<p>Professor’s kids are like kids in the general public. Some need universities. Some are better served by LACs. Some go to community colleges. Some go into the armed forces after high school. Very advanced students who already know what field they intend to study probably won’t be as well served by LACs as research universities, unless they are able to be mentored. imho</p>
<p>You look at the individual student and their needs and then you pick out the school.
Or at least that is how we did it at our house.</p>
<p>edit: my guess is that more LACs than universities offer free tuition to faculty kids… just because most free tuition programs I know of are at LACs. I am basing this guess on a very small sample, probably less than two dozen, very small. Also these programs change a lot over time.</p>
<p>I was speaking of lower-level graduate courses not cross-listed for advanced undergrad/grad students. My classmates and their advisors didn’t even bother with those…even their advisors felt such courses would be a waste of their time considering their undergraduate preparation. </p>
<p>Moreover, if/when they advanced beyond courses available in their given departments, they could avail themselves of independent research courses and/or specially arranged research projects to ensure they don’t feel stalled in their education at their respective LACs.</p>
<p>I think another reason that professors might send their kids to LACs is that they realize that because those schools are less known, they are (somewhat) easier to get in than the most selective research universities. That might be another result of insider knowledge. For example, the middle 50% stats at Amherst are less than those at HYP, but about the same as Brown or Penn. It makes a lot of sense to put those top LACs in the mix if you want a reach school–and it’s true that lots of people won’t know to do that.</p>
<p>And many are heavily influenced by their parents. And the most knowledgeable parents tend to send their kids to LACs.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You have any data to back that (“I think that another reason”) up?</p>
<p>As long as we’re speculating, perhaps it’s because they realize that:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>and perhaps they believe that having a faculty member take an interest in their kid is more important than impressing the neighbors with a decal in the back window of the SUV.</p>
<p>Couldn’t it just be that these types of LACs are more affordable to profs than to the general public? As someone mentioned earlier, there are tuition exchange programs that could discount the very high cost of many LACs. Also, the average professor makes more than the average American and I would venture to guess that they put away a pretty penny for their kids’ education funds that many Americans do not because they (working in academia) know the extremely high cost of college.</p>
<p>Plus, many students do not even know what LACs are. They go to their public state schools because they were never forced to look at other ones (such as small privates, especially those who aren’t in the immediate area of LACs). When I was looking at some small LACs in Michigan, many of my high school friends had never heard of them despite the fact that we live quite close to some of them.</p>
<p>Actually attending a school like Swat would be exactly that…even at my university obsessed math/science public magnet high school. Swat was considered about on par or in some cases…more impressive than HYP because of Swat’s reputation for its notoriously heavy rigorous academic workload and harsh grading. We also had similar levels of respect for Reed for the same reasons…even though USNWR screwed them on the rankings.</p>
What, you mean data that it’s easier to get into Amherst than Harvard? The College Board report of middle 50% of SATs shows that pretty clearly. As to whether that’s the reason professors send their kids there, my speculation is as good as the one you quoted above. They could both be part of the reason, of course. It’s also possible that the children of professors have different career goals than the average student, and that may lead to different choices as well.</p>
<p>If they’re getting tuition remission for private LACs…they’re also just as applicable for elite private universities including the Ivies. It is not always one or the other. </p>
<p>Moreover, from chatting with them…the common perception I heard is that reputable LACs provide a much better undergraduate educational environment than what they’ve experienced as Profs/students at the larger universities they teach at…including the Ivies*. </p>
<ul>
<li>In a few undergrad classes I’ve taken/sat in on at a few Ivies during my undergrad years…I was shocked at how much more passive most of the undergrads were compared to what I’ve seen at my own LAC. There’s a great difference between undergrad classes where only a handful dominate all class discussions during the semester (Ivies) and those where every student can’t wait to contribute intelligently to the class discussion/debate(my LAC) and discussions often continue past lunch, dinner, and well into the following morning in study groups/dorm lounges.</li>
</ul>
<p>Not quite. CBS News and “The Thinking Student’s Guide to College” overstated the case. </p>
<p>I looked up the original paper (“Where do the children of professors attend college?” by John Siegfried and Malcolm Getz, April 2006). Table 1 gives the percentage of faculty kids who matriculate to each type of Carnegie classification for parents who work at research universities, LACs, and then for parents who aren’t in the biz but who have high incomes, advanced academic degrees, or who work as professionals. They exclude faculty kids who are attending their parent’s campus. </p>
<p>The big Carnegie classifications that we care about here are the Research U’s and the LACs. Let’s take a look at the data (crossing fingers formatting works for all):</p>
<p>
Parent @ Parent $100k
Student Institution Research U @ LAC Income
Research 50.6% 31.7% 42.2%
Liberal Arts 23.0 43.7 14.0
