I will assume that the post is legitimate, and note that it is relatively normal on any web site for the adults responding to be a bit much for a young person to take. Most 18 year olds will not have much experience with the sort of âtsunami of opinionâ that you get on public web sites. I usually try to be polite for this reason.
I strongly agree with the consensus regarding finances. There has been enough said on that issue.
However, I also would like to say something about the advantages of attending a smaller school. I had not thought about this much until our younger daughter decided that she wanted to attend a smaller school. We visited a few liberal arts colleges in our area, and I ran the NPC for Amherst, Bowdoin, Wellesley, and Williams College. For us they were not affordable. She ended up attending a small university in eastern Canada â basically the Canadian equivalent of a LAC. Canada does not use the term âliberal arts collegeâ but has some similarly small schools (that they call âprimarily undergraduate universitiesâ). I think that her experience is similar to what you will find at Williams in many ways.
One issue is that class sizes are small (significantly smaller than you would find at UCB), and classes are taught by full professors. This provides the opportunity to get you know your professors. Also, there are very few or no graduate students around (Wikipedia says that there were 25 graduate students at Williams in 2021). This opens up options for undergraduate students to participate in internships and research opportunities. Our daughter had very good opportunities, including a paid research position over one summer that gave her academic credit, was interesting, and gave her material that she could use for her honors thesis. She also was asked to be a TA (and was paid for it).
After she graduated, she took some time off to travel. Once she started looking for a job, the research and internship experience that she had was very helpful, even when she was looking in a different geographic area (she studied in Canada, and ended up getting multiple job offers in the US). The fact that her professors knew her well and had personally seen her work (in class, in the lab, and in the TA position) gave her good references. Again this was very important in her job search.
The small classes, strong professors, getting to know your professors, and good internship and research opportunities will be just as true at Williams.
For getting a job in the US a degree from Williams would be more helpful than from a small Canadian university. Even with this however, she ended up getting three offers in four weeks. The best of these she was very happy with and is where she is currently working.
US News ranks Williams as the #1 LAC in the US. A different ranking puts Williams as the #1 LAC for mathematics in the US. As a former math major whose first couple of jobs were as a software engineer, I see a close connection between math and CS (at least for some jobs, including the ones that I got). I was not able to find a ranking for the top LACs for CS. I did find a short thread on this web site that included at least one opinion putting Williams in the top 3 LACs for CS.
If I were choosing between Williams versus UCB for my bachelorâs (which for me would be in some combination of math and computer science), and if the cost were the same, I would probably choose Williams. For a PhD I would go the other way. However a PhD at UCB, if you can get accepted, would most likely be fully paid so the cost would not be an issue at that point.
)and it was a similar vibe. The college was the center of everything. Iâm sure it still is.