Boy, it sure does, doesn’t it?
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For most college students, the comparison may be between Midwestern State University versus University of Texas (campus other than Austin) or analogues in other states or among moderately selective private schools, rather than reach colleges that they will not be admitted to.
I think you are too close to the trees to see the forest here. It’s because Middlebury and Brown have so much more in common with each other than either has to a state university with a vestigial honors college that the comparison is more interesting. Why argue about the obvious when you can delve into subtle differences?
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I mean no disrespect here, but you have lost me. The more you post, the more it seems you help my case, but your tone suggests something else. I’m pretty much at a loss to how to respond. Nothing you wrote hasn’t been captured elsewhere.
Why is it a more interesting comparison? Because there aren’t neat and clean little boxes into which to put all these schools, and it’s better to think about the spectrum. And on that spectrum, Brown is closer to a LAC than is the University of Texas for the very reasons you gave, and others.
And the fact that my honors college does what I said it does wasn’t proffered to negate that your doesn’t. You’re mischaracterizing the point of the question. Mine is, in fact separate as I described, as are several others, and the motivation for creating it was the point of my question. And that question was being asked rhetorically in response to what seems to be an assertion that you can do LAC anywhere. Again, Philosophy at Michigan = Williams College. If you’re on board, then be on board. I’m not. So, yes, you did miss my point. Entirely. This has zero to do with “my experience is just as important as yours.”
Actually, many individuals do compare large state university honors programs to certain aspects often found at an LAC. While I think that that is somewhat incorrect, it does apply in some respects–primarily with the ability to avoid large introductory classes during one’s freshman year. Other advantages include, but are not limited to, significant merit scholarship awards, priority course registration, heightened counseling & academic opportunities, and special housing for honors students.
Through the past several decades, I have spoken with those heading efforts to create as well as to combat honors colleges at large public universities. Many honors colleges / honors programs were designed initially to curtail state brain-drain to Ivy League schools & to other elite National Universities.
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Ciao. CC is not a debating society and apologies if my posting irritates you all. English is my native language and I’m pretty sure I can follow the reasoning (and the point, when there is one) on a message board but thanks for the clarification.
Carry on.
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What’s the point of this thread? Is it that one type of schools is better for a liberal arts education than others (in which case plenty of people will likely disagree)? Or is it that LACs may have some advantages and disadvantages relative to others (in which case those advantages/disadvantages will likely depend on the specific schools they compare to)? Or is it about the distinguishing features of LACs (in which case someone will likely find some exceptions)?
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Well, I assume directed at me. Your post didn’t irritate me at all (it seems pretty clearly to me to be the other way around). And although English is not my first language, I’m comfortable with my facility and it was my point, so I should know if a response missed it. And yours did, and I explained why in pretty clear English, even for me.
At this point, I think your recitation is a fair one and all of those angles have been brought in at this point.
I thought, and think, the point was, “can’t you do LAC anywhere there is a college of arts & sciences? and if a LAC has anything that isn’t liberal arts, is it really a LAC?”
University of Richmond is near the borderline of the Carnegie Classification definitions I mentioned earlier. It’s Carnegie has changed from “Master’s Colleges & Universities: Small Programs” to “Baccalaureate Colleges: Arts & Sciences Focus” in recent years. USNWR calls the former category “Regional University” and the latter “Liberal Arts College.”
Other current “Baccalaureate Colleges: Arts & Sciences Focus” colleges = USNWR LAC that have changed Carnegie Classification and corresponding USNWR label in recent years include the following:
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Antioch College – Previously “Not applicable, not in Carnegie universe (not accredited or nondegree-granting)”
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Aquinas College – Previously “Master’s Colleges & Universities: Small Programs” and “Master’s Colleges & Universities: Medium Programs”
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Bennett College – Previously “Baccalaureate Colleges: Diverse Fields”
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Bethany Lutheran College – Previously “Baccalaureate/Associate’s Colleges: Mixed * Baccalaureate/Associate’s”
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Doane University – Previously “Master’s Colleges & Universities: Larger Programs”
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Drew University – Previously “Doctoral/Professional Universities”
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Marymount California University – Previously “Associate’s Colleges: High Vocational & Technical-High Nontraditional”
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Sterling College – Previously “Special Focus Four-Year: Other Special Focus Institutions”
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University of South Carolina Beaufort – Previously “Baccalaureate Colleges: Diverse Fields” and “Special Focus Two-Year: Arts & Design”
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University of Wisconsin-Superior – Previously “Baccalaureate Colleges: Diverse Fields” and “Master’s Colleges & Universities: Small Programs”
Facts are Facts and I see just as much cherry picking in your response
You ended with Nobel Laureates so lets start there
You picked the LAC with the highest number but did not compare it to the National University with the highest number.
