My D recently toured and loved a lot about Caltech. However, she is questioning the size. Even though Harvey Mudd is smaller, she sees the advantage of having the other Claremont schools right there. Of course, she will have to see which, if either, of these schools admit her. But in the meantime, does anyone have any feedback regarding the size of the student body?
If she might be interested in larger, USC had 200 in the freshmen engineering college when Scstarted in 2010. That was similar to the size of his HS graduating class – to him not too big not too small. That way there are several faculty members in every department and he was better able to find mentors he liked. Even tho the school is much larger, engineering has its own everything, including career services and social events.
Thanks, @Hlmom. USC is on her list, too! Most of her other schools are large urban schools, so USC actually checks more of her boxes. However, Caltech and Mudd are such great schools that she is willing to veer a bit outside her original list of school qualities for them.
She is a likely math (maybe compsci) major, so probably not the college of engineering at USC. But your son had a good experience there?
@Silverkey Perhaps I’ll have some feedback for you in a couple months. Most of the colleges DS applied to were much larger, like those in the UC system. His experience with dual enrollment classes included class sizes up to 700 students. He was OK with that, but found it kind of impersonal.
But, among others he did apply to Caltech and Mudd and will be attending Caltech. So far, he is happy with the number of people in the admitted class that he is meeting via social media. It seems like many more of them are “his tribe” than the kids in his 2000-student high school.
Actually, CMU’s computer science is similarly small if you just look at the number of students admitted to SCS yearly. The same may be true for smaller majors at some colleges you wouldn’t normally think of as small.
If you Google for something like “Quora Caltech small size” there are a number of answers about how the small size affects the undergrad experience at Caltech.
We are seeing that the number of class options and sections is small, but the Caltech freshmen take mostly the same classes anyway except for humanities and a few others.
@Ynotgo Thanks for the response. I would love to get some feedback from your S once he has a sense of how it’s going. Congrats to him (and you!) on his acceptance, and good luck as he begins. 