<p>I'm thinking about applying to some liberal arts colleges. How can I see what majors are good in certain liberal arts colleges? USNews does not have this information.</p>
<p>You can start by looking at their faculty rosters and course offerings.</p>
<p>While it may be unrealistic to expect a small LAC to have as many offerings each semester as a big research university, for a given subject, different small LACs may have varying numbers and types of courses offered. For subjects you are considering for a major, sufficient advanced offerings should be checked for; it does little good if the subject exists only to offer introductory level courses for students in other majors to take as breadth courses.</p>
<p>If you are extremely advanced in the subject you want to major in, undergraduate-only LACs may not be good fits at all, since highly advanced students may want to take graduate level courses as undergraduates (while skipping the introductory level courses where LACs have the biggest advantages in small faculty-led classes). However, this is mainly an issue for math majors who are two or more grade levels ahead (calculus BC as high school juniors or earlier).</p>
<p>The Fiske Guide to Colleges lists some of a school’s strongest programs (if the college is on the list). It’s also helpful to look at potential majors, see what courses are offered, find how many faculty are in each department, and look for any special programs within that department. If you give a list of the schools you’re considering, people familiar with the schools may be able to help.</p>
<p>A LAC with convenient cross-registration with a research university (e.g. Barnard access to Columbia, for women) may be a good way to get the advantages of a LAC but also have access to the resources of a research university if you want something not available at the LAC.</p>
<p>What majors benefit from the access to research at universities? I’m undecided, but I may be thinking about a math, economics, or engineering major. </p>
<p>And I’m thinking about applying to Colgate University, College of the Holy Cross, Oberlin College, and Bucknell University.</p>
<p>Access to a research university can allow a student at a LAC to access a greater variety of advanced undergraduate courses, graduate level courses, and research opportunities. This is mainly an advantage to a more advanced student who could potentially exhaust the offerings at the LAC (e.g. a likely math major who has completed calculus BC as a high school junior and is now taking college sophomore math as a high school senior).</p>
<p>What math will you complete by high school graduation?</p>
<p>For economics, if you want to go to graduate school in economics, look for an economics department that emphasizes math and statistics in economics at a school with decent math and statistics departments (sometimes combined). This often includes an intermediate (sophomore/junior level) microeconomics course that has a math prerequisite beyond freshman calculus.</p>
<p>For engineering, it is generally best to go to a school which offers it “natively” instead of through a 3+2 program – 3+2 programs are commonly advertised, but have a number of issues (e.g. uncertainly about admission and financial aid to the “2” school, not wanting to transfer away from the friendly small LAC to a giant university to finish engineering, etc.) that may make it less likely to complete an engineering degree. (However, a very focused student may be able to use a 3+2 program to complete an engineering degree with more non-major courses than otherwise, due to the total of 5 instead of 4 years of schedule space.)</p>
<p>So you’re saying for math (I’m not ahead in math) and economics majors, I should go to the school that is the best fit, whether that be a LAC or a big university? But for engineering majors, I should go to a big university?</p>
<p>Best fit for you in any of the majors does not necessarily exclude either LACs or research universities (unless LAC or research university is one of your actual criteria). Presumably, the availability of subjects you want to major in is important, as is net cost.</p>
<p>Engineering does exist “natively” at some LACs like Bucknell, Harvey Mudd, Smith, and Swarthmore, although the latter three have everything combined in one general engineering degree program instead of specific degree programs for chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical, etc. engineering.</p>
<p>There does not appear to be any comprehensive, up-to-date ranking of majors or departments focused on undergraduate programs, period, whether at liberal arts colleges or at universities. </p>
<p>As others have suggested, you can browse the online course listings to observe the breadth and depth of offerings in a major. Read the course descriptions to see if any sound especially interesting. You can also look up the faculty profiles to see how many full time faculty are on staff, what are their interests, whether they have PhDs and if so, where they got them.</p>
<p>Some LACs do have reputations for strength in specific departments. Examples: Williams in Art History, Bowdoin in Political Science, Kenyon in English, Middlebury in Foreign Languages, Bryn Mawr in Classics, Beloit in Anthropology, Wesleyan in Film, some of the Keck Consortium colleges in Geology, etc. You can ask in this forum or in CC’s individual college forums whether the program you’re interested in seems to be strong at specific schools.</p>
<p>One objective measure that I consider relevant (not all posters would agree) is the per capita rate of PhD production. The theory: if a college exposes students to high-quality teaching, if it motivates and prepares them well for the most advanced work in a field, then a relatively high percentage of them will choose to do graduate work in that field and a relatively high percentage will earn the highest degrees. </p>
<p>You can compare colleges by numbers of PhDs produced in some fields by composing a search on this site:
<a href=“https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/[/url]”>https://webcaspar.nsf.gov/</a>
(results are in absolute numbers, not adjusted for program or school size; searching is not very user-friendly).</p>
<p>Here’s a list of the top 10 per capita in some popular fields:
[COLLEGE</a> PHD PRODUCTIVITY](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html]COLLEGE”>Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College)</p>
<p>PhD productivity seems to confirm department reputations in some cases.
