<p>For example, Yale boasts it's liberal arts education, but is not a liberal arts school while schools like Pomona and Harvey Mudd are truly "liberal arts." What's the difference?</p>
<p>In most respects, the undergraduate arts & science programs at many universities are not very different from what you’d find at a LAC. The main difference is that liberal arts colleges (like Harvey Mudd and Pomona) have no (or few) graduate degree programs. Usually they have < 3000 undergraduate students. A university like Yale would have more large classes (> 50 students), but also a wider variety of courses, than a LAC like Pomona. In addition, a university like Yale has many graduate degree programs (including PhD, law and medical degree programs.)</p>
<p>Universities also are more likely to have undergraduate programs in pre-professional fields such as business, journalism/communications, and engineering. Harvey Mudd is one of the few LACs that has engineering programs. However, there are some universities whose undergraduate programs focus almost exclusively on the arts and sciences.</p>
<p>Interesting you should give Mudd as an example. My D is a freshman there, and she has to write a paper this semester on whether Mudd is or isn’t a liberal arts college. Honestly… my vote after watching and listening to her first semester is “not really”. They take a full load of tech courses, and tack one non-tech course on each semester (essentially overloading them compared to every other college out there – 17.5 credits is a normal freshman load each semester). And she says her peers know very little about art, literature, poetry, history, etc – she still likes it a lot and has good friends, but the LAC label doesn’t seem very accurate.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Math and science are parts of the liberal arts. Harvey Mudd College does require all students to complete at least 11 humanities and social studies courses as well as a math and science core curriculum.</p>
<p>However, 35% of recent graduates are engineering majors, not normally considered a liberal arts major. If there is a threshold of percentage of students in liberal arts majors versus other majors which contributes to determining whether a school is a liberal arts college, then Harvey Mudd College might fall short there.</p>
<p>UCB, have you met the kids that go there? I mean, they require a few more courses in the humanities than MIT or Caltech, but really is a tech school. Technically the sciences and math are liberal arts, but the weighting of both interest and coursework is very, very heavy in the math/science direction. Her courses first semester: Physics (Special Relativity), Physics Lab, Chemistry, Calculus, Probability & Statistics, Intro Computer Science, Comp Sci Lab, one humanities class, and a half semester writing class (on science fiction writing). And she had zero choice in them (I think she had a couple of options for the humanities class, but all the rest were dictated).</p>
<p>This semester she has Physics (Mechanics & Wave Motion), Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Chemistry, Chem Lab, Intro to Bio, a required humanities class (no option, they all take the same class), a one credit phy ed class, and the second course in the Comp Sci sequence (the Comp Sci is the one course she could have chosen to do something else).</p>
<p>Like I said, my kid likes it a lot. But she comes from a liberal arts high school environment, and the balance one typically sees across the liberal arts subjects really isn’t there.</p>
<p>Pomona and Mudd may be a 5 minute walk apart, but they are worlds apart in the course requirements and academic focus. Pomona is a much more traditional LAC. But sometimes I think they lump Mudd with the LACs because they are not sure where else to put it…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Most students choose more specialized curriculums in college than in high school. For example, many students take no lab science at all in college (possibly just a non-lab “physics for poets” or “rocks for jocks” type of course to cover a science breadth requirement).</p>
<p>Even when a college has fairly extensive breadth requirements in various liberal arts subjects, the student’s major tends to cause a certain area to be overrepresented in his/her course selection. Few students will graduate with a “balanced” selection of courses across all of the liberal arts areas.</p>
<p>But, once again, math and science are part of the liberal arts.</p>
<p>The education is virtually the same, but the experience is slightly different- at liberal art colleges like Pomona and Mudd, you find that the administration and faculty put in their all just for you and no one else. Research options are not taken by graduate students because there are usually none, and faculty teach all classes exclusively (TAs are virtually nonexistent in lectures). Because of the smaller size and intimacy, people genuinely care about your progress and growth- professors and the supportive staff like the Career Development and Fellowship Office. Connections with faculty are easy to build, even with those whom you may have never had a class in. Your peers tend to be a really supportive and nurturing group, and play a pivotal role in shaping your experience in classes and outside of it. LACs tend to have a great residential life model, though some universities like Yale do a similarly excellent job. Large classes are virtually unheard of- the largest at Pomona tends to be PE with 70 students, and it is rare to find an academic course with over 50 students. </p>
