STEM girl realizes that LACS exist, now how to find the right one?

I love goldilocks threads precisely because they force me to look at a lot of different colleges from a brand-new perspective. For instance, it never would have occurred to me that Tufts didn’t have a clearly defined campus. I think the OP must mean something like the Claremont Colleges where each campus is separated from the city grid by a high wall, rather like a Yale quadrangle. Ironically, that would knock most of NESCAC out of contention. For, despite the fact that New Englanders - including, most famously, its favorite poet laureate, Robert Frost - have celebrated good walls making for good neighbors, very few of its LACs have them, preferring instead to hide in plain sight among the low-rise structures of small town life. Exceptions would include Trinity - but, then, in truthfulness, one would have to point out that the wall is there for a reason, the same reason Yale has gated entrances everywhere, to make people feel safer.

Less threatening immediate surroundings might include Smith which IIRC also has a wall, or at least a main gate, Barnard, and Vassar. These are all former women’s colleges for which a wall may have served a parietal function at some point in their histories.

Swarthmore, IIRC, is accessible only through certain carefully delineated entry points by car and then by foot (I guess, the train station would count as another entry point.) The same is true for the University of Richmond.

@circuitrider , I love the term "goldilocks thread’! I never thought about walls at any college, but now that you mention it, hardly any colleges we visited had them. It was indeed hard to get into Swarthmore. Personally, I much prefer open campuses where locals are allowed free access. My D, at Bates, has unexpectedly enjoyed the fact that local people come to the college for all kinds of reasons. It makes it feel more homey. The public come to many campus events. Just before term ended, the high school kids all showed up for prom pictures. Newlyweds come for photos too. All the college kids seem to love that the locals walk their dogs on campus, (which they clean up after) because many college kids are pet-starved! And the middle school is across the street, so they see those kids too.

We all particularly loved this about Dickinson. Such a cute town, and the campus is right in the middle of it. I love that campus.

@circuitrider “if you read the colleges my kid dropped” or “worst visit” type threads, you’d assume Tufts’ hills function as a wall quite well :))

@PurpleTitan, I think we were focused on SAT/ACT scores which unless one is from a non-English speaking country should do just as well as anyone else. One study regarding correlation https://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2015/6/research-report-sat-validity-primer.pdf.

JHU spends about $2 billion dollars per year on research. Duke spends over $1B (as several state universities do). The LACs with the highest activity, like Wesleyan, spend about $10M (or less) per year on research. So the scale at least is different (in keeping with the different institutional missions).

Don’t get me wrong, I love LACs. The quality & quantity of student-faculty engagement, including mentoring on research projects, may well be better at some LACs than at some top research universities. Nevertheless I do think national universities have a comparative advantage w.r.t. the scale and impact of cutting-edge STEM research projects. This may be an important consideration in college selection for some advanced students, in some STEM fields.

@Chembiodad: A study done on the predictive ability of the SAT by the company that profits from SAT testing.

Yeah, no conflict of interest there.

My point still stands that the SAT and ACT are so unchallenging that they really don’t differentiate academic rigor between top-level schools.

A better measure would be the percentage who get a 4 or 5 in AP tests, and how many, but that data would be tough to find.

Though it’s not quite as extreme as what you’ve posted here when you adjust for size. So, for example, JHU’s fiscal 2015 research spending was $2.3 billion (nearly double the next one on the list, BTW, and also including funding for the Applied Physics Laboratory, making this one really an unfair comparison) with a student body of 20,174, for $114k/student. Similarly, Duke’s expenditures were $1.0 billion for 14,832 students, or $69.9k/student. Wesleyan spent only $7.2 million on research over 3,138 students, or $2.3k/student.

