What defines a liberal arts university?

Parents Forum
424

Except that the quantity of Putnam winners at MIT doesn’t really have much of anything to do with the quality of the undergraduate math programs at top LACs.

Again, if you want to continue on about the greatness of MIT or its many math competition champions, perhaps start yet another thread on the topic, or consider posting here: The Bragging Thread

This thread is about Liberal Arts colleges, and while they may not be perfect for all math focused students who are prepared for and interested in doing graduate or post graduate level work at an undergraduate institution, many are nonetheless excellent and produce a higher percentage of STEM Ph.Ds than do undergraduate research universities.

425

Um, I hope this is a joke? Always good to cite sources, but ChatGPT doesn’t actually search and summarize information on the internet (it also doesn’t have access to the live internet). It tosses together some tasty word salad, based on material previously fed to it, and its “facts” might or might not be accurate. It’s fun to play with, but even less of a “source” than wikipedia.

I haven’t talked to it as much as my kids have, but here are a just a couple of the fun alternative facts that it produced the first day I talked with it:

Violins are generally larger than other string instruments, such as violas and cellos, which have shorter strings and therefore produce higher pitches.

The theremin is considered a string instrument because it produces sound using vibrating strings. While the theremin is not played in the traditional way, with the hands plucking or bowing the strings, it uses electromagnetic fields to vibrate the strings inside the instrument and create sound.

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426

To try to turn back something closer to the original topic than MIT Putnam winners, a few years ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote a short book (based on a popular commencement speech) about many of these issue. Some might find interesting . . .

https://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/1442389761

On the issue of the US approach vs. the approach of countries who have traditionally eschewed the US liberal arts approach in favor of more measurable and vocational benchmarks:

Many years ago, I had a conversation about all this with Singapore’s minister of education at the time, Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Singapore is the right country to look at because it sits among the top-performing nations on international tests. And yet, it is actively seeking to boost innovation and entrepreneurship among the students producing those top scores. “We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam said. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America.”

I think there is some merit to the observation. The uncompromising push for quantifiability doesn’t work all that well when it comes some modes of learning or skills, and I wonder if we are at risk of losing some of our competitive advantage by moving too far toward systems that haven’t ultimately been as successful as our own in terms of global leadership across a variety of disciplines.

427

I don’t disagree with you. The student-to-faculty ratio, like the term “liberal arts”, is ill-defined, IMO. The reason this ratio came up is because another poster linked to an article which uses the ratio to help define LACs, which I thought was erroneous.

I only agree with you partially there. “Small classes” don’t mean what proponents want them to mean. However, small classes aren’t necessarily just for graduate students or upper class students at research universities. As I’ve said before, they have more to do with the size of the school and that students/faculty ratio (for the lack of a better measure). Therefore, a good comparison with an LAC in that regard would be a school like Caltech (similar size and students/faculty ratio). Other than those specified core math/science courses that are required of all students, an average class size at Caltech is as small as at any LAC (probably somewhat smaller in the humanities/social sciences but somewhat larger in STEM, due to the demand and the nature of those courses).

428

All good points, though I don’t entirely agree with all of them.

I agree about Caltech - Caltech classes are all pretty small, and it’s faculty to student ratio, even after considering the amount of time that faculty put into teaching undergraduates, is still lower than many, if not most LACs.

It would be interesting to compare teaching at HMC versus Caltech, since both have roughly the same number of undergraduates, both focus on the same fields, and both are private. I would guess that both also have similar class sizes.

429

I believe you’re right.

430

There you have it!

Now, if you look at my first reply in this thread again, you will see that it was in response to the following statement:

“Expecting to get to the cutting edge in (for example) math when you enroll in a frosh level single variable calculus is not a realistic expectation.”

And with that, I am bowing out.

434

The original question asks what defines a LAC/LAU. Selectivity is not a part of that definition. LACs are not inherently more or less selective than non-LACs. Some LACs are extremely selective. Other LACs are near open admission. Similarly some LACs have an extremely high concentration of excellent students, while other LACs do not. This can include a high concentration of students who are excellent in math and sciences, rather than just students specializing in non-STEM. I am defining “excellent” as wider than top national 100 students in math competitions or similar accolades.

LACs often often have a notable portion of students majoring in the traditional liberal arts fields of math and science, often a larger portion than than comparably selective research universities. As an example, the most popular majors at Amherst in latest NCES are as follows. It’s not all students studying humanities. 3 of the top 4 most represented majors are math heavy.

Most Popular Majors at Amherst
1 . Mathematics – 40
2. Economics – 34
3. Psychology – 31
4. Computer Science – 30

Being a smaller college without a graduate program, Amherst has a much smaller number of total classes than many larger colleges, and fewer different levels of classes. However, many excellent math students find this to be sufficient. A similar statement could be said about most majors at LACs, including humanities. For example, Amherst has a much smaller number of history courses than many larger colleges. Students who are interested in LACs are often not focused on having the maximum volume of available courses or availability of graduate courses

Outcomes for math majors seem reasonably similar to comparably selective private colleges. A summary is below, comparing Amherst to Yale. Note that the order of the top 5 is the same for both colleges. The most common employers of math majors are also very similar at the 2 colleges.

