<p>The LACs that proliferate the New England area are basically snapshots of what today’s members of the Ivy League looked like around the 1920s: small town institutions of higher education whose liberal arts colleges were their whole reason for being. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were barely a thousand students a piece. You had to climb a hill to get to Yale’s science classrooms, so suspect were they in the eyes of purists. </p>
<p>Medical schools and law schools began popping up on Ivy League campuses in the mid to late 19th century But it wasn’t until the post-World War II economic boom that a majority of them were dragged into the twentieth century. The emerging American economy created a demand for a highly educated management class and for Big Science. Together, that pushed the Ivies closer to the flagship state universities in terms of mission, leaving the LACs as historical bookmarks to the green and leafy, intimate residential life that first gave rise to the “ivy” appellation in the first place.</p>
<p>Today, you can still walk through tree-shaded campus greens located in New Haven, Cambridge and Hanover. But, among the NESCAC (the New England Small College Athletic Conference) colleges, there’s a greater sense of familiarity between the students. Jocks are more likely to know non-jocks; musicians are more likely to know pre-med students and vice versa.</p>
<p>In NESCAC, professors are evaluated for their teaching ability as well as published research, and tend to be brought up through the ranks within the same school instead of traded like baseball cards from one research university to another. This gives multiple generations of students a chance to know the same professors and IMHO is one reason NESCAC alumni participation tends to be higher than in the Ivy League.</p>