Why would it necessarily be true that a LAC (or any other college) has no students who turn out to be academically weaker than they appeared to be in front of the college’s admissions readers? Indeed, if a college has substantial non-academic preferences like for legacies and athletes, wouldn’t it be more likely that some are academically weaker than the college’s usual intended standard?
Peter Thiel thinks a college education is a waste. So this shouldn’t be surprising, should it?
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The basis might be that, irrespective of the academic characteristics of entering classes, some colleges are much better than others at teaching students how to write. If this is the case, then these differences should appear in the quality of the writing students produce as they approach graduation.
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Humor sprinkled with levity.
In other words, it was intended as a bit of a joke.
Which does not mean that a class of college like LACs necessarily is uniformly better than all other classes of colleges in this respect. Indeed, the prestige LACs that are the focus of many posters here likely vary considerably in writing general education requirements (if any) and how much writing and writing instruction is done generally (outside of any writing general education requirements).
A former high level athlete… Her sport was one of the ones that Stanford terminated without without warning a few months ago. She has a legitimate reason to be upset about this.
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Agree with this comment. I attended an LAC out west in the early-to-mid 80’s and we were pretty familiar with the undergraduate culture at Stanford. The kids were bright but they weren’t there for life of the mind.
You can find many different types at Stanford. There are plenty of kids who are there for “life of the mind.” There are also options like SLE for students who favor this type of atmosphere, which according to Stanford’s website, “serves as a liberal arts college experience within the research university.” The author of the original opinion article also contributed to the Review article about SLE at To SLE or not to SLE? .
Yep - I noticed that in perusing the gen ed requirements that you can go “life of the mind” if you want to. But I think it’s probably easier to float through Stanford’s gen ed (the choices are just too numerous and range from the very difficult to entry-level with little to no theory involved) than it is UChicago’s, and I suspect that UChicago’s lack of free choice for gen ed tends to discourage those who are NOT there for “life of the mind.”
Am I reading correctly that it’s possible to get through Stanford without doing any lab science? The SMA requirement seems to include courses w/o lab. That’s impossible at UChicago!
I don’t think many people who apply to Stanford are thinking about the how easy/hard their general ed requirements for graduation are or whether they involve theory. Students are far more likely to think about the strength of specific majors/fields, various things that make Stanford unique which includes but is not limited to unique academic programs, and how well they believe Stanford will assist with their unique post-graduation goals.
Rather than “life of the mind”, Stanford’s admission system uses the phrase “intellectual vitality.” This is not just a PR phrase they list on the website to mean holistic admission. Instead they actually rate all applicants in “intellectual vitality” in multiple areas of the application, such that it can have a significant impact on admission. This IV rating includes favoring applicants who appear to like learning for the sake of learning or as the website writes,
My personal experience was there were many students at the college who meet that description… in my experience more so among persons in SLE dorms, but not exclusively. There really were students who wanted to have intellectual discussions in non-SLE dorms and seemed to truly enjoy learning for the sake of learning. However, there are also students who seemed to care far more about getting straight A’s for pre-med than learning or liked to party/drink frequently and rarely talk about anything academic (some of whom were surprisingly great students and seemed to ace their classes). There were athletes, intellectuals, “fuzzies”, “techies”, students from many cultures, etc. You can find a wide variety of different types of students. Most students seemed to find a group that they got along well with, sometimes among like minded students and sometimes among seemingly very different types of people. It sounds like The Review is a group like that for the author.
Stanford offers a good amount of flexibility in degree options, which have widely varying requirements for graduation. Few students seem to graduate with what they perceive to be the easiest possible option. There are options for more challenging academic endeavors and many students pursue them. A minority of students do the LAC-style humanities-intensive SLE as noted above; ~1/3 of students do a co-terminal master’s degree while simultaneously pursuing their bachelor’s; most do impressive things out of the classroom – some academic and some not academic; etc. The majors with the largest enrollment are below. Few of them have a reputation for being super easy. However, there also aren’t many students majoring in Classics or similar humanities fields. I can see why a student majoring in Classics, like the author, might feel like she is not well represented by the student body or a primary focus of the college.
Current Stanford Major Enrollment
1 . Computer Science – 622 (19% of students who have declared a major)
2. Economics – 188 (6% of students)
3. Hum Bio – 181 (6% of students)
4. Engineering (general) – 163 (5% of students)
5. Management Sciences & Engineering – 147 (5% of students)
6. Mathematics – 127 (4% of students)
7. Symbolic Systems – 118 (4% of students)
8. Biology – 113 (4% of students)
,
14. English – 83 (most enrolled humanities major)
…
#. Classics – 25 (<1% of students, many of whom are probably secondary majors)
While the specific general ed requirements have changed over the years and are completely different from when I attended, I’ve never known Stanford general ed requirements to be a major stumbling block for students, and I doubt they are notably more/less humanities intensive or challenging than in the past. However, what has changed is the major distribution mentioned above, particularly the explosion in CS majors in recent years. For example, comparing to 15 years ago, the major enrollment totals were as follows. Humanities students were still in the slim minority and there were still not many classics majors, but there were far fewer CS majors. As the CS majors increased in recent years, most less vocational majors (not CS, engineering, symbolic systems, …) decreased by ~40%, including some of the more common humanities majors.
