<p>There seems to be some shape-shifting going on here with respect to the course-offerings issue. What issue is germane to the LAC v. Ivy (or LAC v. research university) choice? </p>
<p>Do LACs, in particular, suffer from a limited number of upper-division courses? Let’s assume for the moment that most courses listed in the catalog are offered often enough to meet student demand and requirements for on-time graduation. Are the offerings rich enough to comprise a high-quality program? What is the evidence that LACs are weak in this respect? I’ve offered a list of course offerings and program descriptions at a number of LACs. Readers can decide for themselves whether there is enough there to satisfy their appetites. I’ve also pointed out that LACs tend to have high PhD production rates (often much higher than large research universities), which I don’t think would be the case if the course offerings were not rich enough to motivate and prepare them for advanced work. </p>
<p>As for the issue of whether courses listed in the catalog actually are offered as required (or as expected), beyphy seems to be making my point for me. This is an issue that can affect LACs and universities alike. But if it inordinately affected LACs, I’d expect it to affect graduation rates. Is it enough of a problem to affect student satisfaction … or something? I don’t know. Maybe. Where is the evidence?</p>
<p>Now, if you are prepared to place out of all introductory courses in Math and blast into Teichmüller space, or if you are transferring into a philosophy program and want to jump straight into the most au courant topics in analytic philosophy, or if you are already publishing articles in the Journal of Econometrics, then I would agree that a LAC might not be right for you.</p>
<p>Interesting that you mentioned that article TK. Two things that i find usually aren’t mentioned come a few paragraphs later:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The first point i want to make is on Leiter’s first point. Philosophy is a specialized academic subject, like anything else. A faculty member who specializes in the philosophy of language can’t just teach a class on ancient philosophy, and a logician or epistemologist, can’t teach a class on ethics. In both cases, it’s simply out of their range of expertise. So, if they do teach these courses, which they might at LACs with smaller faculty, undergraduates are being educated in subjects by non-experts. This may not seem that important, but if an undergraduate uses some of this information as the basis for a writing sample, she may not like the outcome; another alternative is that the school with smaller faculty simply doesn’t have these options. Berkeley and UCLA both have logicians on their faculty (John Steel and Tony Martin respectively.) I’d be really surprised if the majority of LACs do. Undergraduates will likely get an education in modern propositional and predicate calculus. What they likely won’t get are courses in modal logic, meta-logic, set theory, or recursion theory, among others. Again, these are specialized subjects which, unless your an expert, or a polymath, you likely won’t be able to teach.</p>
<p>The second point is an explicit point against certain LACs. Although they emphasize writing, and likely produce great writers, what they teach their students is just as important as their students ability to write. And given that professors have large discretion over what they teach their students, this could cause problems. A department might emphasize continental education over an analytic one for example. Now, there’s nothing wrong with continental philosophy. But an undergraduate isn’t put in a well position if he wants to pursue graduate studies since most of the graduate programs in the U.S. (and i’d say all of the top ones) will be in analytic philosophy. So such a situation will either prevent them from pursuing graduate studies, shuffle the student to MA programs, or severely limit the amount of schools a graduate can seriously apply to. Again, this won’t be the case at all LACs (Leiter notes some good exceptions) but it’s certainly possible outside the top departments.</p>
<p>This brings me to my final point. Leiter says that top departments, as a rule of thumb, are those within the top 50. So, UCR’s philosophical department isn’t too bad at 31. For reference, Penn is ranked 29 (and it [probably</a> would be ranked lower than UCR if the rankings were conducted after Paul Guyer moved to Brown](<a href=“http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/11/guyer-from-penn-to-brown.html]probably”>http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2011/11/guyer-from-penn-to-brown.html), but that’s a tangential point.) and it’s tied with Northwestern and Wustl; it’s also ranked above Hopkins, which Leiter lauded earlier. So, safe to say, UCR hardly has a bad philosophical department. That being said, here’s a not often discussed point from a UCR professor</p>
