<p>Tarhunt, I understand what you are saying.
Aren't there more difficult classes and classes that are made up of stronger kids?
Honors classes? Seminars? Graduate courses that undergrads can take?</p>
<p>It's pretty bad when a flagship state university can't educate the brighter kids.</p>
<p>Boy this sure seems like envy more than an actual comparison.</p>
<p>Having attended a state U myself and having two in LAC now, I see some differences that make a small LAC a good choice. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Class size. Biggest classes, 25 kids one class at Lac, average class size 14 taught by professors. My experience biggest class 150, average 35 at midsize U. Not all classes taught by professors.</p></li>
<li><p>Contact with professors.. LAC almost 24/7 (some slack because tech changes) My experience I was able to meet with two professors in the 6 years of college. The rest couldn't schedule me in for weeks at a time. </p></li>
<li><p>Lab time, LAC pretty much unlimited. Mine was schedule time and be gone when your time is up. </p></li>
<li><p>Majors LAC fewer choices. State U more choices.</p></li>
<li><p>Four year track LAC ontime, no classes closed out. Mine, hoping for certain classess, settling for what was there.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>6 Cost...LAC $$$$$$$, Mine $$ However, the LACs the kids both attend gave super generous scholarships which made state u really spendy. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Reality.. without scholarships small LAC wouldn't be possible. State schools would have been fine. </p></li>
<li><p>Grade inflation... I've seen no sign that the smaller LAC inflate grades. Now both public and privates have professors who grade easy and hard, but I don't think the majority reside in private colleges. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>I do think if it can be done a small private LAC offers a better shot at a good education because it is simply set up to serve the students needs education wise better. State schools deals with volume as their first concern. How do we handle all these kids?</p>
<p>d:</p>
<p>Hey, I could go tomorrow to some upper-level physics class and be completely outmatched because I just don't have the prereqs. That wasn't my point.</p>
<p>For some kids, going to a flagship public (most of them, but not all) is like being in a first-grade reading class where everyone else is struggling over reading "cat" and they are wondering about the religious symbolism in "The Chronicles of Narnia." It's not a good experience. They'd be better off in classes with other kids who can keep up with them.</p>
<p>Honors classes? Yeah. There are a few. Some public flagships have well-endowed, administered, and extensive programs, but most honors programs are, if not quite "shams," then a bit less than advertised. Most kids in honors programs in most large, public schools still take the majority of their classes with average students.</p>
<p>"It's pretty bad when a flagship state university can't educate the brighter kids."</p>
<p>I don't think it's a matter if they can, it's a matter of can they compete for these kids? My kids ended up with about a quarter mil between them for LAC. State schools became expensive as they couldn't compete price wise. I think they could educate a smart kid, but will the small privates let them? Or will they cherry pick?</p>
<p>Since I have developed a strong interest in this topic, how widespread is the sort of problem MotherOfTwo describes? Honors programs don't help? (If you read the literature, they're supposed to.)</p>
<p>That's a really scary thought; it should have occurred to me to ask it before. I know that in some popular fields it can be difficult even for majors to take courses that are major requirements, so I suppose I should have guessed that non-majors might be completely frozen out of those courses. Wow. My life would have been really different if I hadn't been allowed to take economics courses because I was a literature major.</p>
<p>They let me take graduate level courses when I was at the U of MN getting pre-reqs for nursing school. They were small classes with great profs in areas like Medical Anthropology and cost almost nothing. I actually did better grade-wise in the grad courses than in undergrad.</p>
<p>JHS:</p>
<p>Some majors are oversubscribed. It's a common problem. Not all honors programs are equal. I was something called an "Echols Scholar" at my undergrad alma mater. It really wasn't an honors program, but I could get into any class, first choice, and had no prereqs or distribution requirements. It was a very small program, and the public school I attended was quite wealthy, so there were many classes and they tended to be small (but not always).</p>
<p>It has become increasingly hard, as budgets are cut, to get classes both within and without one's major or, for that matter, to fulfill core or distribution requirements.</p>
<p>This doesn't make publics a bad deal. Far from it. For some students, publics are the best deal available.</p>
<p>" Someone who is substantially academically more skilled than her classmates will do just fine if she likes to coast and doesn't really care much for learning. Otherwise, it's just a situation of getting As just because what's hard for others is easy for you. In addition, the class discussion in some classes will seem stupid and shallow to a kid like that.</p>
<p>Believe me. I've had a number of frustrated young people in my office who would like to transfer, but can't.</p>
<p>The quality of the competition matters." </p>
<p>I TOTALLY agree with the above statement, having an exceptional S who is miserable at Big U [despite the fact that his tuition is free] , and is now in the process of trying to transfer. There is virtually no peer group for him there, and class discussions are not something that leads to popularity with the IM'ing students around him who are there just to "do the time" instead of actually learn.</p>
<p>In the interest of being complete, the schools I was referring to in my above post include Penn State Main Campus (my son and daughter), University of Delaware (my daughter), and Rutgers-Douglass (my niece).</p>
<p>I disagree strongly with the grade inflation. I took classes a large state U (flagship) as well as at one of the top 20 LAC's. I had to work my butt off at the LAC and barely had to show up at the state school. I would love to send my d to a state school but large universities are not for all students. Every state should have a small state U, something like Mary Washington in Va.. It could appeal to those students who want more then keg parties, fraternities and sororities.</p>
<p>MotherOfTwo makes a good point.</p>
<p>As much as I like the University of Maryland, there are certain courses that nonmajors cannot get into -- like virtually everything taught by the Psychology Department.</p>
<p>But does this happen at private schools, too?</p>
