what does "ivy league", well known LACs mean to you?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>what i mean by the first question is, what do you think of schools like Brown, Cornell, or Dartmouth? They are in the Ivy league, however, there are other non ivy league schools that are rated higher. if you were accepted to one of these schools, would you choose to go there, instead of a higher rated school, because they are ivy league?</p>

<p>i also wonder what you think of LACs, and I guess what I'm asking is, how do you perceive the ranking of LACs? according to US news, swarthmore is rated third best LAC, columbia is listed eight best national university. Obviously they are two different lists, so what I'm wondering is what do you think? is columbia still better? is the score out of 100 comparable across lists? (swarthmore is 94 for an LAC and columbia is 91 nat)</p>

2

<p>1) The ivy league is an athletics conference. Most people would not choose schools based on their athletics conference, IMO. Particularly in this case when the conference is so bad in athletics, in the most publicly followed sports anyway.</p>

<p>2) The rankings you are referring to are done by some magazine. Most people ought not select colleges based on what some magazine thinks is important, IMO. One should do some research, develop the criteria and weightings that reflect your personal needs and desires, and then choose on your own criteria, not some magazine’s criteria.</p>

<p>3) LACs are smaller, typically do not have grad students doing grading and leading recitation sections, and have many smaller classes. But typically they offer fewer courses and areas of study. And “cutting edge”, big time research/ researchers are more often found at a university. Either environment, LAC or university, may be variously preferred by particular individuals. Which environment may be “better” depends on which you feel might be “better” for you personally, to maximize your individual academic, social, personal objectives over the next four years. Which is for you to decide. Not some magazine.</p>

3

<p>Monydad nailed it. Now go visit a top LAC-sit in on classes, eat in the dining hall, hang out at a student event or two and then go visit a unversity and do the same. Unless you plan to study a subject not offered at a LAC, you should compare the different environments and decide which learning and living environments are most likely to bring out the best in you.</p>

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<p>eddie: you might not like what monydad wrote but really examine it for grains of truth. The “ranking” stuff is the lazy man’s acceptance of what is “good”. If you think you ought to choose a set of colleges to apply based on some magazine editors’ opinions – you aren’t scratching very deep.</p>

5

<p>^ True. You need to do your own research. Ask questions, visit schools.</p>

<p>On the other hand, you’ve gotta start somewhere. If you are a top student, the US NEWS rankings are not a bad place to start for a first-pass list of colleges, ranked more or less according to selectivity, which in most cases you can presume (again, as a first pass) to correlate to overall academic quality. From there, you get into serious nuancing.</p>

<p>To take an extreme case, USNWR ranks Reed College #49 in its LAC hit parade. But this ranking may have something to do with the fact that Reed, for several years, has refused to particpate in the ranking game by providing USNWR data. Reed is probably one of the top 10 (even top 5) most rigorous institutions for undergrads in the country. Does rigor equal quality? May, maybe not entirely. But for a certain kind of student, a good case could be made for choosing Reed (or,say, St. John’s College) over schools ranked much higher.</p>

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<p>It depends on where you’re coming from. If your family arrived in this country on the Mayflower and you can already point to eleven different uncles, cousins and aunts as possible legacy hooks to some of these schools, the pressure to attend one is significantly less than it might be for someone for whom admission even to the Cornell School of Hotel Management and Hospitality might represent a significant life changing opportunity.</p>

<p>That being said, there are some ivies that are inherently compelling places in which to learn, and others that are less so, IMHO. It’s like asking, what’s the real difference between attending Cornell and the University of Michigan? Or, Columbia and the University of Chicago? Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that.</p>

<p>One thing I do know, is that there isn’t an Ivy League college or university that doesn’t, at some point, or other, compare itself to an LAC. That’s the model they were based on; it’s as American as apple pie. Most of the early American colleges began as LACs and grew bigger in order to include more numerous course offerings, professonal training and research. I think when some of them look back on it, there is some regret at the loss of intimacy and distinct sense of place that formed the basis of the Ivy League in the first place, and for that, you have to follow Monydad’s advice and decide what’s important for YOU.</p>

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<p>Well, yes and no. The Ivy League is indeed an athletic conference formed in 1954, but it was an association of schools that had long been peers and had already developed close affiliations with one another. The eight schools invited to become the “Ivy League” were the eight northern universities out of the nine colleges in operation during America’s colonial period (W&M was the Southern one that was not invited). Rutgers declined the invitation, so Cornell was brought in as the eighth member of the athletic conference. Cornell might be said to be an outlier geographically and historically, but the other seven can trace their interactions - and their leadership roles in American higher ed - back over hundreds of years.</p>

