<p>Hi, I've been accepted into UCBerkeley, UCLA, and Swarthmore, and I would like to pursue English Lit. as my major.</p>
<p>Truthfully, I love discussion and the 8-1 student professor ratio that Swarthmore can provide, but my mother's been pushing me towards UCBerkeley since she believes UCB's name is worth more and she read somewhere that Swarthmore was ranked the most difficult college to receive grades (then again, you could say this anywhere). But at the same time, all three English departments look extremely promising, and I'm feeling a bit tortured right now...</p>
<p>Worse, I've received invitations from both Berkeley and Swarthmore to visit their respective campuses, but UCB's on Apr. 18-21 and Swarthmore Apr. 18-19.</p>
<p>If anyone could give me any advice, please, please post. Thanks!</p>
<p>Cost differences? Are you a resident of California, or are you OOS? I know very satisfied english majors at both Berkeley and UCLA and Swarthmore’s humanities are extremely strong. If you can picture yourself at a small LAC and can afford to do so, I’d personally choose Swarthmore, even though it’s one of the most grade deflated schools in the nation (at least according to 1990s era Berkeley Law).</p>
<p>I’m just wondering if Swarthmore is as connected to the humanities as people say. And I did hear that Swarthmore was ranked as the most difficult college to get good grades. Is that true?</p>
<p>Do some digging for comparative data on student outcomes.
I think you’d find that Swarthmore alumni significantly out-perform Berkeley alumni for admission to top professional schools (law,medicine,business) or for PhD production per capita in the humanities. According to payscale.com data, Swarthmore alumni have slightly higher average mid-career salaries ($104K v. $103K); these figures exclude alumni with graduate degrees (which means they probably exclude relatively more of Swarthmore’s strongest students, since so many of them do pursue advanced studies.) Of course, these numbers may be inflated by the fact that Swarthmore is an even more selective college, so it is cherry-picking a higher percentage of top students.</p>
<p>Does UCLA have an open house that does not conflict with Swarthmore’s? If so, go to both. Schedule a separate visit to Cal. Try to sit in on introductory English/lit classes at each school.</p>
<p>At Swarthmore you’ll have an ability to get to know your profs really well. Pick that! Outstanding reputation for those in the know I would say. Go visit!</p>
<p>^Those rankings are of no use to this student in making his undergraduate decision because they rank from within a predetermined list of world universities with graduate programs. The criteria also use citation counts from databases that aren’t important for humanities research in the US. </p>
<p>Swarthmore is the best place to study undergraduate English on your list.</p>
<p>What do you mean by “connected to the humanities”, and what people are describing Swarthmore this way? </p>
<p>According to the US News college site, 7% of Swarthmore students major in psychology, 29% in other social sciences. 12% major in the biological sciences. 8% major in foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; 7% major in English. This does not look like a major tilt toward the humanities.</p>
<p>You can check out more details about the distribution of majors in Swarthmore’s Common Data Set, section J.</p>
<p>Tk, it means that Swarthmore leads phD production in the humanities which is often a good indicator to see which LACs especially emphasize certain programs. For instance, Carleton leads in phD productivity for the geosciences. From that information I can guess that its geology program is likely very strong and very well funded (I’d be correct.) </p>
<p>Btw, over 22% of all students majored in some sort of humanities field. Compared to most other schools, that’s an enormously high percent. 14% of all Berkely students studied some pure humanities field. Of course UCB is several orders of magnitude larger than Swarthmore, but the point still stands that Swarthmore does, by every measure, put a large emphasis on humanities.</p>