<p>RLT...great post and great research!! Very helpful and eye-opening to some, I'm sure.
[quote]
Someone unfamiliar with undergraduate research in the sciences
might feel quite safe in predicting that the quality of the
research would be far better at research universities than at
liberal arts colleges. After all, the amount of research-grant
funding, the availability of state-of-the-art instrumentation, the
research reputation of the faculty, the quality of the library,
and the frequency with which highly successful scientists visit
to give seminars and share research ideas all weigh heavily in
favor of the research universities. More specifically, while successful
college professors might raise tens of thousands of dollars
a year to support their research programs, successful university
professors often raise half a million dollars per year.
While a college would be justifiably proud to have a 400 MHz
NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectrometer costing
perhaps $400,000, research universities vie for 800 MHz NMRs
that cost around $2 million. Finally, while top colleges might
host an internationally known scientist to their campus for a
day or two each month, top research universities are stimulated
by several such seminar speakers every week, in each field of
science.
Yet in spite of these obvious advantages of conducting research
at a research university, there is no compelling evidence
that their undergraduates end up doing better research. At both
types of institutions, successful undergraduate research culminates
not infrequently with a publication in a peer-reviewed
journal with the student as a co-author. Such publication sets a
very high standard, and certainly many good research projects
do not generate publications. But publications provide a universally
appreciated, objective measure of quality. With respect to
the current argument, the frequency with which undergraduate
research is published is not so different between colleges and
universities as to mandate the conclusion that one or the other
set of research projects is generally of higher quality. Furthermore,
in interviews with professional scientists who are familiar
with undergraduate research in both types of institutions,
there was no consensus that research was generally better in
one type than the other. To the contrary, most rated them to be
of similar quality.
[/quote]
Wow, who'd have thunk it? Oh wait, some of us did.
[quote]
Why then do the large grants, expensive equipment, and
famous laboratories available at research universities not lead
to overwhelmingly superior undergraduate research opportunities?
The answers are not so difficult to fathom. University
research labs survive on the productivity of their graduate
students, postdoctoral fellows, and technical staff. The grant
money, the access to multimillion-dollar instrumentation, and
typically the best projects go mainly to these more advanced
scientists. Undergraduate research is promoted because of its
educational value, but it does not determine the research productivity
of the laboratory. In contrast, the research at liberal
arts colleges is carried out almost entirely by undergraduates
and faculty members, and the productivity of the undergraduates
largely determines the research productivity of the laboratory.
As a result, the faculty member spends more time organizing
each project, more time training the students, more effort in
troubleshooting the technical problems that inevitably hinder
progress. At research universities, these time-consuming tasks
are delegated to postdoctoral fellows or graduate students who
are heavily occupied with their own research projects. The
greater investment in time and effort spent with undergraduates
at liberal arts colleges more or less compensates for the
fact that research universities are better set up to carry out
research.
[/quote]
I believe this point was made numerous times in this thread, specifically by Mini. We have been saying all along that Smith and other LAC's, but in this case particularly, Smith provides research opportunities for entering First year students. The research that these young ladies are involved in is as important and meaningful as research institutions like MIT, etc.<br>
[quote]
However, it is noteworthy that the most selective private
research universities (Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia,
and Yale) are more selective than any of the liberal arts colleges,
and their students taken as a group have higher SAT test
scores than the entering classes of any of the liberal arts colleges.
Yet their efficiency of production of Ph.D.s, while excelScience
at Liberal Arts Colleges 213
lent, lags behind that of the top liberal arts colleges (table 3).
Clearly the liberal arts institutions are doing much more than
simply recruiting talented students and hoping for their eventual
success.
[/quote]
The individual attention they get because of class size enables them to be involved in superior research. Great article! It does put this argument in perspective, and to bed!</p>