2% – Middlebury College
10.8% – Vassar College
9.7% – Claremont McKenna College</p>
<p>I don’t personally care how many math/science majors there are at Vassar. Somehow, in your book, no college can ever compete with Swarthmore, which is apparently the world’s best school.<br>
That comment was totally uncalled for.</p>
<p>Psychology is a department with courses that bridge social science and science. At many schools, some psych courses satisfy science requirements while other psych courses satisfy social science courses. I’ve run across quite a few colleges that include all of their psych majors in their tally of science majors, presumably to boost the numbers. I think that’s a bit misleading.</p>
<p>I beleive that the IPEDs database will provide that data if anyone would like to tally it. There’s also a category including forestry science, fishery science, and agricultural science that is not included in the percentages above.</p>
<p>And, yes, for the record, I do think that only having 10% to 11% math and science majors is an issue for a liberal arts college, especially for a prospective science major. That is analagous to an theater major considering MIT. MITs a great school, but if it doesn’t have much interest in theater, then it probably wouldn’t be a good match.</p>