For example, my son’s LAC has a highly-regarded Geology program; its PhD production in Geology is #2 among LACs and much higher than it is in some of its other departments I’ve checked. Williams and Amherst are 2 of the most selective, prestigious LACs, but Williams has a strong reputation in Mathematics while Amherst seems to be relatively weak in this field. Williams, as it turns out, has produced more than 2X the number of Math/Stat PhDs in the past 5 years as Amherst has. In contrast, Amherst (which long has had a highly regarded English department) has produced more than 2X the number of English/Literature PhDs in the past 5 years as Williams has. Kenyon (famous for its English & writing programs) has produced 15X as many PhDs in English as it has in Computer Science over the same period. Beloit (with its highly-regarded Anthropology department) produced ~2.5X the number of Anthro PhDs as Psychology PhDs in 2006-10 (even though all LAC alumni earned nearly 5X as many Psych PhDs as Anthro PhDs in the same period).</p>
<p>Math and economics are very different from engineering, because the former two are usually offerred as majors within a liberal arts college (whether a stand-alone LAC or a college of arts and sciences within a university), while engineering is often a separate school with a separate application process. Almost every school I’ve looked at requires engineering students to declare their major in the application and write a separate essay about why they chose engineering. If you’re a junior or younger, I would highly recommend exploring engineering further now so you can decide whether or not its for you–take advanced science classes in school and over the summer to be sure you can handle the pressure, try a job shadow or internship at an engineering firm. Aim to know whether or not you’ll apply to the engineering school by senior year. </p>
<p>I recommend obtaining a copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges and looking at the list of “Small Colleges Strong in Engineering”. Your local library should have a copy.</p>
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Rugg’s Recommendations would be more helpful, I think, as it provides suggestions of colleges for each major. Fiske is an extremely useful college guide, but it focuses on providing a broad overview of its colleges.</p>
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Carolyn, a very knowledgeable former poster, came up with a rather excellent set of guidelines many years ago for doing this.</p>
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<p>Ahh, I did not realize the rankings from USNews were mostly for graduate school, and not undergraduate programs. So the strength of a major in graduate school has no bearing on the strength of a major in an undergraduate program?</p>
<p>A highly ranked graduate department presumably has faculty who are productive researchers in their field. This may be beneficial to undergraduates, provided those faculty teach undergraduates, they are effective teachers, and they integrate their research into their teaching.</p>
<p>Research seems to be divided on the relationship between research productivity and teaching effectiveness:
<a href=“http://www.sfu.ca/content/dam/sfu/teachingandcourseeval/documents/Aleamoni_Student_Rating_Myths.pdf[/url]”>http://www.sfu.ca/content/dam/sfu/teachingandcourseeval/documents/Aleamoni_Student_Rating_Myths.pdf</a> (see Myth #2).