</p>
<p>Yes, professors’ children are far more likely to attend LACs than are children from a comparable general population. But a significant percentage of faculty offspring attend research universities. Among the offspring of research U professors, a majority end up attending other research universities. That’s not the same thing as saying that “the most knowledgeable parents tend to send their kids to LACs.”</p>
<p>But what do I know, I was educated at research U’s. Great big ones! ;)</p>
<p>Back on the original topic–I don’t think this guy has a leg to stand on. If he’s such a hotshot researcher that he belongs in the pantheon where he only has to teach one class a week, then he should have no problem finding another job.</p>
<p>SlitheyTove: Thanks! I am not a good researcher and couldn’t find the original paper.</p>
<p>I have mixed feelings about the professor in the original post. At state schools it seems the legislature has a lot to do with how everything is run. When times are tight it may be fair for everyone to take on more duties rather than eliminating some positions. What I foresee though is this: if the typical teaching load for senior faculty was 2 classes a term and they agree to teach 3 … no way they are ever going back to 2. Solutions aren’t going to be temporary and they will really change state universities.</p>
<p>Probably because academic faculty know that the LACs exist in the first place, whereas the average high school student probably knows his/her local or in-state public and private schools, with recognition and awareness fading for further away schools.</p>
<p>Actually, even on these forums, even a lot of LAC advocates are unaware of the specific strengths and weaknesses of the LACs that they suggest, indicating that awareness of LACs (good and bad) seems to be LACking.</p>
<p>As the data SlitheyTove posted above suggests, it’s not so easy to tease out of those numbers what the motivation of the professors is. Also, I question to what extent those professors or other parents decided to “send” their kids to LACs vs. research universities in the first place. What about the kids? It appears from those data that the kids of LAC profs are more likely to go to LACs than the kids of university profs. Why? There are many possible answers–a belief that the teaching is better is certainly one of them.<br>
But perhaps they are also less likely to have the objection that I see most often from kids who are making this decision: that the LACs are too small. For my kids, and for others I know, the fact that a school has only 1000 kids is on the negative side of the ledger, and it’s even more so if the school is in a remote location.</p>
<p>From my own experience, I’d rather have a large lecture in an introductory course taught by a professor with excellent teaching skills than a twenty student course taught by somebody who’s not very good at teaching. I have a couple of friends from college days who now teach at major research universities, and who generally handle large lectures with platoons of TAs. They get rave reviews, not because the classes are easy (few computer science classes are) – they are both fabulous lecturers, who put tremendous time into planning their courses and training and managing TAs. They’ve seen students hit about every mental roadblock you can hit, and have worked and reworked lectures and course materials to help with that. </p>
<p>It doesn’t much matter whether a class has 60 students or 360 students when it is done very well. I would guess that their TAs also learn a lot about how to teach effectively through this whole process, which helps as they too eventually move into faculty positions. </p>
<p>LACs can be a great choice for some students, and some students absolutely need the smallest possible classes in order to make a connection with the material and the professor. Others are capable of success even when taking large lecture classes, as the droves of successful graduates from UCLA and Berkeley can attest.</p>
Really … so there must not be a lot of knowledgeable parent. If the top 50 LACs average 500 freshman a year that only totals 25,000 students … out of over 3 million seniors. So all those parents who send their kids to Harvard, Dartmouth, Berkeley, UVA, Cornell, etc in numbers that dwarf the number of kids who attend LACs are not knowledgeable?</p>
<p>3togo - parent of one child at a LAC and one at a OOS state school … both of whom picked what I thought was the obvious best choice for themselves among LAC and Research U choices.</p>
<p>PS - Annasdad, personally I find your posts written with moral certainty and demeaning of those holding opposite positions offensive.</p>
It is important not to conflate research universities with universities in general, which several posters on this thread have done. The number of high profile, research-geared universities is relatively small. According to NCES, the breakdown of four-year colleges is as follows:</p>
<p>48% LACs
36% Master’s U
5% Doctoral U (low/medium research)
5.5% Doctoral U (high research)
5.5% Doctoral U (very high research)</p>
<p>That picture does change significantly when considering enrollment numbers. Still, only slightly more than 1/3 of all students attend a university with a high or very high level of research: </p>
<p>19% LACs
35% Master’s U
10% Doctoral U (low/medium research)
15% Doctoral U (high research)
21% Doctoral U (very high research)</p>
<p>Universities like UCLA and NYU are the exception, not the rule. Many, many universities have their primary focus on teaching and expect their professors to teach 3 or 4 courses per semester. Admittedly, their larger size will usually make the attention of a LAC impossible. </p>
<p>The difference in dedication to teaching between a less selective private or a directional state university and a research-intensive university is often night and day. Is more dedication to undergraduates worth the trade-off for professors who may or may not be as qualified as those at the important research universities? Eh, that’s up to the individual applicant to decide.</p>