So it still looks like there’s a big difference, but it’s a much smaller one. However, even this leaves out two important pieces of information:
[ul][]Wesleyan is 92.3% undergrad, while Duke and Hopkins are 43.5% and 26.4% undergrad, respectively. Given that research funding skews toward support of grad students and their research nearly across the board, I strongly question whether Duke’s and Hopkins’s numbers provide anything remotely like a valid comparison to Wesleyan’s, particularly with regard to questions about undergraduate experiences.
[
]Somewhat relatedly, Duke and Hopkins both have med schools, which inflates their research funding numbers dramatically.[/ul]
That last one is a big deal, actually. I couldn’t find 2015 numbers, but I did find a 2013 disaggregation of medical school and other research funding from federal sources. If we take non-med school funding out, both Duke’s and Hopkins’s federal research funding numbers drop precipitously, respectively by 59.0% and 25.2%. (Clearly, Duke’s research funding stream is pretty heavily reliant on med school funding in a way Hopkins isn’t; that’s probably explained by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Hopkins, but I’m not certain of that.)

And, of course, even looking at the reduced (non-med school) numbers, one has to take into account the funding of graduate programs at those schools.

TL;DR: Simply comparing research funding amounts to compare comprehensive universities with LACS doesn’t work.

Check out Case Western Reserve University:

It is a Engineering School merged with a LAC. You get the best of both worlds.
5000 Undergraduates.
Research for Undergrads: http://case.edu/source/
In Cleveland, but in the University Circle region, a mecca of culture
Hillel house: http://case.edu/hillel/

^^ @dfbdfb
Sure, all those differences are part of the picture. No LAC has a medical school or operates a DOE national lab. Graduate students get more opportunities than undergrads to claim major research project roles. But surely, undergrads get some benefit from those projects. If nothing else, major research opportunities and facilities tend to draw many top scholars, some of whom actually teach undergraduates (or mentor junior faculty).

The OP is considering UChicago. She says she likes history and politics as well as STEM. She likes discussion-based classes. UChicago has about 2x -3x as many undergrads as some large LACs. Nevertheless it has a higher percentage of “small” classes (78% < 20) than some LACs. Yet it employs about 3x as many history professors as Middlebury does (~48 to 16). Now, about 100 graduate history students must command a lot of faculty attention at UChicago. Still, even if the total history S:F ratio is better at some LACs, you’re likely to get far more coverage of centuries and continents at UChicago than any LAC can possibly offer. Is that wider coverage more important than exclusive focus on undergrads? Personally, since you can’t study too many centuries/continents in any depth, I’d tend to recommend a higher level of student-faculty engagement to a greater variety of courses. But it depends on what you want, your learning style, etc.

@wisteria100, a link to an interesting journal article that speaks to the differences in outcomes of those in the 99th percentile - http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721410391442

The attached link from the Cleveland Fed detailing spending per student at Public and Private Universities and Colleges doesn’t bode well for the OSS value proposition at the more expensive state universities - https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-commentary/2016-economic-commentaries/ec-201610-trends-in-expenditures-by-us-colleges-and-universities.aspx

@tk21769, I have no opinion about U Chicago as a match for this student but I’d caution you to be careful of the % of small classes statistic. What can be more telling is the number of large classes and how many students there are in each. For instance, Business Insider did a story on a couple of the largest classes at Harvard. One had 818 students, another had 711. So even though 45% of Harvard’s classes have 2-9 students and 28% have 10-20, in the fall semester almost a quarter of all students were in one of only two classes, and those two classes were enormous.
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-popular-course-at-harvard-2014-9
To put it in another way, if a school has 100 classes with 6 students and 2 classes with 600 an individual student is twice as likely to be in a mega-class as they are to be in a micro-class.

That’s not to say there’s anything inherently wrong with some large classes, just that you have to be careful about how you read this particular stat.

@Chembiodad, you just sent me down a (quite enjoyable) rabbit hole.

The Robertson et al. paper you linked to, first of all, has a lot more hedging in the body (just from a quick scan) than in the abstract. This isn’t surprising, but the extent to which math testing at age 13 (which is what they use) predicts future outcomes turns out to be quite incompletely predictive—in fact, given the way the paper sets everything out, I’d suggest that the overall purpose of their study was to show that earlier results that had pointed to math testing results being predictive were flawed by ignoring the degree to which other factors act as confounds.