<p>Not at the private schools my kids have attended. Since my D transferred (not due to discontent with academics), I have experience with three private schools.</p>
<p>Chedva notes, "</p>
<h1>10: The political process in your state has cut funding to the public universities (including the flagship) to the point where most professors are part-time or adjunct; facilities are run down; labs have old equipment; presidencies and chancellorships are given out on the basis of political connections."</h1>
<p>Response: This was covered by item 6 in my original post, where the state schools aren't that good. </p>
<p>As for private schools seemingly giving out slightly better grades, both I and my professor friend taught at both public and private institutions. We also attended as students both public and private institutions.</p>
<p>We have found that many public schools have to make room for incomming kids from junior colleges,especially if there is a state mandate to take all kids with a certain GPA from these schools. Thus, public schools actually have an incentive to flunk kids out. This is certainly NOT true for most private schools. Why would they want to lose all of that nice fat tuition money? Think about it. Don't get me wrong; I don't think that there is a conscious policy to have grade inflation at private schools. There just seems to be more of an incentive to not flunk out kids.</p>
<p>Marian:</p>
<p>My kids who have attended private schools have, on occasion, had trouble getting into a particular classes at particular stages of matriculation. But there has been no problem double or even triple majoring. In some public schools these days, some double majors are pretty much not going to happen because of oversubscription.</p>
<p>taxguy:</p>
<p>I teach at a large public, and I have taught (though long ago) at a LAC. I've never felt any pressure to flunk anyone out or to not flunk anyone out.</p>
<p>I'm sorry that's been your experience.</p>
<p>I really think the OP's biases are showing (or perhaps they couldn't resist the cute comment at the expense of truth. ) There is no equating:</p>
<p>a.
[quote]
1. The parents have more money than sense.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>b.
[quote]
If you have so much money that it really doesn't affect your life or retirement, going to a private school might make sense.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There is no way that having saved and achieved b. implies any truth to a.</p>
<p>Marian -- DS is interviewing with a couple of CS people at UMD for mentorships, and they are certainly eager to work with the kids, wherever they are! They were quite willing to be flexible about course placement and offered opportuntites for grad classes early. DS met the CS Adviser a couple weeks ago (turns out she also interviews for Banneker/Key) and she was very enthusiastic about the program there. DS definitely has been feeling love.</p>
<p>What is your DS's experience with math classes there?</p>
<p>I think it is dangerous to generalize. It depends on the school and the department and the kid. There are a lot of really top notch kids at many of the state schools who are in rigorous programs. Take Enginerring at UW,UCLA,UCB,UT,UIUC,UMich, Iowa Sate etc.etc. I even spoke to a former top student of mine who had been accepted to Stanford and ended up in engineering at U Arizona and he was dying and saying how competitive it was. So it is program and school dependent. Good kids challange themselves. Take a look at where a lot of students who are at grad schools earning Phds. at top schools or in top med schools m. It is quite a crossection of undergrad institutions, many being state schools. As has been posted before good kids are good and excel wherever they are and learn in spite of bad profs or large classes. Does having competition help? It can. But as with friends, how many do you need to make it valuable? I often chuckle when people talk about the big schools as if at any school a student would get to know more than a small group of peers. And in most schools there are more than two or three bright motivated kids. Hopefully very bright kids are intrinsically motivated to learn and challenge themselves in a variety of settings. Some students may need or benefit from small classes but not all. I find it sad if there are state schools where there is a bright student would feel or actually be alone. Unfortunately, I have had a lot of kids come back from HYPS level schools who complain about how few of the kids seem to be there to actually learn or are interested in working hard, believe it or not--so the grass may not always be greener.</p>
<p>I have a degree from our flagship state U, and you might want to add to #10 a profound occupation with athletic success, athletic facilities, and paying for them with circus acts, Pro wrestling, and monster-truck exhibitions. Some schools are ranked by "This is a library?", while the main events sponsored by our state U could be seen as "This has something to do with education?" I know all the arguments like athletics support themselves but it's the energy and level of alumnae support ($$$) that could have gone elsewhere if it were somehow more fashionable to support education than trophy running-backs, no matter how nice or smart those guys may be as people. </p>
<p>But then I started out at at private U where our rioting and burning was selectively aimed at ROTC during the Viet Nam "military action". So I have seen both sides. I think I'd rather have kids demonstrating against war than demonstrating because their team choked in the finals. I love my state U, and they do walk a difficult line between athleticism and support for education, even if they've been able to build a huge Colosseum in record time while their artists labor in tin sheds having been promised a new building four years ago when they evicted them from a one-hundred-year-old mold-contaminated gym to renovate it for museum space. Oh well. I suppose it all depends on your own interests.</p>
<p>When discussing public versus private one must also consider the size of the school. Small LAC's, or for that matter, some larger ones, no matter how elite, don't offer the breadth of courses that the flagship U's do. LAC's are not the way to go for science students. UW-Madison has no restrictions on taking courses outside of one's major due to overbooking and the math/science intro Honors courses are worthy of the designation. </p>
<p>One approaches the private/public debate differently based on the relative strengths of the ones closer to home. East-Midwest-West-South one sees a lot of differences in both the secondary and college quality and availability for public/private schools. I suspect midwesterners are more likely to promote public and east coasters private. Until recently I hadn't realized how many private schools are driving distance for so many people, no wonder they are so concerned about so many schools.</p>