<p>27 year old Jon Favreau is Obama’s Chief Speechwriter and makes $173k/year. He is Holy Cross class of 2003. Did not attend graduate school.</p>
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<p>I see very few preprofessional majors in the offerings of the 10 schools I cited above. I only find a Communications major at one of them (Evergreen State, which is public and by far the least selective of the group). Knox offers Journalism and Business, but only as minors. Where you see listings for Nursing or other professional areas, they tend to be “advisory” programs or co-op programs with larger schools (3+2 or 4+1 BA/MA programs etc.)</p>
<p>Would this explain the migration from the “College” designation to the “University” designation?</p>
<p>The problem I always have with the type of reasoning in the article is that it is fundamentally flawed due to the wrong type of generality. The basic problem with this topic is that if LACs were equivalent to, say, polar bears, they will likely be extinct in the future as the habitat is being rapidly diminished.</p>
<p>The better analogy is that LACs are equivalent to bears in general. Some may or may not become extinct due to loss of habitat, etc. but NOT ALL bears will become extinct because polar bears likely will.</p>
<p>I know this is a poorly expressed analogy but I hope someone understands what I am saying here!</p>
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If you look at most top universities, what people cite as their best programs tend to be medicine, engineering, and business (at least in my circles), ignoring liberal arts majors even though they could be #1 in the world at English or History or whatever.
I doubt most LACs have the infrastructure to offer a nursing or engineering major, but if you look at what Grinnel now offers, the “Program in Enterprise and Leadership” looks like a businessy major, probably meeting the increased demand overall for an undergraduate major in business.</p>
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<p>Which employers recruit at which LACs for which kinds of career positions? Are there web links to lists of recruiters at particular colleges?</p>
<p>Who was sad to see Antioch go? They invite cop killers (Mumia Abu Jamal) to speak at commencement? What a joke.</p>
<p>Economic pressures will only accelerate the trends identified in the article (very interesting – thanks for posting).</p>
<p>Students will look for majors that increase their chance of employment after school – which will support continued growth of pre-professional programs.</p>
<p>LAC’s will need to look to ways to offset susbtantial declines in endowments – and limits on their ability to raise tuition as their primary funding source. This will lead them to leverage their reputuations in ways that generate money for the school to grow and compete for students (which moves them away from their traditional LAC focus).</p>
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<p>Given that you’ve been posting on this site for five years, I’m guessing that your questions reflect disbelief. I know of a couple of dozen LACs that recruiters visit, primarily from friends and family who are employed at LACs that recruiters visit, and who have seen recruiter itineraries listing other LACs they visit. These recruitment efforts are not unlike the CTCL admission representatives who travel together on applicant recruitment junkets. If you are really interested in answers to your questions, you would have to approach LACs individually and ask them your questions.</p>
<p>Why would adding business majors make an LAC no longer an LAC? Dickinson College now has an international management major that is the fastest growing major at the liberal arts college. Muhlenberg College offers and accounting major that is almost as popular as Theatre Arts at the same school. They are still LACs. Grinnell (post #25) is just following the trend. What’s wrong with that?</p>
<p>Oh yeah, as far as the top LACs, their graduates even get recruited by Wall Street Investment banks, just like Ivy undergrads.</p>
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<p>There aren’t any web postings of schedules of visits?</p>
<p>Big companies list schools where they recruit. Colleges also have schedules when companies come to campus to recruit. You might have to be a student at the school to see which companies come to a specific school and which companies have special drop boxes for resumes for a specific school.</p>
<p>I just did some web searching, and I found a lot of pages about on-campus recruiting for research universities.</p>
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A simple Google search yields results for LACs. For example, I found the following two programs:</p>
<p>1) Liberal Arts Recruiting Connection (Bates, Clark, Colby, Connecticut College, Holy Cross, Mount Holyoke, Trinity, Union)</p>
<p>2) Big Apple Recruiting Connection (Bates, Clark, Colby, Davidson, Hobart & William Smith, Holy Cross, Hope, Marist, Mount Holyoke, Washington & Lee)</p>
<p>As just one example, W&L has very detailed employment data. Top employers included Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and PricewaterHouse Coopers. Other employers like Bain, Goldman Sachs, IBM, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, the Met, NIH, and various government branches also hired students.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.wlu.edu/Documents/careerservices/2008%20Annual%20Report/2008%20Employers%20Hiring.pdf[/url]”>http://www.wlu.edu/Documents/careerservices/2008%20Annual%20Report/2008%20Employers%20Hiring.pdf</a></p>
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This year, I hear one graduating senior got a consulting job. No ibanking job for Amherst.<br>
Looks like this will be the trend in the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>^Washington and Lee also has a business major and most companies only employ one student. It doesn’t tell you if that one student had connections or if the student was picked up from the website. I doubt that they go all the way to W&L to hire one kid a year.</p>
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<p>It doesn’t, but it starts a slow trend toward moving away from original educational ideals. How far these schools will have to go is hard to say, however, the article is commenting on a general trend at LACs to go a bit farther than one or two concentrations. And if the LACs simply become places people go to for a great preprofessional major and because it’s small, rather than due to some unique character of the form of education being presented, than the LAC as we know it will begin to look quite different.</p>
<p>I think there are people confusing several issues in this thread. 1) Is the LAC more than a strong, small school? 2) What is the purpose of post-secondary education? 3) More broadly, of the multiple purposes cited in 2, does it make sense to specialize in just a few of these purposes or to try and tackle them all in one environment? Do any of these purposes “lose” in some systems while “winning” under other systems? 4) Do we lament when things we value fade due to a lack of transient relevance or do we try and preserve them?</p>
<p>The Carnegie Classification system distinguishes between “Baccalaureate Colleges-Arts and Sciences” and “Baccalaureate Colleges-Diverse Fields”. “Diverse Fields” means less than 50% of the degrees are in Arts and Sciences.</p>
<p>According to IPEDS:
Enrollment in Bacc-A&S colleges increased from 421,025 in 1980 to 526,531 in 2007. Enrollment grew substantially.</p>
<p>However, enrollment grew even more in the Bacc-Diverse Fields colleges from 370,907 in 1980 to 593,749 in 2007.</p>
<p>This is based only on current Carnegie Classification and ignores schools that have gone out of business and colleges that have changed classification.</p>
<p>The 1980 group of schools is the same as the 2007 group of schools.</p>
<p>The traditional A&S LAC is not disappearing, at least in terms of enrollment. The definition of Bacc-A&S colleges as 50% or more A&S degress is pretty broad, however, and merely means that 49% or less are professional degrees.</p>
<p>^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Thanks for the specific links to programs of employment recruiting for liberal arts college students. That’s what I was asking about to get a sense of the specifics of those recruiting efforts.</p>
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Thanks. I was ill for most of yesterday, but the fever is gone now and my thoughts are clearer. I can remember my forum mantra - read the post before submitting it.</p>
<p>As far as the topic is concerned, my final word is this: LACs bring something unique to the table. If there are no students interested in what they offer, then they should and will die. But so long as there are people interested in attending them, LACs should survive (even if there are fewer of them).</p>