<p>The best combination in my opinion is a liberal arts college within a consortium, as they offer the full promise and nurture of a liberal arts education and experience, while also maintaining the benefits and resources of a large university. The Claremont Colleges have over 2500 classes, 250 clubs and organizations, 7 dining halls, and the 3rd largest private library in California, all available jointly for the 5 Claremont Colleges (like Pomona and Mudd). Some other schools have similar consortium systems to mitigate the downsides of being much smaller and exclusively undergraduate focused. That being said, there are a few things that even consortiums can sometimes not change, like being able to take pre-professional or rarely studied courses like nursing and Afrikaans, or being able to work at the most cutting edge, expensive facilities in the country. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In my opinion, those downsides sometimes are exaggerated on College Confidential. For most students, the benefits of small classes and greater faculty attention to teaching far outweigh the absence of Afrikaans courses, or the fact that your major only offers twice as many courses as you possibly can take (instead of 3 or 4 times as many).</p>
<p>If you do believe the downsides are significant, then yes, one way to mitigate them is by attending a consortium college. Another way is to attend a relatively small, well-endowed university where average class sizes are nearly as small as a LAC’s. A third way, in some cases, is to attend a public honors college.</p>
<p>However, there is not a single university in the USA where 100% of classes have less than 50 students (as is fairly commonplace at LACs). Many LACs seem to do quite well in academic outcomes such as PhD production rates or admission rates to top professional schools. If there are significant academic downsides to LACs, I don’t see them reflected in such data. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The downsides (or the disregard for them) do vary based on the student and his/her academic interests. For example, math majors (particularly the more advanced ones) are more likely to encounter the downsides of running out of course offerings and getting fewer of the upsides of smaller class sizes (because upper division math tends to have small class sizes even at big universities) than pre-meds (where the pre-med courses are often among the largest classes at any given school and are widely available almost everywhere).</p>
<p>Of course, a smaller school may have strong and weak departments; a student may need to consider his/her academic interests relative to the strength of each school’s departments. An example from a previous thread was for a prospective physics major; among LACs, some (e.g. Oberlin, Reed) are stronger than others (e.g. Marietta).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In the case of the weaker departments, the department may only offer the bare minimum courses for the major, and infrequently or unreliably.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, that may be the case for some departments. It should be noted, though, that LACs are not the only schools where some students have trouble getting the courses they need. </p>
<p>If this were a serious systemic problem, one might expect it to affect graduation rates. Most of the US News top ~20 national LACs have 4 year graduation rates of about 85-90%. The top ~20 national universities fall approximately in the same range. </p>
<p>A liberal arts college is a college that focuses primarily or exclusively on undergraduate study in the liberal arts and sciences. Many people forget that the original phrase is the liberal arts <em>and sciences</em>, which include physics, chemistry, computer science, and math. Thus, Harvey Mudd is a liberal arts college focused on math and science. That’s actually exactly how they describe themselves - a “private liberal-arts college focusing on mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, and engineering.”</p>
<p>The key in the LACs, though, is not the liberal arts part so much as the <em>undergraduate</em> part. Places like Yale and Harvard do offer a rounded liberal arts & sciences education, but their primary focus is not undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Re: <a href=“What's the difference between a college with a liberal arts education and a liberal arts college? - #10 by tk21769 - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>What's the difference between a college with a liberal arts education and a liberal arts college? - #10 by tk21769 - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums;
<p>Those schools (LAC or otherwise) which offer the bare minimum (or less) for a given major may reduce the major requirements to prevent lack of course offerings from delaying graduation. But then the students in that major may be less prepared for post-graduate study or employment where the expectation of what the major contains is greater than what was available to the student at the school with the weak department.</p>