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<p>“Rutgers declined the invitation, so Cornell was brought in as the eighth member of the athletic conference.”</p>

<p>Could be wrong, but my understanding of this is “urban legend”, in agreement with post #28 here:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/302312-rutgers-public-ivy-2.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/302312-rutgers-public-ivy-2.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>But in any event what matters to a current applicant is how the various options are considered currently. And currenly it is true that there are a number of very highly regarded institutions that are not members of the Ivy League athletic conference, which someone might reasonably choose in the alternative, given the right set of objectives and interests.</p>

9

<p>Ivy League: ownage
LACs: what the ■■■ are those?</p>

10

<p>monydad is 100% spot on.</p>

<p>At a certain point, rankings become irrelevant. Columbia or Swarthmore, either way, grad schools and employers who are in the know will be very impressed, and that’s because either way you’ll get a great education, because they are both great schools. </p>

<p>Once you’re looking at the best schools, it becomes a matter of fit. For instance, you bring up Swarthmore and Columbia. I looked at both of them, and didn’t really like either, for myself. My top choices were Brown and Wesleyan – both ranked lower than those other schools. But the difference between #3 and #10, or #8 and #15 or whatever they were at the time just didn’t matter. I knew all four schools would give me a good education, so it became a question of where I would be happiest, and that’s how you should approach it, IMO.</p>

11

<p>If you do take rankings seriously, you may want to examine the scope of measurable differences between, say, the #2 and #20 school, or the #5 and #50 school. Differences do show up in all sorts of areas more or less relevant to quality, including the number of books in the libraries, the average faculty compensation, average class size, average starting salaries of graduates, etc. The question is, how big are these differences, really, and do they matter to YOU?</p>

<p>Compare, for example, two respected private liberal arts colleges in the same state (Minnesota). Data is from the schools’ Common Data Sets unless otherwise noted.</p>

<p>Carleton College<a href=“US%20News%20#8”>/u</a>
$45,400 is the median starting salary of graduates reporting to payscale.com
56.2% of entering students score 700-800 on SAT-CR
74% of entering students ranked in top tenth of HS class
27.5% of applicants were accepted
9:1 student-faculty ratio
1 classe with 50 or more students
$81,213 average f.t. faculty salary (source: stateuniversity.com)
over 700,000 library volumes (source: [Carleton</a> College: Gould Library: About Our Collections](<a href=“http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/library/about/collections/]Carleton”>http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/library/about/collections/))</p>

<p>Macalester College<a href=“US%20News%20#29”>/u</a>
$43,900 is the median starting salary of graduates reporting to payscale.com
44.0% of entering students score 700-800 on SAT-CR
65.9% of entering students ranked in top tenth of HS class
41.1% of applicants were accepted
10:1 student-faculty ratio
4 classes with 50 or more students
$78,782 average f.t. faculty salary (source: stateuniversity.com)
450,000 volumes in DeWitt library (source: [Macalester</a> College: Quick Facts](<a href=“http://www.macalester.edu/about/facts.html]Macalester”>http://www.macalester.edu/about/facts.html))</p>

<p>Two observations:

  1. the 21-point spread in the US NEWS rankings does correspond to many measurable quality differences that do consistently favor the more highly ranked school;
  2. the measurable differences, in many cases, are fairly minor (maybe not enough to override, for example, a strong preference for urban St. Paul over rural Northfield MN.)</p>
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<p>By all means whatever of this info that one feels is relevant should be taken into account
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One might also recognize there are factors that might be relevant, and valued, that US News does not measure. It doesn’t measure something so fundamental as what you can learn there: how many courses your school offers in each major, and how many majors it offers. Or whether the ones it does offer are the ones you care about. Data is also imperfect, as some schools selectively collect and/or report certain data. Details for individual colleges of multi-college universities are not distinguished. </p>

<p>In the above example, if it were the case that Macalester had an affiliation and course sharing agreement with the University of Minnesota, such that the entire U Minn library system and other facilities were actually at their student’s ready command, and they also had, as a result, access to U Minn professors - with their salary level, and peer reputation, whatever they may be-and a virtually unlimited course catalog, this would also not be captured. Where students have the right to use another college’s resources, when it is to their advantage to do so, these are options. such options are of real value to the students who hold them. But Us News does not value options. If it were the case that Macalester students had unique extracurricular opportunities, eg for work or internships, due to its location, that would also not be captured. Just other examples of why one might best use one’s own brain, and put together what you personally find important .</p>