Stanford Major Enrollment 15 Years Ago
1 . Hum Bio – 324 (decreased 45% today)
2. Economics – 271 (decreased 30% today)
3. Biology – 267 (decreased 60% today)
4. Political Science – 187 (decreased 45% today)
5. Psychology – 171 (decreased 40% today)
6. International Relations – 161 (decreased 40% today)
7. English – 142 (decreased 40% today)
8. Computer Science – 129 (increased 380% today)
8. Engineering (general) – 129 (increased 25% today)
…
#. Classics – 20 (small sample)
The change above isn’t unique to Stanford. CS majors at Stanford and similar colleges typically start out with >$110k salaries prior to bonuses and stock options (CollegeScorecard lists median earnings of $136k for CS vs $24k for English… latter has small sample) , and many students chase that high salary. Most other Ivy-type colleges have had CS increases by a similar extraordinarily large factor and corresponding decreases in less vocational fields. However, they started with fewer CS majors 15 years ago than Stanford, so increasing by 400% is a smaller portion of the class than at Stanford.
I’m not as familiar with Chicago major enrollment, and they seem to have limited public stats. According to IPEDS, the number of Chicago CS majors increased by a factor of >900% from the most recent available year to 10 years earlier, but it’s still a relatively small portion of the total class majoring in CS… a far smaller portion than Stanford or most (maybe all) Ivies.
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The comments have not really touched on the OP’s reason for posting that piece by the Stanford student. OP asked us to consider whether the Chicago ethos today is what the Stanford ethos (as sketched in the piece) used to be. That piece was written for a Stanford audience and was addressing perceived changes at Stanford. We don’t need to agree with the author that the Stanford ethos has changed as greatly as she thinks it has in order to take from her piece the delineation of a certain educational ideal. At least from the time of Plato authors who describe ideals have located them in past golden and semi-mythical worlds. That might be the case here. Perhaps Annika’s Stanford is more a notional Stanford, a Stanford of the mind and heart, than a real one. To me the interesting thing about her piece is not its accuracy or lack thereof but that it exists at all and is written with such passion - that it is a cri de coeur from an actual Stanford student. It is hardly surprising that it found a resonance in a Chicago student of similar disposition, who asked us to consider whether this hypothesized vanished glory of Stanford still exists at Chicago.
It is a brief sketch in a brief piece and is meant to be provocative. It had three planks: free speech, traditional studies in the liberal arts, and the importance of the student-athlete. Love it or hate it, question its accuracy, question its practicality, deride the quality of its prose or argumentative power - there’s an ethos to be found in that sketch. It happens to be an ethos we talk about quite a lot in this Chicago cc forum and describe as the Chicago ethos (absent the student-athlete part of it).
This attention to larger meanings is a refreshing turn from some of our recent debates on this board. For once we are not comparing schools according to their rankings, their ROI, their prestige, or how they fare in the cross-admit wars. No one in his right mind would disparage Stanford in any of those regards. No one would deny that there are students within Stanford very like Chicago students (Annika may be one of them). And vice versa. Sketching an ethos for either school is to my mind far more interesting than any of these things. It is a task that does not lend itself readily to statistical analysis. It is at least in part impressionistic and more a subject for novels or memoirs than for empirical demonstration. It is historical and granular and anecdotal. Here on cc we have glimpses of it all the time in the declarations of aspiration announced by kids longing to get into particular schools. These are schools they have chosen because they are what they are and the aspiring kids are what they are. I daresay their visions of themselves in those schools figure strongly in their essays and affect greatly their chances of acceptance in those schools. It is in the mix of all these aspirations and factors on the ground that we should look for the elusive quality of ethos.
I take it as a given that Stanford and Chicago are good schools, but does anyone doubt that there are real differences in the goals of the kids who choose them? Or real differences in the histories and educational programs of each of them? Climate and geography and campus setting and a multitude of other factors further enter in to it. Perhaps even the existence of D1 athletics as against D3, of disparate social vibes and extracurricular emphases - and, yes, such things as the existence or otherwise of robust protections for free speech, for a common education in “the best that has been thought and said”, for a tolerance of maverick behhavior and thought.
There are those on this board who simply deny that such a thing as ethos exists and assert with respect to top schools that they are interchangeable units. That was hardly the way choosing a school worked for me once upon a time. I doubt it was how it worked for most of the commenters on this board. OP would likely deny it worked for him/her in that way - as would this empassioned Stanford author.
The historical specialness of our institutions is always under pressure from the homogenizing general pressures of our national culture. To me it is inspiring to see young people push back against those pressures. That is the message I take from these two students at Stanford and Chicago respectively.
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Of course it isn’t surprising that a piece written for a conservative college newspaper by a student active in conservative politics on campus would find resonance in a UChicago forum here. It’s also unsurprising that she’s passionate about her political views because she has long held those views.
