Question on Liberal Arts Colleges

<p>I haven't had much of an opportunity to hear about LACs. Are these schools just colleges that focus mainly on liberal arts. Do have even have science, math classes offered there? How much do they focus on science and math? How are they different from universities?</p>

<p>LACs can have wonderful science and math programs. One of the major misconceptions about them is that they only teach humanities. Some of them have higher percentages of students going on to get PhDs in math and science than top universities (including Ivies).</p>

<p>BTW, I am interested in math and biology, and I am considering the following LACs:</p>

<p>Smith*
Wesleyan*
Swarthmore
Haverford
Carleton*
Macalester
Oberlin
Reed*
Lewis and Clark</p>

<p>*well-known for math and science</p>

<p>Don't forget Harvey Mudd. Perhaps best LAC for math/science, plus in the claremont group = cross registration with 4 other schools, which are great in humanities also, if you decide for more options.</p>

<p>For getting into grad school LACs do very well.</p>

<p>All Schools:</p>

<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>Williams</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Amherst</li>
<li>Swarthmore</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Pomona</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
<li>Wellesley</li>
<li>Penn</li>
<li>Georgetown</li>
<li>Haverford</li>
<li>Bowdoin</li>
<li>Rice</li>
<li>Northwestern</li>
<li>Claremont</li>
<li>Middlebury</li>
<li>Hopkins</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
</ol>

<p><a href="http://www.wsjclassroom.com/college/feederschools.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.wsjclassroom.com/college/feederschools.htm&lt;/a>
<a href="http://www.wsjclassroom.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.wsjclassroom.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Thanks for the post, Slipper. I found that to be very interesting. Makes me wonder about where to go...</p>

<p>Just an observation about the "feeder schools" ranking above. I believe it was based on an inadequate sample of graduate schools (10 different) by Wall Street Journal. They double-counted graduate schools if they had both MBA and Law, for example. I think almost all were from the Northeast and almost half were Ivys. I am speaking from memory. They obviously have some good "feeder" schools in their list but I wouldn't give the rankings or the list much weight because of the sloppy "quick and dirty" method.</p>

<p>That WSJ article is very misleading, and needs to be taken with a large grain of salt. First of all, it applies to <em>professional school</em> admissions only--Law schools, medical schools, and business schools only--NOT graduate school admission in say, math or biology (or any other discipline).</p>

<p>But it's not even a good study of feeder schools to the "top" professional schools, due their arbitrary limiting the study to the "top" five in each category, and some very glaring omissions even within those choices. </p>

<p>The absurdity of this study (and I mean no offense to you, Slipper!) can best be illustrated by considering Stanford University, which the article ranks as their #4 feeder school to "top" professional schools, just behind Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. But if a person graduates from Stanford and decides to attend Stanford's business school (#2 in US News), or its law school (#3 in US News) or its medical school (tied with Columbia at #8 in US News) that person doesn't count, in this study, as one who went on to one of the "top" professional schools in those fields. By strangely limiting their "top" schools to only five in each category, they eliminating a host of other "top" schools that are the equals of their choices by any possible measure--excellence, fame, prestige, you name it. Below is the "fine print" from the bottom of their article explaining their methodology. (and in response to the original question--YES, LACs are a great choice for math and science.)</p>

<p>"We focused on 15 elite schools, five each from medicine, law and business, to serve as our benchmark for profiling where the students came from. Opinions vary, of course, but our list reflects a consensus of grad-school deans we interviewed, top recruiters and published grad-school rankings (including the Journal's own MBA rankings). So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale."</p>

<p>Driver and Collegehelp,</p>

<p>I don't know if you can call the rankings flawed if they clearly state the schools they are considering elite. Moreover, in considering the top 5 schools in each category it would seem to follow that the next five would reflect similar patterns of acceptance--unless there is some great statistical glitch after the first five have been ticked off.</p>

<p>There will certainly be exceptions, but as they say, exceptions usually reinforce the rule rather than replace the rule with an alternative rule.</p>