Another very, very important issue: Robertson et al. deal only with those identified early on as having high quantitative ability; no conclusions can be drawn from this about those with high ability in non-quantitative fields.

There’s also a potential confound in that those who are identified as such early on would be more likely to come from families with the academic/cultural capital to recognize the possibility and get testing done and so on.

One fascinating sentence in a footnote, for which, sadly, a source isn’t given (emphasis my own): “Indeed, modern talent searches miss more than half of young adolescents in the top 1% on spatial ability, because they the cut on both quantitative and verbal selection measures.”

Anyway, Robertson et al. is reasonably well-cited. I haven’t done a serious review of the literature that follows, of course, but there are some intriguing articles that point to rather more basic factors (e.g., working memory capacity) being what’s really driving the differences found in studies like those of Robertson et al.'s. There’s also a pretty decent amount of research showing that implicit bias plays a role, in that those who are identified as top students are given (not earn, but rather are given) opportunities that may increase differences in possible outcomes, which can create the illusion of larger differences in outcomes than would otherwise occur.

TL;DR: For quantitative abilities, innate ability matters (at the very least for the top 1% vs. the rest of the top 5% and 10%; no claims within the top 1%). However, other factors have at least as big an effect as innate ability, and quite likely a larger one.

In UChicago’s case, the percentage of “large” classes also is rather low (5.5% >= 50 students).
That’s one of the lowest percentages for any RU, but still higher than many LACs (which in many cases have 0% >= 50, or even ~0% >= some smaller number). My S2’s LAC claims that class size is limited to 25 students (unless the class is taught by 2 professors, in which case it generally is limited to 32).

I have to admit that I was annoyed this year when my daughter had a lecture with 60 students. It was for an Intro level class, but all of her other classes for the year had 25 students or less. She had nine classes at Bates, so I guess one large one is tolerable. But I expect her classes to be pretty small going forward, which is a big part of the reason she wanted a small college.

@circuitrider I also found the OP’s views on the Tufts campus interesting. My DD was accepted to Tufts (but is not attending) so we visited a few times over the past years. While the campus is not surrounded by brick walls, it does have a clearly defined campus (although it is open on a couple of sides) in the middle of Somerville, a nice but also interesting suburb. Plus, the T gets you to fun Cambridge in (I think) 2 stops and Boston Common in 4 stops. (Much better access to Boston than BC, etc.) IMHO, I think that for the OP who seems to want a mix of LAC-style school but with access to a great city, Tufts is worth a second look.

@tk21769, only 1% of UChicago classes have more than 100 students, but my point was that unless you know how many students are in those big classes (101? 300? 800?) you have no way to know the odds of any one student ending up in a very large class vs. a small class. At many LACs the numbers are clearer because they have no classes with more than 100 students.

@dfbdfb, glad you enjoyed the adventure and that you climbed back out.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1897961-colleges-with-aerial-and-or-circus-clubs-programs-on-campus-or-nearby.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1997351-colleges-for-environmental-science.html
http://www.hillel.org/about/news-views/news-views—blog/news-and-views/2015/06/24/2015-top-60-schools-by-jewish-student-population
http://www.hillel.org/college-guide/search#
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1469437-best-college-towns.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893014-liberal-arts-college-with-the-best-college-town.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/1778002-what-are-the-best-college-towns.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1636930-best-college-towns.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1194125-good-lacs-near-big-ish-cities.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1248024-lacs-in-cities.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1166327-small-lacs-in-near-big-cities.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/705549-what-are-some-good-lacs-in-or-close-to-major-cities.html
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/589158-lacs-nestled-in-large-cities.html

@tk21769 wrote:

Different scale, mission. Also different exposure to federal whims. Last Fall, when the president of Wesleyan wrestled with Tucker Carlson during a FoxNews debate on the issue of “sanctuary colleges”, Carlson playfully dangled the possibility of losing “200 million dollars” in federal funding over the stance Wesleyan had taken. His jaw visibly dropped when President Roth corrected him by saying, “No. It would be closer to 20 million.” Carlson had grabbed the incorrect number from an article in the student-run newspaper.