<p>How do the reputations of Liberal Arts Colleges rank compared to normal universities?</p>
<p>what is the main difference?</p>
<p>How does Amherst rate compared to say, Harvard?</p>
<p>LACs are providing great undergraduate education, there’s no problem.</p>
<p>The only problem (if it’s a problem) is that there will always be a higher premium placed on research than on teaching.</p>
<p>=></p>
<p>Research-based universities are always going to be seen as more prestigious than LACs</p>
<p>There’s a reason there are separate rankings for LACs and national universities. It’s very hard to compare both together when they have different focuses.</p>
<p>The best LACs offer a kind of education developed, historically, for free citizens of independent means. However, they’ve more or less adapted to the interests of middle class students who expect college to open doors to lucrative careers in fields like iBanking (as well as medical or law school). The top LACs seem to meet these needs approximately as well as the Ivies and other top national universities, judging from the record of professional school admissions, Ph.D. completions, or mid-career salary levels.</p>
<p>Except in certain rarefied circles, or in parts of the northeast, LACs will be less well-known than leading national universities. They are smaller. They usually don’t have nationally ranked D1 sports teams. The most selective ones are concentrated in a few regions (New England, the mid-Atlantic, parts of the Midwest). They generally do not provide the same system of direct vocational training (in engineering, business, architecture, engineering, nursing, etc.) offered by public universities.</p>
<p>why do people attend them?</p>
<p>and why are their costs so much higher?</p>
<p>I will be attending an LAC because i do not want a large school. I also do not want a school with extensive graduate studies available.
I also want a women’s college, and they are nearly all LACS</p>
<p>“Why attend them?” Because they focus on delivering superb undergraduate education, because they are not huge and anonymous, etc.</p>
<p>“Why are their costs higher?” They aren’t. Where did you get that idea? Compare the cost of the elite LACs to the cost of the elite Us that draw from the same student pool.</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t know of any women’s college that is not a LAC…unless you count Barnard, I guess.</p>
<p>the costs reflect the higher ratio of faculty and deaning resources packed into them. Also, to be quite frank about it, LACs, along with the Ivy League have been saddled with quite a bit of the social progress made by this country over the past generation. Smart kids who might otherwise have had to slug it out in state schools with large classes and few role models other than the occasional basketball coach, are given a lot of financial aid that is more than likely subsidized by higher tuition paid by other families. When it became obvious how much of this burden was being assumed by the same small group of colleges and universities, they formed their own lobbying group: [COFHE</a> : Consortium On Financing Higher Education](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/cofhe/]COFHE”>Consortium on Financing Higher Education)</p>
<p>
Yeshiva would count, though the female portion of the university is LAC-sized.</p>
<p>“what is the main difference?”</p>
<p>They are much smaller, have smaller class sizes, no or few graduate programs (hence no or few graduate students), but typically offer fewer courses, particulary at the upperclass/advanced levels, and may cover fewer areas of study, less comprehensively.</p>
<p>monydad’s description is the most balanced one I’ve seen yet re: LACs.</p>
<p>
Are you serious? It must be such a terrible “burden” to have a huge endowment - and I assure you that far more disadvantaged students attend “state schools” and receive a fine education than the statistically small number who receive scholarships to top private colleges.</p>
<p>Harvard is the most reputable institution of higher learning in the world.
Not even Yale or Princeton can compare to Harvard in reputation.
No school can compare to Harvard: therefore, you should go to Harvard, since you seem to care so much about reputation.</p>
<p>Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Wellesley are the alma maters of countless reputable and important people who’ve made meaningful contributions to the world. They are therefore well-respected by academics, high society, and graduate school admissions staff.</p>
<p>Liberal arts colleges, the best ones, aren’t costly. It costs less for me to attend Amherst than it would for me to attend any State/City University of New York school.</p>
<p>monydad’s assessment is not proper. It’s not that fewer courses are offered in the sense that there is a lack of depth/breadth of courses. Rather, one can’t depend on certain courses to be offered every single semester, every single year. There is no lack of advanced or upper-level classes.</p>
<p>If one is able to do exceedingly advanced Mathematics, say, one should be going to MIT, CalTech, Harvard, Princeton: but, a vast, vast majority of people cannot, and it’s just wrong to argue that LACs lack depth and breadth just because they don’t offer “Special Topics in Algebra” or “Honors Advanced Analysis.” Anyone who goes to a top LAC can easily ask a professor to teach a “Special Topics” course in advanced math if he or she so desires.</p>
<p>^ While I have no need for graduate-level depth in any subject, some people do run out of courses at an LAC. There are obviously fewer upper-level and fewer courses in general, since LACs don’t have the population to support as many electives or options as a large university.</p>
<p>Even in just looking for breadth, not depth, I’ve found few LACs that offer much beyond the basics in Computer Science; let’s not even get into Linguistics. I’m sure the same goes for people looking to study, say, Arabic.</p>
<p>
Well, that’s quite a generalization. Care to support it?