I wondered why Chicago is nicknamed “The Windy City”.
Now I know.
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In my view, this thread is about a very poorly written & poorly edited published article comprised of superficial disjointed thoughts given life by some who like to debate.
Imagine a poorly prepared trial attorney with a filing deadline who quickly jots down multiple unrelated thoughts and statements which are unsupported by authority or argument in the hope that either the judge, the jury, or opposing counsel will make her arguments for her.
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Stanford has 36 varsity sports and they’re eliminating 11 in a pandemic. Michigan has 27 sports listed on their athletics website. The past couple years, Michigan has finished a distant 2nd in the Director’s Cup standings to Stanford.
I’m sure most universities have had to make some cuts in athletics. So, instead of “crying” about the loss of fencing, why not do what Cal (UC Berkeley) did several years ago when baseball was to be eliminated? Raise money to fund the sport. Granted baseball does often have celebrated alumni, such as Jeff Kent, in the case of Cal, but these fencers are the more “serious student athlete,” 
so I’ll bet there are some wealthy fencing alumni willing to help.
At any rate, Stanford could bring back some of those sports once were safely past the pandemic.
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I’m less concerned about whether the article is tightly written and more about what the author is trying to say. According to her, the ethos at Stanford has changed. This impact has been/is being felt. As a parent of a student who might consider Stanford, I found this interesting. Why? Well, despite the chorus on many campuses, not everyone wants to have someone’s politics dominating their educational pursuits. It also seems obvious that the world has changed a lot. So the days of Silicon Valley being the place where people got to take chances and start companies might be in the past. Yes, it’s taxes and the high cost of living but it’s also a movement away from certain states (like CA) for other reasons as well.
The life of the mind is something that many students are, in fact, seeking in a college education. So any discussion that talks about the ethos at a school is interesting to potential students, IMO. Some may in fact but happy about the changes or current “ethos” as described. Others might have an aha moment.
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@marlowe1 1,000%
Thanks @Data10 this is quite comprehensive. FYI, UChicago’s enrollment stats can be found here (click on "access enrollment reports): Data & Reporting | University Registrar
The format hasn’t changed in decades so a great way to compare growth in the Colllege, growth in a major, etc.
As UChicago’s structure includes four academic divisions, and the “schools” are really graduate institutions (undergrads graduate exclusively from the College which is 100% liberal arts), I tend to view the historical trend by examining the relative proportions graduating in specialties pertaining to humanities vs. social sciences vs. bio vs physical sciences. Keep in mind that while students at UChicago are similar to Stanford in their enthusiasm for this or that major, your major is really only a third or so of your total credits. The other 2/3 are Core and Electives. Nevertheless, it’s possible to see trends among the various major categories and they are unsurprising. 15 years ago, 52% of UChicago grads majored in a social science (including History, which is a SS at UChi). Econ alone was nearly 20% of all bachelor’s degrees! CS was in its infancy there; fewer than 1% of majors in the graduating class. Fast forward to the Class of 2020: CS is 4.4% - still low, but growing steadily - and Econ is still nearly 20%. I suspect that Class of '21 onward, we’ll see the econ proportion drop a bit, but it’s still the most popular major on campus and will likely remain so. The biggest gainer over the 15 years has been non-Bio STEM: while a bit less than 14% of total degrees in 2005, it’s now about a quarter and growing. The biggest loser: Humanities which was just under a quarter of the class of '05 but was less than 20% of the class of '20. Social science and Bio have been relatively stable to declining a bit. The College grew 47% in class size during these 15 years which indicates that the largest growth has been in non-bio STEM: a growth of about 161%.
When you look at declared first majors, you see an example of what’s to come. CS grew 863% between autumn 2005 and autumn 2020! Econ only grew 142%. Phil and English, the most popular hum majors, declined 13% and 45%, respectively. Classical Studies declined nearly 18% as a first major in the 15 years. As a total (including second and third majors), it increased 15%. These numbers of course have to be placed in context of the overall growth in the College which was about 50% over that time period. So majors like English and Phil slipped in terms of ranking, and majors like CS went up. CS isn’t the only one to do so; I suspect that some of the social sciences such as Pub Pol and Psysch might have increased as well. These relative rankings are buried in prior forum posts by me and I’m sure others. One can look at those or they can re-crunch now that they have the link to the data.
Anyway, I don’t see these trends as all that different from what’s going on at Stanford. I think the schools are distinct from one another, but these trends are pretty indicative of what’s going on in higher ed in general as you point out. Of course, UChicago will obviously have a higher number of BA’s as a percentage of the graduating class (and some will earn the BS in some fields); it’s 100% a liberal arts college. But the historical trends in major aren’t really all that different from elsewhere.
@Publisher, that’s because you apparently failed to read OP’s opening comments. You should go back and read them. Your confusion might be understandable, as I suspect this thread has been relocated from the UChicago forum.
How do we know that? Do you know the author or is there a post you can share to support this?