<p>I don’t think anyone would base a decision on the WSJ ranking of feeder schools, but I think it would be an important piece in any decision involving the possibility of going on to a top MED, LAW or BUS school after graduation, since there is a shortage of accessible information out there.</p>

<p>I suppose that is why the WSJ published them.</p>

<p>Miracle - universities are insitutions with graduate programs. Just like an airport with one flight a day to Mexico can be called "international" so can a school with one Master's degree program be called a "University"
LACs are colleges, that is undergraduate institutions only, although a few have extremely limited numbers of grad students. The idea is that they focus primarily on undergraduate education.
There is a lot of crossover - universities teach undergrads, and LACs have faculty members doing research.
Both groups have advantages and disadvantages - look on the website of a top LAC, somewhere, probably in the "About Us" or introductory material, you will find a description of what a LAC is about. Also look at the "Colleges that Change Lives" website, it disscusses some lesser known LACs, and the pros of a LAC education.</p>

<p>Driver,</p>

<p>I agree the study isnt perfect at all. A better study would have included perhaps the top 10 grad schools at each. Regardless of how close it is to being exact, it does show some real trends though, i.e. at a reasonably good selection of top schools LACs tend to do very well. Also, they clearly state this is for professional schools in the link.</p>

<p>yemaya13, with those particular interests, you might check out Bryn Mawr as well.</p>

<p>Bryn Mawr for sure. It has excellent science and math programs. I think I read somewhere that it produces more future female physics PhDs on a per capita basis than any college or university in the country with the exception of MIT.</p>

<p>Kalidescope-
The Wall Street Journal list of "feeder schools" is flawed because of its method. It should not be used as a factor in making a decision about which school to attend. Their basic idea was good (ranking undergraduate schools based on professional and graduate school destinations) but their method was awful. I think the reason WSJ published the list was to sell more papers without doing any hard work. It was more like tabloid journalism. The fact that they happened to identify some great schools does not excuse their unscientific approach.</p>

<p>Sloppy methods like this could result in public misinformation. WSJ has no way to tell whether a more scientific method would yield similar results. Although I personally think highly of most of the schools on their list, there is no way to know its accuracy without doing the "feeder school" study over again in a more skillful manner.</p>

<p>I object to the incompetent manner in which they conducted this project and the fact that they presented the information as though it was from a scientific survey. Readers could easily draw the wrong conclusions. It wouldn't be so bad if they had emphasized the limitations of their article to the reader. I am not making a comment about Liberal Arts Colleges. I am simply surprised that the Wall Street Journal would do this. </p>

<p>Their headline called it "a comprehensive ranking of America's most successful feeder schools", which is not true. They referred to their list almost exclusively as a "grad school" list, which it is not. They make it sound like an extensive survey when it was not:
"To compile our list of the most effective feeder colleges, we researched the background of more than 5,000 students starting at more than a dozen top business, law and medical schools this fall, including names like Harvard Law and the Wharton MBA. Our survey canvassed grad-school admissions offices, spoke to officials at more than 50 colleges and in some cases counted up kids one by one in student "face book" directories." </p>

<p>It was actually 10 different universities. They claim their 10 schools was a consensus based on discussions with Deans, recruiters, and guide books. They could only come up with 10? Nine schools of 15 provided their own lists to WSJ, the rest were from the face books. Their data was just a one-year look, not an average over several years. The 10 elite schools in their benchmark list accept a lot of students from themselves.... their own undergraduate programs.</p>

<p>The ranking was based on a sort of percent with class size in the denominator. What goes into the denominator? U Michigan has a large undergraduate population of engineering students very few of whom aspire to law, medicine, or business school. How does "New College of Florida" count as a separate college rather than the Florida State system? How does Reed College wind up at 50th? Are Cornell's agriculture, hotel management, engineering, and human ecology students included in the class size? Were Northwestern's communications students included in their class size?</p>

