<p>My daughter is adamant about wanting a big university, not a LAC for English major. Her choices:Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or Michigan?
Any ideas from those either attending or having children at any of these, (not just your opinion if it's not first-hand.)</p>
<p>I have a very good friend and published author on the English faculty at Illinois. I’ll ask her what she thinks.</p>
<p>Thanks, I appreciate your help!</p>
<p>In the Big 10, the best English departments can be found at (in alphabetical order):</p>
<p>Indiana University-Bloomington
Northwestern University
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of Wisconsin-Madison</p>
<p>I personally attended Michigan and took a couple 300 and 400 level English classes. The classes were small and the professors were effective and entertaining. Michigan also has a well regarded undergraduate
Creative Writing program. </p>
<p>Other large universities with excellent English departments include:</p>
<p>Cornell University
Rutgers University-New Brunswick
University of California-Berkeley
University of California-Irvine
University of California-Los Angeles
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Pennsylvania
University of Texas-Austin</p>
<p>I believe that Iowa is very strong in creative writing as well.</p>
<p>Every Big Ten school has an excellent English faculty with much more talent than necessary to teach your daughter everything she could hope to learn about literature and composition in a four-year undergraduate degree program. This isn’t any kind of exaggeration. Just about every first- or second-rate university in America can do this. There’s a lot of talent available in English. All of the good universities have plenty of it. The situation might be a bit different if your daughter were interested in a different field (music, bioengineering, nursing, many others), but in English (as in history, political science, and other popular liberal arts) most universities, certainly all of the Big Ten universities, will be able to train your daughter to a very high level.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that all English departments are equal. At the graduate level, most students (though not all) would be better off at an Iowa, Michigan, Northwestern, or Wisconsin than at a Purdue or a Penn State. At that level your daughter would want to pick a school largely on the basis of particular faculty strengths in her own particular corner of the field. But as an undergraduate she won’t have any particular corner of specialization until the very end. And she will only be taking 1/4 to 1/3 of her courses in English anyway (if that even turns out to be her major).</p>
<p>So it doesn’t make sense to pick a Big Ten university on the basis of the reputation of its English department. These reputations mostly have to do with faculty research productivity and Ph.D. production, which are near irrelevancies to an undergraduate. In fact, a case can be made for an inverse relationship between faculty research productivity and care in undergraduate teaching, but let’s not go there now.</p>
<p>How to pick a Big Ten university then? Pick it on the basis of your daughter’s overall feel for the place and her excitement at the prospect of being there.</p>
<p>To get a sense for this, there’s nothing like visiting a few schools when classes are in session. It that’s not possible, gather information from sites like this (being attentive of course to the likely actual knowledge base of the poster, which is usually is fairly obvious). Note that some schools are favored in this CC sub-culture (Michigan, Wisconsin) while others (Minnesota, Iowa, to a lesser degree Indiana) are rarely given their due. So branch out beyond CC as well.</p>
<p>Someone is likely to follow up to this post with an objection or amendment, arguing that your daughter may want to go to the Big Ten university with the most highly ranked English department because this will increase her chances of admission to a first-rate English graduate program four years down the line. This kind of argument usually comes from people in their teens who have an undeveloped understanding of the system. Even if graduate school is your daughter’s ambition, or a possibility, top grades and strong letters from Purdue will put her in just as nice a position as top grades and strong letters from Michigan. This is an assertion based on many years of experience sitting on graduate admissions committees in my department at a Big Ten university.</p>
<p>Which Big Ten university should your daughter attend? The one she thinks she’ll like the best! Luckily, there are no bad choices here.</p>
<p>Iowa is extremely well-regarded for creative writing, if that’s the route she wants to take.</p>
<p>All four are excellent though.</p>
<p>Whip-poor-will:</p>
<p>I agree with much of what you say, though as a faculty member who has also been on many admissions committees, and someone who has not seen his teens in many, many years, may I gently assert that not every graduate admissions committee is exactly like yours? Certainly, what you describe is not entirely the case in my field and at my university. </p>
<p>I would also like to make a minor tweak to what you say. My undergrad majors were English lit. and physics. I was not very gifted in physics, so I don’t think it would have mattered if my professors were tops in their fields. On the other hand, I had one of the top Shakepearean scholars in the world for three classes, and he changed my life, my understanding of Shakespeare, and even my understanding of the progression of the understanding of human behavior that led me to my current field, behavioral psychology.</p>
<p>I have a daughter who attended a school in which one her professors in Shakespeare pointed to the stage directions that indicated an entrance, and then pointed to the large amount of copy before the entering character spoke, and asserted that this was because of the vast size of the Elizabethan stage.</p>
<p>So, all teachers are not created equal, I think?</p>