<p>^ what is your understanding of LAC and how does Harvard qualify as being one?</p>
<p>Wow. Talk about off-topic. Lots of great information here and you are all very bright, but back to the original topic… It is hard to get around the rankings. Even though you’ll go to the top schools and be taught by a Grad Student, and it will be a huge school and you’ll feel anonymous, you WILL graduate with a degree from Harvard, or Yale, or Columbia, and that decision will be with you the rest of your life, unless you go on to graduate school. So unfortunately the rankings do matter, because most people believe them, and you will get more doors opened to you obviously if you graduate from Harvard than ASU. However, you then must prove yourself, and if you’re incompetent, it doesn’t matter that you have a Harvard degree, does it? And if you hate the school or the town, even if it is an “ivy”, then you really sort of waste 4 years of your life, and formative years, too, important years. </p>
<p>Liberal Arts colleges are really that—small schools with individual attention devoted to the arts for the most part. So if you’re a science major, you’ll get very frustrated at the course offerings, with one Physics class and 60 Poetry classes. </p>
<p>Big universities can be so huge that you feel lost, especially if you change majors or don’t really know yourself well enough to know exactly what you want to study. You meet far more of your fellow students in small liberal arts colleges. They are by design, smaller and more nurturing, and you really can’t hide—the classes are usually so small you can’t get out of doing the work. Whereas at a large university, you can get by, sometimes, and take relatively easy classes and sometimes you graduate and still don’t have a clue what you want to do with your life. </p>
<p>Sorry if I’m rambling and also “off-topic”. Hope I can help any of you in this big decision.</p>
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<p>Be careful not to confuse the liberal arts with “the arts.” Because science and mathematics are tradtionally part of the liberal arts, and most LACs are good at teaching them, although they usually will not offer the same breadth of specialized science courses that a research University will. I personally know a kid who majored in Physics at Williams and had no trouble getting into the Physics PhD program at MIT.</p>
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<p>Coureur, you have to go back to my original post at #6. I never said, that Harvard was modeled on anything. I said, “the Ivy League” was. And, since we’re agreed that, 1) Harvard was the first American college, 2) Harvard was the “functional equivalent” of an LAC for the first 170 years of its existence, and, 3) the vast majority of the Ivy League was based to some extent on Harvard’s prototype, Q.E.D.: The Ivy League was based on the LAC model which I will give props to Harvard for inventing. :D</p>
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Last time I checked, Duke, Chicago and Hopkins were admitting in the mid to high 20% rate, while Columbia 9%, Brown 13%, Dart 15% and Penn 20%. Only Cornell would be comparable to DCH.</p>
<p>johnwesley, I think we can agree on your #1 and #2. I’m not so sure about #3. What was “Harvard’s prototype”? When you say “the vast majority of the Ivy League was based to some extent on Harvard’s prototype”, do you mean that all the “Colonial Colleges” were based on the model of Oxford and Cambridge? </p>
<p>I think what you mean is that those colleges were founded in imitation of Harvard, and that Harvard, when they were founded, was the functional equivalent of a LAC. Therefore, they were all imitating, or based on, a LAC model.</p>
<p>I don’t think all of us agree on the latter. Coureur seems to be saying that Harvard never set out to be a “LAC” at all. It was an Oxford-Cambridge wanna-be. If it was the “functional equivalent” of a LAC, that was only because it was a university in an arrested (or incomplete) state of development. “LAC” was not the model.</p>
<p>Anyway … for the OP and other HS students out there struggling to make their choices … is that the right way to think of the LAC concept? Is a LAC basically just a university in an arrested state? Or is the LAC just as much a modern invention as the modern research university?</p>
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<p>Yes, that’s exactly my point. And eventually Harvard did become a university, although still not quite what the founders had envisioned - not an Oxbridge-style university with multiple undergraduate colleges.</p>
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<p>I think it’s now Columbia 9%, Brown 10%, Dartmouth 13%, Penn 17%, Cornell 19%. Just FYI.</p>
<p>trollnyc,</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s right to base acceptance on % alone. The criteria for admission requires several aspects such as GPA, SATs, ECs, etc.</p>
<p>I will add to post #67 that I doubt that Harvard spent all those 170 or so years that it was what we would now call an LAC constantly striving to fulfill its founders’ model and turn into a University. I think it’s reasonable to assume that through much of the 18th century the presidents of Harvard either set aside or lost sight of the original university model and were content to let Harvard be what it was for that time and for the foreseeable future. </p>
<p>I’m guessing that it was largely through later ambition and natural growth that Harvard evolved and took on characteristics of a university. Which would explain why they didn’t end up a copy of Oxford - they had given up on that model and were becoming their own sort of university.</p>
<p>Yes, my understanding is that the 19th century was a fairly complex transition-period. Significant milestones included the Morrill Act (allowing for the establishment of land grant colleges); the founding of Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago (which all represented departures from established American models); and the establishment of the “elective system” at Harvard under President Charles William Eliot. The elective system accompanied tighter integration of classical literary studies with modern scientific studies (which, ironically, seem to have been regarded by some educators as the more “lightweight” course of study at the time, much as we might now regard the industrial arts.)</p>
<p>Meanwhile, what was happening at schools that came to be known as LACs? John R. Thelin (A History of American Higher Eduation) refers to New England’s “Hilltop Colleges” (Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Wesleyan). Students at these colleges in the early 19th century tended to come from farm families with modest incomes. The oldest son would inherit the farm. Younger sons would be packed off to a “Hilltop College” to prepare for careers as teachers or ministers. They came to be considered respectable alternatives to godless, big-city Harvard.</p>
<p>The focus of the LACs Students.