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<p>The LAC is not the model the Ivy League universities are based on. It’s certainly true that the Ivys purport to offer a liberal arts education to their undergraduates, but to say that Ivy League schools compare themselves to, or copied, or model themselves on modern LACs as such is incorrect. It would be closer to the truth the other way around - although that’s not quite right either, since modern LACs deliberately do not embrace all that an Ivy school typically offers.</p>

<p>The nation’s first college, Harvard College, was so named not because it aspired to be an LAC but because it aspired to be a college within a British-style university. Our modern concept of an LAC didn’t exist back in 1636. Harvard was copying the British Oxbridge model of multiple colleges combined within an overarching university. The origiinal plan was for Harvard College to be the first of several undergrad colleges within some unnamed future Massachusetts university. As we know it didn’t work out that way. Harvard remained the only “college” at that site, and it added addtional graduate and professional schools as it expanded and grew. Yale and most of the other early Ivy schools that followed copied a combination of the British system and Harvard. None of these schools were planned or founded with the idea of copying say Amherst or Williams, which didn’t exist yet. One by one as they grew the Ivy schools became known primarily as “universities.” The sole exception is Dartmouth College which clings to its college designation to this day despite being functionally a university. LACs as we know them didn’t come along until the 19th century.</p>

<p>You can see a similar phenomenon at work in Canada where the British influence was even stronger. Canada has almost no LACs today. Europe has only a very few as well. Although the concept of the LAC was originally a European invention, the modern LAC is much more of an American thing. The Ivy league and LACs share a common laudable devotion to providing a liberal arts education to their undergrads, but by no means are the Ivys trying to copy or be LACs.</p>

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<p>^^^you have it completely and rather perversely wrong. It was the university that first came into existence in the nineteenth century, not the LAC. To say, that Harvard and Yale and the College of Williams Mary of the 1600s were aspiring British universities is a little like saying a spark plug is an aspiring Maserati. When they did evolve into universities (the first American Ph.D wasn’t awarded until the 1860s) – they were based on the German model not the British. What were they before then? LACs.</p>

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<p>Hey, I’m sorry if the history of Harvard doesn’t match your preferences. I’m merely reporting what has been written. Read here: </p>

<p>[Online</a> Encyclopedia and Dictionary - Harvard College](<a href=“Your Free Online Encyclopedia and Dictionary Resource”>Your Free Online Encyclopedia and Dictionary Resource)
Excerpt:
"The name Harvard College dates to 1638. In that year, the two-year-old school, which had yet to graduate its first students, was named in honor of the recently deceased John Harvard, a minister from nearby Charlestown, who in his will had bequeathed to it his library and a sum of money. In the understanding of its members at the time, the name “Harvard College” probably referred to the first (as they foresaw it) of a number of colleges which would someday make up a university along the lines of Oxford or Cambridge. The American usage of the word college had not yet developed: to the founders of Harvard, a college was an association of teachers and scholars for education, room, and board. Only a university could examine for and grant degrees; nonetheless, unhampered by this technicality, Harvard graduated its first students in 1642. </p>

<p>But no further colleges were founded beside it; and as Harvard began to grant higher degrees in the late eighteenth century, people started to call it “Harvard University.” “Harvard College” survived, nonetheless; in accordance with the newly-emerging American usage of the words, it was the undergraduate division of the university – which was not a collection of similar colleges, but a collection of unique schools, each teaching a different subject." </p>

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<p>Harvard and other US universities were, both in name and function, universities long before the 1860s and well before any of the modern LACs were founded. Penn added a medical school in 1765, Columbia in 1767, and Harvard in 1782…</p>

16

<p>I don’t go by rankings, I go by fit and general reputation.</p>

<p>In my opinion, it’s somewhat useless and misleading to quantitatively rank schools in this manner. Grouping schools together in smaller tiers (maybe 10 per tier) would be a lot easier and better way for students to digest information about what schools are great for them. Really, in the top 10 national universities there’s only slight differences in reputational status and prestige. The choice to choose between, say, Harvard and Yale shouldn’t be on the basis that Harvard is #1 and Yale is #2 or whatever the rankings say this year - it should be on the basis of fit, whether the student feels like he or she fits more into the student body at either school. Same thing about Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth.</p>