<p>This is much more recent than the faculty that aren’t from top departments which Leiter discusses earlier. As a final note, i’ll give examples of some recent hires by UCLA. During my time there (and shortly afterwards) UCLA hired four people: two from Rutgers (#3 program in the world and likely the best in philosophy of language, which i noted UCLA’s specialty in earlier) a professor from UNC (top-10 program) and one person from a program outside of the top 50 (New School.) The one person who got hired out of the top 50 was pretty much said to be a genius from everyone who met him from what i heard. The same is probably true for the person from UNC. And USC, which i’ve also kept up with, has hired about four or five faculty in recent years: one is from NYU (#1 program in the world) and the other three are from Oxford (#2 program in the world.) One of my adjuncts from Princeton (#4 program in the world) painted a dreary picture noting that, although she regretted nothing, it was highly unlikely that she’d get a job in academia.</p>
<p>I think overall i agree with Leiter: you should try to find a balance between both teaching and the quality of the department, and there are several good options for that. But be cautious of thinking that any department from any university will get you into top departments even if you have a phenomenal writing sample. Unfortunately in the prestige-obsessed academia, that’s likely not the case.</p>
<p>I would expect faculty members in those specialties to be able to lead undergraduate discussions of The Republic or Aristotle’s *Ethics<a href=“Mill’s%20%5Bi%5DUtilitarianism%5B/i%5D,%20etc.”>/i</a>, for non-majors (and pre-majors) anyway. If they can’t, then I’d say that represents deficiencies in their individual educations, or is an indictment of hyper-specialization in the field. As for the course topics available for majors in philosophy (or anything else), no college can cover everything equally well. I’d expect most decent undergraduate history programs to offer a course in ante-bellum US history. I’d expect a decent linguistics program to offer courses in phonetics, morphology, and syntax. Are these programs necessarily bad if they don’t cover the Meiji Restoration or computational psycholinguistcs in depth? </p>
<p>NSF/webcaspar does not break out PhD production rates for philosophy, so I cannot determine if LACs lag research universities in that field (unlike virtually every other arts & science field I’ve investigated, in which LACs as a class tend to out-perform research universities). It may be the case that in certain fields (maybe pure math, maybe philosophy), top PhD programs do demand a level of specialized undergraduate preparation that many LACs cannot support. If so, that is something the OP would have to consider if s/he is seriously interested in an academic career in one of those fields.</p>
<p>I see why you might think that TK. Other fields like economics, mathematics, etc. have standard courses that probably all, or most, of the faculty are able to teach. I suppose in that sense philosophy is quite different. That’s not to say that professors can’t teach courses outside of their immediate specialties, but it can’t be too far off. Perhaps you’re right that the subject matter is to specialized, but that’s simply the reality of the subject.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, here are some insightful comments provided by bclintonk:</p>
<p>Economics students intending to go on to PhD study need to consider how mathematically oriented the undergraduate school’s economics department and courses are, and the math and statistics offerings.</p>
<p>^ Those are interesting observations reported by one CC poster. S/he may be onto something significant about how well LACs can prepare students for top PhD programs in pure math.</p>
<p>However, here’s what the NSF/webcaspar and CDS data indicate about size-normalized Math & Statistics PhD production rates for several LACs and research universities:</p>
<p>To get the PhD production rate (col 2), I’ve normalized the NSF/webcaspar numbers for 2007-11 (col 3) according to an estimated number of Math/Stat alumni (based on the % of degrees conferred in Math/Stat and the total population of degree-seeking undergraduates.) NSF does not distinguish pure math from applied math / statistics.</p>
<p>I don’t know what I don’t know about PhD production rates for fields that have no available data (philosophy, pure math). All I can say is that, for every arts & science discipline I’ve investigated, PhD production rates for LACs compare very favorably with rates for research universities. </p>
<p>When one sees a pattern like this in the data, it’s a good idea to ask if there is a plausible explanation (since it’s always possible that the pattern is confounded by extraneous factors). I think there is. I suspect that in general, in motivating and preparing students for advanced study, the smaller classes and higher level of student-faculty engagement at LACs (as measured by the NSSE assessments of reading loads, writing assignment rates, etc.) may trump the advantages of wider course selection at larger schools. YMMV. Special preparation requirements may apply to certain fields/subfields.</p>