The focus of the vast majority of ‘national/research universities’ research.
Access/opportunities for research at a ‘few’ LAC far superior to the majority of the ‘national/research universities’.
At a small number national/research universities a significant portion of their resources target undergraduates.
Greater % of undergraduates at the top LACs involved in independent research compared to majority of the big research publics. The number of LAC science faculty at the top LACs with research grants is a lot higher than you might expect.</p>
<p>LAC is a label used to highlight schools with an undergraduate focus. By the way the administrative structure of Cambridge and Oxford is extremely complex. Most of the big ticket items (sciences/research) are handled centrally. The colleges are fairly independent and often feel more like and LAC; emphasis on undergraduates.
Applicants and parents need to sit back and consider which environment (research university or LAC) is the optimal.
I like the ‘Hilltop College’ concept. However, I think it had more to do serving the populations in the frontiers as opposed to the ‘farmers’ versus urbanites. Bowdoin and Williams were intended to serve the population in the northern and western districts of the Commonwealth of Mass. Imagine the investment in time and effort to send your son off Boston to college if you lived in Augusta (Maine) or North Adams. Both Bowdoin and Williams had medical schools and courses in engineering. It is true that the majority of their students pursued careers in teaching and the ministry. However, in 18000 the outcome was the same at Harvard or Princeton</p>
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<p>One thing I don’t quite get is why Johns Hopkins gets pretty much sole credit for being the first German-style research university in the US. Because Daniel Gilman, the first president of JHU, was years earlier the second president of the Univ. Of California and founder of the Berkeley campus. And he had implemented much of the same approach at UC. According to one account I read it was because they liked what they saw taking shape at Berkeley that caused the founders of JHU to recruit Gilman to be its first president.</p>
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<p>I think where Hopkins gets credit is in putting the whole package together and becoming a trend-setter. Making research a primary institutional objective, granting doctorates on a significant scale, establishing a university press, etc., all reflected JHU’s identity and mission. Other schools may deserve credit for one-off innovations (Yale, for example, apparently granted the first Ph.D.) but did not put it all together into a major paradigm shift.</p>
<p>I dunno, this may just be received wisdom that deserves a little more scrutiny.</p>
<p>Did anybody mention that Hopkins and Clark U. started off with no undergrad programs at all? I have no idea why this might be relevant, but it seems odd that nobody (from what I can tell) has mentioned it.</p>
<p>tk21769 wrote:
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<p>No, because I don’t think the “hilltop colleges” that came later in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were necessarily inventing anything new; they were simply doing what Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Dartmouth had done with a fair degree of conformity before them, which was to build a single, all-purpose building some distance away from the hustle and bustle of the ports and counting houses, house them with dormitories, classrooms, a rudimentary library and a small collection of faculty culled from what was the chief learned profession of the time – ministers. That paradigm wasn’t something that was invented by Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin and Wesleyan; it had its roots all the way back to Cotton Mather.</p>
<p>The fact that neither Harvard nor any other Colonial Era college ever really followed through on their Oxbridge ambitions (except, much later as a blueprint to solve some of their problems around community and residential life) was perhaps a sign that the American soil was inhospitable to the complex system of competing undergraduate colleges often built at the behest of politically powerful prelates of The Church of England.</p>
<p>After all, America is where the Puritans had come to get away from all of that. The frontier would always act as something of a siren song – and, probably a safety valve as well – for every religious schism that came along. When the Congregationalists got fed up with the Unitarians in Boston they put down roots in New Haven; when the Presbyterians could no longer abide either of them, they crossed the Hudson into New Jersey and so on and so on. The rationale behind Oxford and Cambridge (a state church trying to hold together contentious factions) simply broke down in America.</p>
<p>^^continuing the same point, let’s face it, keeping even a stand-alone Colonial Era undergraduate college opened and functioning was probably as much as Harvard et al could do. Case in point: Rutgers. Were they “aspiring” to be anything? Yes, solvent. :D</p>
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<p>Duke is 17% as well. [Duke</a> University Offers Admission to 3,517 for Class of 2013](<a href=“http://news.duke.edu/2009/03/admissions.html]Duke”>http://news.duke.edu/2009/03/admissions.html)</p>
<p>And interestingguy, stop ■■■■■■■■ everywhere and putting down institutions like Duke just 'cause you have some complex that makes you feel as if you must put whatever HYPSM school you went to on a pedestal.</p>
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<p>Same with Rockefeller University and UC San Francisco. And both are small, graduate program-only schools to this day. And both are further examples that university can be smaller than an LAC and still be university.</p>
<p>“Liberal Arts colleges are really that—small schools with individual attention devoted to the arts for the most part. So if you’re a science major, you’ll get very frustrated at the course offerings, with one Physics class and 60 Poetry classes.”</p>
<p>Wow! If that is your definition of a LAC I feel sorry for your kids. I attended a top 10 Biology graduate program for my PhD. About 30% of the graduate students came from top20 LACs 50% from top20 national research universities, 20% were internationals and few from lower ranked US colleges and universities. Many of higher ranked LACs have amazing science programs; outstanding facilities and research active faculty. Imagine having an endowment of $1 billion to support a mere 2000 undergraduates and without the high cost associated with graduate and professional schools. In the core subjects, the education offered by the top LACs is equal to that offered by the top national universities.</p>