The American Physical Society honors this combination with a prize, actually. Note that the 2021 recipient received his B.A. from an LAC (Williams), his PhD from a national university (Princeton), and has achieved national recognition for his research and mentoring as a professor at Hamilton:
2021 Prize for a Faculty Member for Research in an Undergraduate Institution
“For outstanding contributions to fundamental neutron physics, development of neutron polarizers using optically polarized helium-3, and extraordinary engagement and education of undergraduate students.”
Ok here is the deal: if we can say that LACs have the same exact research opportunities and experiences as large universities, then we can also agree that large universities have the exact same discussion based, small classes as LACs.
Neither is true, but there are opportunities at both. (I am particularly feisty today because tomorrow is Monday and my job is very stressful).
I think LACs were described nicely in one of the posts noted above. And as noted- there are many differences among schools from the same category (LAC, etc).
Thanks for all the replies and input. I feel that was my question was answered well by Lindagaf. Also, I’m sure a lot of kids are having great experiences and outcomes at schools with 1000 kids or schools with 50,000 kids and everything in between.
I now realize you are not necessarily going to get a true Liberal Arts Education at every school that is commonly called a Liberal Arts College. Also that you can get a true Liberal Arts education at Harvard or MIT or the vast majority of schools that are not referred to as LACs.
I’d be a lot happier with the back and forth, if you edited the subject line to more accurately reflect your real underlying question, which isn’t about LACs per se, but really more like, “What is a Liberal Arts Education?”.
And, a gentle reminder that CC is not a debating society.
This was exactly my point: it is ridiculous to state that LACs have the same research opportunities as national universities. The high impact paradigm-shifting work goes on at the universities, not the LACs. Incidentally, this is probably why LACs have little to no name recognition among the public, as they are not typically doing the type of research that makes it into the mainstream media. Also, in rankings which list both universities and LACs (eg WSJ/THE, Forbes), the LACs clearly trail the national universities, which further demonstrates that comparative differences in available resources, opportunities, and outcomes…
Clearly, we all should agree to disagree here. To each their own…
No one’s disagreeing with you. I just find the whole thing a bit of a strawman argument, that’s all. The kind that pops up every time CC entertains one of these free-for-alls.
I don’t want to create any angst and it sounds like it would be best to end the thread. However, my original question is exactly as I intended it to be and for me was answered clearly. It seems like you disagree with my takeaway which is absolutely fine too.
LACs don’t offer all that a research University does, and to suggest otherwise is comparing oranges to apples. There’s a good reason why a publication such as USNWR creates a separate list to rank LACs. And so what if an LAC doesn’t make it into mainstream media? In what way is that important?
It’s clear that students can attend LACs and do important research while they are at college, just as students at any higher ed institution can do. Research needs a human to do it. It doesn’t matter where the human attended college and it’s very clear that people at LACs can do research along with the best of them. Why the condescension? Using words like ridiculous and absurd is uncalled for.
Hard to argue that LAC’s provide an indaquete education or poor prep for graduate school, if actually look at data.
If you look at the National Science Foundation’s data on schools that produce the most per-capita (PHDs/BA recipients) , there are tons of LACs (8 of the top 10 in Chemistry and Biology are LACS).
My undergrad degree is from an LAC and while getting my grad degree at a National University took an undergrad class. The experience was totally different in terms of level of student engagement and involvement with the LAC being far superior.
Lol. This is indeed a textbook straw man. Nobody really was comparing them in terms of size and depth. But it makes your argument a whole lot easier to frame the debate that way I suppose.
The differences between these two models are obvious and most people who have bothered to objectively think about it know what they are. For the LAC crowd, it is simply a matter of resources relative to those who partake of them. Class size, faculty focus and attention, “life of the school” in which one can immerse oneself on a human scale. In no other aspect of life do people torture themselves to get to the answer they want like they do this topic when considering resources and users. I’ve met exactly zero people who don’t/didn’t care about how big their kids’ class sizes were from grades k-12.
The “people have never heard of the schools” argument borders on desperation. Big time sports is 99.5% of the reason for that, .4% is because they have exponentially more graduates in the world and maybe for a tiny % of the population it’s due to research output. Most people I know don’t know what CERN is or what they do. Who cares?
Bottom line is that the results are there to support LAC education. When you control for size, their relative output of PHD and professional school production speaks for itself.
It’s worth pondering why large publics began offering honors colleges in the first place, and why those are limited to a more accomplished cohort of the student body. What are those kids getting more of, why are they getting it and why did they have to clear a higher admissions hurdle to be eligible? And what does all that mean for everyone else?
