<p>in addition to a few anecdotes about large schools, it can be useful to look at what surveys reveal. Many colleges have surveys of their graduating seniors, answering not only “did you like the U?” but other more detailed questions about class size, ease of getting to know profs, etc. </p>
<p>With the exception of prestigious special programs like the Sophie Davis BS/MD program at CUNY, there was a bit of a stigma regarding our state/city schools at my specialized high school during the mid-'90s. </p>
<p>Our state and city flagships were regarded mainly as financial safeties for kids who couldn’t afford the Ivies/topflight OOS state flagships/other more reputable private schools they were admitted to or worse, safety schools for those near/at the bottom of our graduating class. </p>
<p>Binghamton and other SUNYs/CUNYs were not “amazing”, especially for most at my high school…even those who ended up there. A reason why several ended up transferring up to schools like Brown, Cornell, Reed, and Columbia after 1 or 2 years. </p>
<p>For those who were top 50% or better and were loaded or willing to take a huge financial risk, they almost always chose the more reputable private schools if they felt they could. A reason why many of the latter type of classmates ended up going to NYU and are either still paying off their undergrad debt or just recently paid it off after 10+ years. </p>
<p>In my case, lucked out with a near-full ride scholarship at a private SLAC which made it an arguably better deal than going to my state/city flagships when one accounts for class size, academic quality, closer professor-student relationships, and overall reputation.</p>
<p>Also the grads of state flagships tend to run many of the businesses in the home state and today even dominate the Fortune 500. For many the lifelong connection through sports is also fun and valuable. Do Carleton alums get together every week to do anything? Most big school alums have viewing parties for football and basketball at cities across the US, so in Seattle there is a group of PSU alums meeting every week to wqtch PSU football. Same for virtually every other Big 10, SEC and Pac 10 school. Same in NYC and Chicago and Atlanta and LA.</p>
<p>My SLAC’s local alumni association chapters in NYC and other areas do get together to hang out at various restaurants/bars, perform community service in the area, enjoy a book reading/signing session by an alum author, enjoy and/or participate in musical/theatrical performances, join alumni tours at local museums, and more. </p>
<p>Granted, we’re not as big on sports, but there seems to be a great number of writers, artists, musicians, and conscientious citizens concerned about community needs.</p>
<p>““To not go to college with everyone they’ve taken classes with in high school for the past four years.”
I always kind of laugh when I read a remark like the one above when it comes to a school like Michigan. You have over 40,000 students on campus and the odds of constantly running into the few dozen you actually know are not that great. The odds of meeting hundreds that you never would have met before are much higher.”</p>
<p>Oh, it wasn’t about Michigan…my state flagship is rather smaller and, particularly in the honors program, I would have been living in the same dorms and taking the same honors seminars as several people from my high school. </p>
<p>It was just one of many reasons I decided to go about 500 miles away for school.</p>
<p>This has always struck me as a strange cliche. How does the quantity of people at the school make someone feel lost, whether physically or in terms of life goals?</p>
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<p>Also strange. I really don’t see what effect the simple fact that other people from the high school go there has.</p>
<p>LAC = table service & linen with a table of 6
Public Flagship = self service deli & faux wood tables lined up in a grouping of 20.</p>
<p>Public: a call to an 800# that takes you through 20 minutes of menu choices till you get the office you need, only to get an answering machine
Private: A human answers the phone and immediately directs you to the appropriate person, who answers their phone.</p>
<p>There’s only so much you can do to deliver service at $10k tuition vs. $31k-$42k for Privates. The trouble is ALWAYS related to labor costs… the reason a Professor teaches a class of 200 at a Public vs. 40 at an LAC is that the PUblic can’t afford five classes of 40 vs. one class of 200.</p>
<p>The reason its hard to get good advising at Publics is that an advisor might need to serve 1000 students, vs. 250 at a Private. Not enough money at Publics to hire more advisors.</p>
<p>I’m not saying the Private is better… only that at a Private it is easier to get what you want. Perhaps the struggle to self serve at a Public is actually better preparation and training for the real world? Who knows.</p>
<p>DunninLA has stated it pretty well. When I first discovered CC I lurked on the UCBerkeley forum to get a feel for what students were saying about it. I encountered many posts that went something like this: Help! I’m suppose to be at my Anthro 101 seminar and I can’t find it. Quick, can someone help me.</p>