Harvard (#1 in Research Universities) has 16 winners that did undergrad there since 2000 and 80 Alumni total undergrad and Grad That won Nobel Prizes
Research Universities in total produce more Undergrad to PHD’s
So let’s look at Swarthmore and Harvard again
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/
Between 2002-2011 Table 4
Swarthmore 472 Doctorate Degrees 13.1 yield
Harvard 1,794 Doctorate Degrees 10.0 yield
While Swarthmore has a 3 % higher yield Harvard has over 3 and a half more Bachelor to PHD’s in the same time frame
Research universities are offering degrees and training in Nursing, Physical/Occupational Therapy, Accounting and many other fields where the goal of the student is to enter the workforce without a PHD. Many of these fields you can not major in at most LAC’s.
Which College had the most Presidents graduate from it
Harvard with 5
Yale, Princeton, William and Mary 3
West Point and Penn 2
If you count Advance degrees Harvard has 8
Also a dozen Presidents didn’t Graduate College and only one had a PHD
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To add, I will also write that large flagships are wonderful places as well. The vibrancy which comes out of a student body of 30,000 students, the fact that, no matter what you like or what you do, you will find a group of like-minded friends, etc
As somebody told us about the place where I work now - “every day there is something different going on”.
For many kids, large lecture formats are the best way to learn. That worked for the the universities of Europe for hundreds of years. You learn by listening to a lecture, and arguing it out between yourselves. Having most small labs and discussion groups run by somebody who is just out of their undergraduate also has benefits.
Large lecture halls have an energy which is difficult to emulate with a small classroom. I have taught both and taken classes in both, so it’s personal experience there.
The format of an active classroom of 10-20 students is the nightmare of many many students. It’s too many for many students to be comfortable talking, and too few for them to simply sit quietly, and sitting quietly isn’t really an option anyways. That is not good, even for many extroverts who are on the shy side.
Smaller private universities are advertising “small classes”, because the parents of their kids demand that. COA is enormous, and wealthier parents are both asking "where is that money going?, and are on the helicopter side “my kid needs personal attention” (I’m actually for parental involvement, BTW). When relative costs were much lower and any parental involvement beyond “see ya kid, call if you’re in the emergency room” was frowned upon, these colleges were not advertising small classrooms.
The Ivies and similar colleges, both public and private, followed a different trajectory than colleges like Moravian or W&L, and that worked out very well for them. However, they DID change their missions and their focus, and to claim that they are still primarily undergraduate-focused colleges ignored the facts on the ground.
Bottom line, the point of LACs is the small class and focus on undergraduate education. That is what they are best at, and, for students who really do best in those conditions, they are the best colleges. “Undergraduate education” also means “undergraduate research”.
They are great at training people who stay in research and/or academia because they encourage that attitude.
Smaller universities, like some Ivies, Rice, etc, have larger classes and more of them, have TAs, etc. They also have larger social circles and a wider variety of them, and a larger range of classes - they may only start attending them as Juniors, but the selection is enormous. They also have engineering and professional programs like nursing.
Large universities have the size and vibrancy that only comes with that many students. No matter who you are or what you like, you can find a community at a large university. They are often networked in the state like nothing else, allowing access to wide state and often federal resources and opportunities. They have name recognition in the state that goes beyond anything that any “elite” college has, as well. If you like spectator sports, well, c’mon.
PS. I think that it is really sad that states are not investing more in all of the excellent public LACs out there, and think that there is no place for a public college which isn’t primarily for professional training. There is a need for more affordable LACs, and the best way to do that is to support the public ones more.
Regarding public LACs, these are typically small compared to other public schools, though some are larger than the private LACs that seem to be the focus on these forums. However, their small size in the context of public schools means that a state would need to build many public LACs to serve the same undergraduate population as one large state university.
Can the LAC model be scaled up to a large school?
Or is the LAC model only really doable and effective at a small school?
I made that same point fairly early in this thread before it descended into a rising tide of straw arguments around which type of college sets the world on fire (or, a bigger portion of it.) Size matters and not always in the ways you might think.
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Sorry, Harvard isn’t the National University with the most Nobel Prize winners per student, Caltech is. Furthermore, École Normale Supérieure beats Harvard, hand down. Also, Swarthmore has fewer than 1/3 the number of undergrads that Harvard has.
I will repeat - only 3% of all students attend a LAC. By all rights, there should not be a single Nobel Laureate, more than a single president, in fact, almost nobody anywhere should be a LAC graduate.
That makes no sense at all. “Yield” means PhD to Bachelor ratio.