I’m sorry, but of all of the iterations of this debate I’ve seen on CC, this is easily the worst.
I couldn’t agree more that LACs can be excellent places to study STEM (or anything else), but such lists are an apples to oranges comparison. The denominator is the total number of undergraduates at each school, which at universities includes many students in disciplines rarely culminating in a PhD – music, journalism, architecture, nursing, international relations, and so on. Little surprise that LACs fare well in comparison!
The ratio of PhD recipients to BA/BS recipients within a particular major/field would be considerably more informative, but such data is rarely available.
Not so fast (and I’m not disagreeing that this is an apples to oranges comparison), but people very often rely on these baccalaureate origins stats as a way of appraising how academic, intellectual (read: nerdy) different places are. So, in some cases, inclusion of the non-PhD bound undergraduates makes sense as a denominator. Just sayin’. That kind of atmosphere/ambience is a draw for some kids.
But, this thread went off the rails a long time ago.
Back to the original topic of the thread. I think there are a number of schools that are commonly referred to as LACs that are true Liberal Arts Colleges and some that truly aren’t.
Pitt has roughly 70% of it’s undergrads in the College Arts and Sciences. W & L has about 66% studying Arts and Science. Pitt is not called an LAC because of it’s size, that it has a big graduate school programs, maybe larger class sizes and it does major research. W&L is called a LAC because it’s smaller, doesn’t have a major graduate school program and has small class sizes.
For sure there is a long list of schools that are truly Liberal Arts Colleges. Like Colby or Hamilton or Grinnell, there are many because all of their academic program are within the Liberal Arts.
Back to the original OP question: What is a Liberal Arts College?. Is it the college of Arts and Science within the University of Pittsburgh where 100% of the students are studying programs in the Liberal Arts or is it W&L where by far and away the number one major is business?
I recommend that you read up on the methodologies for those rankings, and then go a read the missions statements of LACs. Then you should spend some times actually looking at admissions to PhD programs, to medical schools, job placement, etc., rates for LACs.
Fact is, the educational resources available for LACs students are enormous, and that most of the resources that you read about at R1s are not available to undergraduates.
Look up where LAC graduate end up. For example, although only 3% of people with an undergraduate earned it at a LAC, 30% of all USA presidents attended a LAC (more if you consider service academies to be LACs).
The way that you describe LACs (isolated, poor, no research) is so at odds with the facts on the ground that I wonder where your information is coming from.
Research opportunities for UNDERGRADUATES, dude. Read what people write.
LAC faculty are generally not engaged in that type of research, because that type of research almost never engages undergraduates, and because faculty at LACs invest a lot more time and effort into teaching undergraduates than faculty at R1s.
Top researchers at R1s all are on different levels of teaching releases. So they are teaching, at most, 1 class a year. Great for research, not great for teaching since. As people have repeated upteen times, LACs are focused on undergraduate teaching and research, so LAC faculty do not focus on research that requires them to not teach undergraduates
What you seem to be saying, essentially, is that LACs aren’t good places for undergraduates, since LAC faculty spend too much time teaching undergraduates.
Since that makes absolutely no sense, could you clarify your reasoning?
Thank you for supplying a question to the OP’s original assertion. Usually, it’s the other way around.
It’s an ambiguity this country has been living with ever since the collapse of the academic market. People who would normally have chosen “a life of the
mind” have had to choose back-up careers in business. There was a Daedalus article published in 1999 that once asserted that if you eliminated all the self-identified LACs that offered business degrees, there would only be 200 “real” LACs left in the United States.
That’s not what I’m reading anyone to say. Instead, it’s …
National U guy says LACs don’t crank out ground breaking research; therefore, LACs are not good places for undergraduates to do research. Some go further and say that, therefore, LACs are not good places to prepare for graduate school in STEM (which ostensibly - to anyone who has bothered to look into it at all - is factually incorrect). And you actually have someone in this thread who lived up to that stereotype and demonstrated my point.
LAC guy, OTOH, says LACs have small class sizes, which is true, more faculty attention and focus to the undergraduate, which is generally true, and more resources available to the undergraduate on a per student basis, which is almost always true.
What LAC guy never says is that LAC research production is comparable to that of a national university and that LACs have greater resources than that at a large research powerhouse. Nobody ever says that nor do they need to say it.
The other red herring I see a lot pertains to class size, where the big school folks argue that they have small class sizes too. Nobody really ever says there are no small classes at large research universities. What they do say is that the small LAC offer smaller class sizes across the board, which they clearly do. It’s the rare bird who is going to get through 4 years at a large research powerhouse without being in several large classes. I really don’t know why anyone ever bothers to debate this point.