First Destination for Amherst Math Majors
1 . Finance – 15%
2. PhD in Math – 13%
3. Consulting – 12%
4. Engineering/Software – 11%
5. Research – 9%

First Destination for Yale Math Majors
1 . Finance – 20%
2. PhD in Math – 18%
3. Consulting – 10%
4. Engineering/Software – 9%
5. Research – 5%

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436

Oh for goodness sake, we haven’t seen this sort of circling of the wagons since Research University World (aka, HYPMS) insisted that the reason they were keeping half their students at home in 2020 was because they could afford to take the loss in room and board fees and LACs couldn’t (of course, it had nothing to do with the fact that city-based unis had no room to implement social distancing measures that spacious LACs could - but that’s so much water under the bridge.)

Similarly, no longer able to lay any claim to being beacons of “learning for learning’s sake” they must go to extraordinary lengths to discount the very idea that the liberal arts (and sciences) are relevant in modern society. And how do they do it? By associating the term exclusively with the idea of smallness; small colleges in small towns only a small number of Americans have ever heard of. Colleges that nevertheless punch above their weight in PhD production. I ask now the same question I asked in the “Colleges in the Year 2021-2022 & Coronavirus” threads: Why is the Ivy League so threatened by LACs?

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437

So other than the multiple large courses that everyone has to take, the classes are small?

More generally, I don’t understand why CalTech is being compared at all. As undergraduate programs at research institutions go, CalTech is more anomaly than exemplar.
______________________________________–

Great. But I was responding to your claim that LAC’s are “not . . . strong” in Math and CS, as well as your comments on “handholding” and on “the logical reasoning skills of LA majors.”

438

I don’t want to rehash the relative strengths arguments (esp. since you concede that LACs may not be the best environment for the very top STEM students - though I do take issue with labeling their thirst for knowledge as a race and a box-checking exercise), but my “logical reasoning” remark was a tongue-in-cheek retort (clearly indicated as such) to another poster’s comment implying that my imputed lack of liberal arts background prevents me from recognizing the fallacy of my own argument.

439

I concede no such thing. I said LACs may not be the best environment for STEM students who expect graduate level and beyond instruction at undergraduate institutions. Please do not try to put words in my mouth beyond that.

As for the rest, your comments were extremely consistent with your posts here and elsewhere, but I’ll leave it at that.

441

A reminder that CC is not a debate society. If you find yourself arguing a point with another poster, please stop or take it to PM. Thank you.

442

I would just like to point out that one of the most useful bits of data on the Common Data Set form is the breakdown by class size, specifically for the undergraduate classes. The student:faculty ratios are not comparable between colleges and research universities. If they are publishing, getting grants, and maintaining their “research active” status, research university faculty are only teaching one or two classes a semester. If they are at the cutting edge of their field, those will likely be graduate classes. Half of an undergraduate’s courses might be taught by graduate students.

There is nothing wrong with that model, but it is very different than the LAC model with almost all courses taught by faculty. A “liberal arts university”, which was the original topic of the thread, might be more like a research university in this respect.

I ran the numbers for several schools during the college search process, using reasonable proxy values (e.g., counting courses of size 10-19 as 15, 50-99 as 75, etc.), in order to get an average class size. I counted class sizes of 100 or more as 100, which actually underestimates the average class size. This based on latest CDS available in the summer.

Some examples:
Binghamton, avg. class size 35.0 (6.6% of classes over 100 (114 of 1738)

Yale, 23.0 (4.0% over 100 (56 of 1387)

Haverford, 17.4 (0.2% over 100, 1 of 365)

Just a few examples, but the numbers shake out mostly how you’d expect. Elite LACs have average course sizes under 20, and very few courses over 40. State universities are in the 30s, with many small courses available, but a lot of 40+ and 100+ classes that presumably most must pass through. Elite research universities are somewhere in between, usually 20-25 average class size. In addition to the 56 courses with over 100 students at Yale, there were 91 courses with enrollments 50-99.

If you are on the level of a Putnam winner, you might reasonably expect to be placing right into upper level classes and then on to graduate work as an undergraduate, and therefore MIT or better might be the right choice. But a sizeable fraction are clearly slogging through large course sections at the most prestigious institutions that have more visibility than LACs. While I don’t believe that it’s necessary to have tiny 10-person or less seminars to learn, I do think that a 20-person class discussion is very different than in a 40-50 person class.

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443

Not sure how of all this attention on Putnam Competition winners relates to the question of what is or isn’t a liberal arts subject anyway. A quick google search of about 12 or 13 winners over the past thirty years reveals that most of them wind up staying in academia. Are these guys any less “consumers” from a societal viewpoint than history majors?

444

People in academia teach and do research. Much of scientific advancement comes out of research in academia. I don’t need to defend research. You need only look at China and their step up in state support for STEM research to understand that they see it as it being in their strategic interest.

445

Perceived benefit vs. actual?

446

But Pure Math? Let me remind you what you said in the other part of that same reply:

447

People in pure math wish their fields don’t become applied. Unfortunately for them people continue to find uses for things discovered even a century ago. For example current cryptography doesn’t exist without number theory which nobody thought had uses. Stuff discovered in modular forms and elliptic functions is being used in physics. And abstract algebra is being used to understand chemical bonding. We can go on. Just because we don’t know what the uses are, doesn’t mean the stuff is useless.