“Bachelor to PHD’s” is the reciprocal of the yield, so if Swarthmore has a higher yield, of COURSE it’s “Bachelor to PHD’s” is lower.
So could you clarify your claim?
They are LIBERAL ARTS Colleges, and undergraduate schools. Why should they have professional and professional master’s degrees?
BTW, many research universities also do not have these fields as well.
It’s like claiming “that rice-cooker is useless, since it can’t be used to bake a cake”.
Your post also seems to be about “But Harvard!”. I talk about LACs as a class of college, and you keep on repeating “But Harvard!”
Harvard is wealthy and old. It has served the rich and powerful from the get-go, and, as a result, has more than its share of people in positions of power and control. Considering its wealth, age, and influence, I am surprised that only 5 presidents are from Harvard.
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Great overall reply, but on this one part, just to clarify, I think he (and others who point this out) mean that those more professional/vocational degrees seldom / never end up at PhD, and having those students in the denominator for large research hurts their “pro rata” number. And that’s fair, although I do wonder how much it really moves the needle. Perhaps more and more over time as kids are encouraged to major in “practical pursuits”.
That said, the poster to whom you responded, and everyone else, would do well to keep in mind the context of your reply, which for the 5th time or so is that you, and I, and others, are responding to posts calling the LAC model into question. Again, “if you can major in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburg, isn’t that a LAC education?” and “because LACs don’t routinely involve themselves in the most cutting edge research that national research powerhouses do, the research opportunities are inferior and you’ll have trouble getting a STEM graduate degree or into med school.”
Let’s just try to not forget the original premise(s) here. This thread has so thoroughly confused so many people here that a Brown graduate (a helluva lot closer to being a LAC than a major research powerhouse) swept in and thought she was arguing against me when in fact she was arguing with me.
Our experience exactly. D did 3 summers of paid research. Secured a job at a well known research institute. Is now at a top tier PhD program at an R1. Based on her personality, I am not sure going to a national university would have led to the same outcomes. She also had plenty of successful premed friends in her class in her rural LAC. Some kids will more likely thrive in one environment over another so advantages/disadvantages of LACs vs National Universities are student dependent.
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From the link to NSF Data posted earlier
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf13323/
The “institutional-yield ratio” for a baccalaureate-origin institution for a given year is expressed as the number of S&E doctorate recipients per 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields 9 years earlier.[5]
TABLE 4. Top 50 U.S. baccalaureate-origin institutions of 2002–11 S&E doctorate recipients, by institutional-yield ratio, institutional control, and 2010 Carnegie classification
S&E doctorate recipients
Rank Academic institution Institutional control 2010 Carnegie classification Number Institutional-yield ratio
1 CA Institute of Technology Private Research-very high 739 34.9
2 Harvey Mudd C. Private Baccalaureate 359 24.4
3 MA Institute of Technology Private Research-very high 1,880 16.0
4 Reed C. Private Baccalaureate 374 14.2
5 Swarthmore C. Private Baccalaureate 472 13.1
6 Carleton C. Private Baccalaureate 555 12.3
7 Grinnell C. Private Baccalaureate 366 11.1
8 Rice U. Private Research-very high 728 10.8
9 U. of Chicago Private Research-very high 940 10.7
10 Princeton U. Private Research-very high 1,131 10.1
11 Harvard U. Private Research-very high 1,794 10.0
12 Pomona C. Private Baccalaureate 345 9.5
13 Haverford C. Private Baccalaureate 269 9.5
14 NM Institute of Mining and Technology Public Master’s granting 142 9.1
15 Williams C. Private Baccalaureate 451 8.7
16 Case Western Reserve U. Private Research-very high 608 8.4
17 Bryn Mawr C. Private Baccalaureate 245 8.3
18 Stanford U. Private Research-very high 1,359 8.0
19 Brown U. Private Research-very high 1,188 8.0
20 Yale U. Private Research-very high 1,020 7.8
I am not saying they should
I am pointing out that National Research Universities may have 10 to 15 Colleges and many students are looking to enter the workforce after a Bachelor or master degree depending on the field.
How much does this skew the percentages is debatable
We can look at University of Florida for example over 34,000 undergrads and 11,000 in the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
So do we look at how many UF Grads go on to get a PHD out of 34000 or do we look at how many UF Grads get a PHD that Graduated with Majors aligned with LAC’s
Just want to compare Apples to Apples
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Can you explain this number? It sounds like you would not consider Benedictine University, North Central College, Elmhurst College, Aurora University, Dominican University, Wheaton College and Lake Forest College LACs. These are all in suburban Chicago and all predominantly undergraduate. Most self-identify as LACs.
Many people who attend college go to these kinds of places. Nearby, and solid but undistinguished. Far more than 3%. So we’re clearly talking about different things.
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