Eh? If I can’t depend on having courses in a specialized area offered, that would certainly seem to imply that there is a lack of depth available in that area.
…and therein lies the rub. Certainly there are top LACs (such as Harvey Mudd or St. Olaf) that are bastions of mathematical excellence and have faculty capable of teaching “Special Topics” courses on advanced subjects. But many lower-tier LACs do not have the same mathematical strength, and the department may simply not have expertise in specializations that a student needs. In contrast, even a mediocre research university will usually offer enough upper-division undergrad or graduate courses for a student to study the field that interests them.</p>
<p>Not my words, but “Liberal arts colleges, the best ones, aren’t costly” is true for (ONLY) those who qualify for significant need-based financial aid.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>I agree, and I assume that’s what the original poster meant (?). I think the more important point is Consolation’s, which is that LACs are generally no more (or less) expensive than equivalent private universities. </p>
<p>Really, in terms of aid, private LACs and Unis are generally the same deal: if you qualify for need-based aid, than the top ones will probably be good for you, because they tend to give good need-based aid (obviously, varies by school HOW good). OTOH, if you don’t qualify for need-based aid, but also don’t want to pay full freight, you might be best off applying to a bunch of schools where your stats put you in the top of the class, so as to get merit aid (which most of the top privates, LAC or Uni, don’t offer at all, and if they do it is obviously HIGHLY competitive). </p>
<p>Though it is worth noting that there are also a handful of public LACs that are cheaper, if anyone is interested in LACs but doesn’t want to/can’t pay for a private school.</p>
<p>^ Yes, the public LACs are wonderful assets. Though they can be non-starters for certain types of LAC students, mainly those who want to study an up-and-coming academic field. Adequate depth or just availability of Arabic, Chinese, linguistics, even computer science are all difficult to find at public LACs, which tend to focus on core academic subjects.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sorry, I have a hard time believing this. Say you do the bare minimum and take the 12 courses required for your major: this includes Honors courses to write your thesis. You have 20 courses left. In the spirit of a liberal arts education, you can take four courses in five departments, let’s say. I’ll do French, Art History, Philosophy, Classics, and Political Science.</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m impressed that Harvard offers its undergrads 2000, 3000 courses, but how many of them could you actually take, or would you actually want to take?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sorry, I had assumed we’re restricting our discussion to low-income students and the top LACs. Is it safe to generalize that students from upper middle class families are shafted everywhere beside HYPSM?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Eh, how specialized are we talking about? Again, I’m going to rely on my “Special Topics at any of the best LACs” argument.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, my bad. I had assumed we were comparing the top LACs to the top research universities. At Amherst, the tenured professors and associate professors have their terminal degrees from Stanford (1), Brown (1), Harvard (1), Princeton (1), Texas A&M (1), MIT (1), Wisconsin (1), Michigan (1), Penn State (1). The visiting professors from Brown (1) and Texas (1).</p>
<p>I can’t judge how good these graduate programs are, but given the mostly sterling pedigree, I hope they have a good grasp of more specialized math. And, they’re at Amherst because they’ve proven themselves to be great teachers.</p>
<p>I do not advise anyone to turn down a “mediocre research university” for a “lower-tier LAC.”</p>
<p>kwu - People don’t run out of courses by taking the minimum 12 courses required in their major. They run out because they want to take the maximum number of ALLOWED courses in their major because they love it so much. (In Amherst’s case, I’m not sure if there is a division/department maximum, but many LACs have such caps.) They run out of the courses that they MOST WANT to take, not possibilities. That much should be obvious.</p>
<p>I doubt that Amherst has the resources to offer Special Topics in all of the major linguistics areas of study–syntax, phonology, morphology, phonetics–plus evolutionary linguistics, linguistic anthropology, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics. In fact, Amherst has no formal courses that I can find in linguistics at all, suggesting that its faculty is not prepared to teach it. (Five-College courses do not count in this assessment, as arguably the academic quality at UMass is different from at Amherst and many students don’t want to commute to class.)</p>