<p>Ok, so that isn’t an exact quote, but it gives the general feel. Many posts were asking logistical questions. The place is just so big, finding what you’re looking for may take some doing. That doesn’t make it bad, some people thrive on such adventure, but there are some 18 year olds who don’t have the assertiveness or confidence to push their way through the roadblocks. </p>
<p>I also think that the stereotype that SLAC attendees are all rich is just plain silly. Lots of LACs give merit and need based aid, especially those that aren’t in the top 10 listed on USNWR. I notice every day how not rich we are.</p>
<ol>
<li>Few privates offer the range and depth of most flagships</li>
<li>Publics tend to have a wider demographic range and also a wider range of types</li>
<li>Tuition is not the only source of income to publics so that comparison is way off. Most flagships have substantial income from OOS tuition, research endowments, and licensing</li>
<li>The range of services at privates is probably as wide as at publics. Does Syracuse or Northeastern have the same advising as Princeton?</li>
<li>Flagships tend to have more up to date sciences facilities than most privates too. Nothing like a good building project to get support from lots of people. Many of the largest libraries are at publics.</li>
</ol>
<p>For all of the above reasons. Plus, husband went to Berkeley and hated it after Rice. No access to his advisor for his Phd program. Said the problem sets the undergrads were doing didn’t compare to the work he had done at Rice. Plus, after our son graduated from a very intense high school in California we felt it would not be great to go into the same competitive atmosphere at a UC. The impression we had was that it was all about weeding kids out and the kids were there to get good grades rather than to learn anything. The wrong kind of competition. You have to compete just to get into your major. Plus, the CA budget was in bad shape after Enron and continues to be in bad shape so I’m sure the administrative hassles must be awful.</p>
<p>^100% sure you are going to read all those books in the library. As someone who never needed the library significantly in college, I still dont understand the library hype. Maybe its a humanities thing.</p>
<p>My son’s private U. is not costing us more than our expensive flaghsip. Son’s private U does not have as high of a sticker price as many, he got merit aid and a little FA. He was not offered a dime from our instate public.</p>
<p>When public land grant universities sprang up all over the country in the late 19th century, they offered instruction in fields like agriculture as well as liberal arts and sciences. This blue collar orientation, their lower costs, sprawling size and less selective admissions policies, all made them seem less prestigious than the older private or church-affiliated schools. This was especially the case in states and regions that already had many excellent private colleges, where for years, state universities often were derided as “cow colleges”. </p>
<p>I admit to an emotional bias toward private schools, but the OP’s question is a good one. If you live in a state with a top public university (CA, NC, MI,VA) it’s hard to justify spending double to attend a private school at full-pay rates unless you can easily afford the difference. Otherwise, if your family can afford it, you typically are buying small discussion-based classes, carefully graded written assignments, more exclusive focus on the arts and sciences, and a geographically diverse student body. You are positioning yourself to become a thought-leader in a national and global career market, instead of “just” a competent professional in a local and regional market. That’s the traditional difference, anyway. Honors colleges have narrowed the gap; for many middle class families who can’t get aid, they are much more cost-effective.</p>
<p>Universities exist to create and transmit knowledge. Big libraries exist not for voracious readers but for voracious researchers. It takes a very large library to provide good coverage of all the many fields its professors might want to research.</p>
<p>^ true, depending on the field. Libraries are not that important in the hard sciences, more research is done with online journals. But I think we were talking about undergraduate as opposed to the research the faculty does. I was wondering what the link was between large library sizes (which is awesome for a research university) but how much value is it to several students. I am aware that several fields require a large depository of knowledge where the professors/students can utilize when writing papers and such. But there is a certain point when an extra million or two is not going to affect research that much considering that several universities run a consortium.</p>
<p>Depending on the undergraduate and his/her interests, a larger library could facilitate his/her undergrad research for anything ranging from class/seminar research assignments to doing an undergrad thesis/undergrad research with a professor. As an undergrad, the college library which was quite large for a SLAC really facilitated me when I was doing research papers for several seminar/colloquium courses I took during my undergrad career. </p>
<p>Even so, I had to ILL several books and some obscure journal articles to complete some of my research for those papers. Granted, this was before academic journals were put online.</p>