<p>What may be more significant is how pre-professionally oriented (at the bachelor’s degree level) the students are, and how well recruited the schools are by employers looking for bachelor’s degree graduates.</p>
<p>LACs may attract a less pre-professionally oriented group of students, and their small size may attract fewer recruiters (of course, there are apparent exceptions, like Claremont McKenna). For example, at bigger universities, many math and statistics students go in with the explicit goal of preparing for actuarial or finance jobs (and the bigger universities offer courses aimed for those purposes), or into teaching math at the high school level. Plus, the big research universities tend to have more majors where one is more prone to go to work right after a bachelor’s degree (business, engineering, agriculture, architecture, etc.).</p>
<p>Even for the PhD-bound students, math is a subject where it is common for LACs’ advantages are minimized, while their disadvantages are maximized, since many top math students skip most or all of the lower division math courses where LACs provide the smaller classes; upper division math courses are commonly small, even at big research universities. This would not be the case for some other subjects.</p>
<p>It depends on the liberal arts college you go to, ucbalumnus. I do agree with your statement that universities would prepare students more for career-related opportunities. I’m not quite sure by what you mean by the top math students. Of course, the very best of the best students (winners of USAMO, IMO) would find the vast majority of the lower division math courses (and even some upper level courses) skippable. But for most other students (even at places like MIT or Caltech), most students haven’t taken classes beyond Calculus III or Differential Equations. Statistics in high school tends to be limited to just AP statistics, which is considered the very first intro class you’d take in college. </p>
<p>At Pomona, where math is the second most popular major, there are a huge number of classes available through the consortium, a significant number of which are upper level classes: <a href=“Mathematics and Statistics Department | Pomona College in Claremont, California - Pomona College”>http://www.math.pomona.edu/2012-13mathcatalogue.pdf</a>. So many that it’d be impossible for a math major to even take a quarter of them and still graduate within four years. Each track at Pomona (there are four) asks students to choose classes out of potential upper level classes, usually about 8 out of 25 different classes. At many LACs with a consortium (like Amherst, Smith, Swarthmore, Barnard), I’m sure a similar amount of options exist. Even if Pomona were to offer stand alone math classes and bar any access to the consortium, Pomona students would still have access to 40 or so math classes, around 6 of which would be introductory level classes. I’m sure stand-alone top liberal art colleges like Wesleyan, Carleton, and Williams would offer the same opportunities, if not more. </p>
<p>I personally think the math department at a top LAC would be more than sufficient in preparation for PhD bound students.</p>
<p>PhD production patterns may be distorted by self-selection effects.
Without good data, we can only speculate about the degree of these (or some other) effects.</p>
<p>The OP thinks a LAC would be a good fit for him, but (without indicating a prospective major) expressed concerns that a LAC might limit his grad school options. There seems to be little or no objective evidence for that. There is some plausible speculation that for certain majors, graduating from a LAC might leave him with significant gaps in his knowlege. In fact we all have those gaps. That’s life. Regardless, the NSF data indicates that many LAC alumni are succeeding in grad school.</p>
<p>A math major there would likely want to use the cross-registration agreement with University of Massachusetts - Amherst to expand the course list.</p>
<p>Most of those six pages of math courses are common lower division courses (calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations) or remedial courses (precalculus topics normally covered in high school). Upper division math courses for math majors are only a small portion of that list of courses (and some of them are duplicates across the colleges, or multiple sections of the same course).</p>
<p>I decided to send Brian Leiter an email on the topic of liberal arts vs research universities for undergraduate philosophical education. It seems like he has a preference for LACs over, at least large public research universities, even the highly ranked ones. He did note that certain schools (e.g. Stanford, Princeton, etc.) have good reputations for undergraduate education, and they might be preferable over LACs given the strengths of their departments (7 and 3 respectively in the U.S) and emphasis on teaching.</p>
<p>Brian Leiter is a philosophy professor and legal scholar at a prestigious university. He’s a full professor who holds an endowed chair. He runs a web site devoted to assessing the quality of philosophy programs. Yet, it sounds like even he couldn’t give more than a nuanced opinion about this issue.</p>