<p>Sure, Harvard and Yale may be better known than them, but they are still very, very good schools, and a student would be happy to have a degree from any of them. I always thought that Brown or Dartmouth would be a good fit for me if I had applied in college (smaller, more LAC feel and Brown’s open curriculum and community health major) so I certainly would attend those.</p>

<p>What do I think of LACs? I went to one. I think they are fantastic schools. They are not as well known nationally because of their reduced research production; when they are well known, it is for their undergraduate reputation and the reputation of their alumni. Is Columbia “better” than Swarthmore? That’s really completely up to the applicant. Columbia might be better for one application and Swarthmore may be the better choice for the other. Comparing #8 to #3 is risky even when they are on the same list because schools are so qualitatively different; comparing <em>across</em> lists is even worse. Columbia and Swarthmore are very different institutions with different histories, traditions, missions, faculty, student bodies, locations…etc.</p>

<p>Also, I wish people wouldn’t diss graduate students teaching sections and doing grading. Graduate students are at a point in their career where they have extensive knowledge about the basics that they are teaching you; they generally only teach sections within their area of expertise and they are conducting research in the area in which they are teaching. Furthermore, that graduate student is probably far more concerned about your individual success than the professor. I’ve heard some appalling opinions of undergrads spoken by professors at my top-tier Ivy League graduate school. Beyond that there’s not much difference between a 5th year graduate student and a 1st year assistant professor as far as teaching prowess goes. In grad school they don’t teach you how to teach, and so the most brilliant research mind could be the most horrible teacher. I’ve had graduate TAs in my grad classes here and they are generally better teachers than their supervising professors.</p>

<p>That said, I did have much better teachers at my small Tier 2 LAC than I’ve had at my top-ranked Ivy League graduate school. Probably because the LAC teachers knew they wanted to focus on undergraduate education and worked specifically on developing the skills to be good teachers, and the LACs specifically hired people they knew had the skills.</p>

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As a TA, I’m required to take a teaching seminar.</p>

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<p>Coureur wrote:

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<p>I’m not going to argue with you. One picture is worth a thousand words:
<a href=“http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/HarvardElizaSusanQuincy1836.jpg[/url]”>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/HarvardElizaSusanQuincy1836.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Techically it wasn’t Penn and Columbia back then, it was the College of Philadelphia and Kings College…</p>

<p>I’m just sayin ;)</p>

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<p>During the 1700s and early 1800s, there was little difference between the schools that we now recognize as “universities” and those that we now recognize as “LACs”. All of these schools were small institutions focused on undergraduate teaching, and would have most closely resembled what we call LACs today. There were no formal graduate schools; sometimes a motivated student would stay at school for an extra year or two after earning the BA, and pick up an MA as well.</p>

<p>It’s true that some of these institutions had “medical schools”, but that’s misleading. By today’s standards, a medical school would clearly differentiate a university from a LAC. But that was not the case in the 1700s and early 1800s. At that time, medicine was studied by undergraduates; the medical degree was a bachelor’s. Schools that we now regard as LACs had medical programs; for example, in the early 1800s there was a “Medical College of Maine” affiliated with Bowdoin, and a “Berkshire Medical Institute” affiliated with Williams. </p>

<p>Furthermore, there was little difference in enrollment size. For example, the Harvard [Class</a> of 1837](<a href=“Surname Site Find My Ancestors and Surname Origins and Surname Meanings in Free Genealogy Sites Directory and Free Geneology Queries and Records”>Surname Site Find My Ancestors and Surname Origins and Surname Meanings in Free Genealogy Sites Directory and Free Geneology Queries and Records) had only 47 graduates (including Henry David Thoreau and Richard Henry Dana), so the total enrollment was only around 200. At that time, Harvard was smaller than Amherst, which had an enrollment of 259. In fact, this made Amherst the [second</a> largest](<a href=“http://www3.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/genealogy/acbiorecord/faq.html]second”>http://www3.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/genealogy/acbiorecord/faq.html) institution of higher education in the United States at that time, after Yale. </p>

<p>The differentiation between “research universities” and “LACs” began in the late 1800s. It was pioneered in the US by Johns Hopkins, which in turn followed the German university model. Under this model, universities differed from LACs because they emphasized research as well as teaching; they also offered distinct graduate and professional programs, which required prior undergraduate degrees for admission. Schools like Harvard and Yale adopted the new JHU model, expanded greatly, and became known as “research universities”. Schools like Amherst, Williams, and Bowdoin stuck with the traditional model, and became known as “LACs”.</p>