<p>I want to point out a better study that was done by the US Dept of Education called the "Weighted Baccalaureate Origins Study". I have not been able to obtain a copy of the complete document but I think Reed was in the top 10 in almost every PhD field. It would be very interesting to compare the results of the "Weighted Baccalaureate Origins Study" with the Wall Street Journal "feeder school" article. Anybody out there have it?</p>

<p>Here tis:</p>

<p><a href="http://web.centre.edu/ir/student/OverallBaccOrigins.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://web.centre.edu/ir/student/OverallBaccOrigins.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>It too must be taken with two handfuls of salt. It weights class size, but doesn't weight the number of students who enter as "mature students" (who are much less likely to go on for higher degrees), family income on entry (students from lower income backgrounds are much more likely to go out and get jobs on graduation and/or will be less willing to take on more debt), or even "academic preparation" on entry (with such a correction, one may be measuring the quality of the students before they entered, rather than anything the school actually did for them.) It also doesn't factor in social work terminal degrees (MSWs usually), and I'm not sure whether it factors in Ed.D.s. And it doesn't factor out those who go on to professional degrees rather than Ph.D.s.</p>

<p>But it is light years better than the WSJ piece, which is made even worse by the fact that the professional schools they chose are the most "spendy", and hence likely to attract a disproportionate share of high-income students, independent of their academic quality. (hey, this IS WSJ!)</p>

<p>Reed would indeed be high in PhD categories, but this is a much more professional school based survey. I think the survey should be renamed. My only issue with the survey is that it doesnt include the top ten schools. How can you include Michigan's law school but not NYU for example. Overall though it paints a relatively clear picture that the LACs are very competitive at the highest level.</p>

<p>Slipper,
They do state that it's professional schools in the text, but you posted the list as one ranked on "getting into grad schools," and I wanted to clarify for anyone who just looked at the list....many of the people I've seen commenting on that list here are under the mistaken impression that it is a grad school admissions ranking, generally.</p>

<p>Yes, including 10 top schools in each category would have solved most of this study's problems. For example, the US News top 5 and the WSJ's top 5 (in each category) differ substantially, but all of WSJ's top fives appear in US News' top 10 for each category, and I think an expanded WSJ group would have contained most of the same schools as USN (I don't think USNews rankings are the bible--it's just an easily accessible and familiar benchmark). This would have ameliorated the study's enormous regional skew, as would have the addition of Northwestern's b-school and WashU's medical school, Duke's law and med schools, UVa law--USN top-10s all. </p>

<p>For example, it states that Pomona sends half its graduates on to grad school. What if a substantial number of them choose to stay in sunny CA, and go to one of Stanford's 3 professional schools, or to Berkeley for b-school, instead of coming to the dreary cold northeast? Pomona's place on the WSJ might be dramatically different, had those top-10 grad schools been included. Same for Swarthmore, which sends lots of students to UPenn Law, and UPenn Medical. Take Penn itself, as an example. The article mentions that Penn is now taking record numbers of its own grads at its medical school. But because its medical school (#4 in USN) doesn't make the WSJ's top 5, that doesn't count in the study.</p>

<p>Anyway, I'm a big fan of LACs (my daughter's came out smelling like a rose in the WSJ) and of the Wall Street Journal, but I was disappointed in the half-baked feel of this particular study.</p>

<p>If I recall correctly the WSJ only showed results for a few of the top schools in three professional disciplines, with a distinct regional bias, and only for A SINGLE YEAR. Is this right?</p>

<p>It would have been more interesting if more of the top schools had been included, and if it were a multi-year survey, not just a survey of one particular year.</p>

<p>Besides which, these are not"grad schools" at all, they are professional schools. The WSJ article did not survey any grad schools whatsoever.</p>

<p>I don't think one should draw very hard and fast conclusions from just one year's data.</p>

<p>Thanks, monydad! I am interested in Bryn Mawr, and there are many others that I did not list earlier.</p>

<p>Driver,</p>

<p>I 100% agree with you. WSJ Business school rankings are notoriously skewed. I think top 10 takes out alot of those concerns, especially the regional ones. You are right to mention the Stanford grad schools particularly.</p>