[Research</a> Productivity and Teaching Effectiveness.](<a href=“http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED215637&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED215637]Research”>http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED215637&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED215637)
<a href=“The Department of Physics”>The Department of Physics; </p>
<p>(The consensus appears to be that there is no evidence in practice of a strong positive correlation between research productivity and teaching effectiveness.)</p>
<p>The usefulness of a good graduate department in your major is not so much the teaching quality, but the availability of more advanced courses and research opportunities if you are advanced enough to take advantage of them.</p>
<p>Imagine if your high school had a solid college-prep curriculum, but did not have any AP, dual enrollment, etc. type of courses for more advanced students to take, or had such courses that were low quality so that students taking them needed to retake them in college anyway due to low scores on AP tests and placement tests given in college. Such a high school may be fine for many college-bound students, but those who are advanced would exhaust the offerings there. That could be analogous to an advanced undergraduate in college running out of courses in his/her major and not finding very interesting research opportunities.</p>
<p>Whether this might apply to you in your major is something you have to evaluate for yourself.</p>
<p>If engineering is in the running as a potential major, yet you like LACs, consider some of the smaller engineering programs such as Bucknell, Union, Lafayette etc. as well as smaller universities such as Tufts, U. Rochester, Case Western etc. These types of schools may have all the features you are looking for.</p>
<p>^^ So it would be interesting to investigate whether, given a highly ranked graduate department, the undergraduate program is in fact likelier to include more advanced courses. </p>
<p>According to P’ton Review, the most popular liberal arts major is Psychology. According to the USNWR graduate department rankings, UC Berkeley has a very highly-ranked graduate Psychology program (tied w/Stanford for #1). In the Fall of 2012, Berkeley offered 20 upper-level (100 or above) Psychology courses. That was for approximately 300 Psychology majors (~4% of ~7500 undergraduate degrees conferred), or 1 upper level course for every 14.9 Psych majors.
[Undergraduate</a> Courses | Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley](<a href=“http://psychology.berkeley.edu/undergraduate-program/courses]Undergraduate”>http://psychology.berkeley.edu/undergraduate-program/courses)</p>
<p>Compare these with the numbers for some highly ranked LACs. In the Fall of 2012, Amherst offered 14 upper-level (200 or above) Psychology courses. That was for approximately 34 Psychology majors (~7% of ~480 undergraduate degrees conferred), or 1 upper level course for every 2.4 Psych majors.
<a href=“https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/psychology/courses[/url]”>Courses | Psychology | Amherst College;
<p>In the Fall of 2012, Carleton offered 12 upper-level (200 or above) Psychology courses. That was for approximately 30 Psychology majors (~6% of ~500 undergraduate degrees conferred), or 1 upper level course for every 2.5 Psych majors.
<a href=“https://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/psyc/courses/?order_courses_by_term=1[/url]”>Courses – Psychology – Carleton College;
<p>So in fact Berkeley does not offer many more upper level Psych courses relative to the department size, compared to these two LACs. In fact, the opposite is the case. Still, in absolute numbers, Berkeley does offer a greater number of advanced courses. One might expect this to provide greater opportunities for exposure to advanced research in the field. If so, one might expect a higher percentage of Berkeley’s Psychology majors to go on to complete advanced degrees in this field. </p>
<p>In fact, this does not appear to be the case. For every 100 Psychology majors in 2006-10, Berkeley alumni earned about 9 PhDs in Psychology. In contrast, Carleton and Amherst alumni earned about 14 PhDs in Psychology per 100 Psych majors.
(Source: <a href=“https://webcaspar.nsf.gov%5B/url%5D”>https://webcaspar.nsf.gov</a>)</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that a talented, motivated undergraduate can get more exposure to bleeding-edge research at Berkeley than at Carleton or Amherst. I would not assume, however, that the average Psych major at Berkeley therefore necessarily will get a richer, more challenging education. In my opinion, the greater student-faculty engagement fostered in a LAC environment may be a bigger advantage for many students than the presence of advanced research activity. Of course, a lot depends on how you take advantage of the opportunities available at any school.</p>
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<p>Is that necessarily due to the LAC environment, or the self-selection of students who choose to attend a LAC (or a specific LAC or non-LAC)?</p>
<p>Berkeley is no exception to the “big state flagship university” characteristic that its students contain both those with top end academic ability and motivation and those who are content to just slide through academically while majoring in “fermented beverage social studies” and the like.</p>
<p>Anyway, the OP’s likely majors are not psychology. Amherst would be a poor fit due to not having engineering and having a relatively limited math department (although cross registration with a nearby big state flagship university might help). Carleton also does not have engineering.</p>