Your conclusion seems to be that more that parents are aware of LACs, the more likely their children are to select them.
The first sentence of the conclusion of the paper mirrors that: “The children of college and university faculty make dramatically different choices among colleges and universities than do children from non-academic households with similar incomes, occupations, and education. The evidence supports the first element of the Zemsky-Massy hypothesis: Better-informed consumers do make markedly different college choices.”
Later in the conclusion they state: “Another possible explanation for the dramatic differences in college choices is that the faculty children attend undergraduate institutions similar to the undergraduate institutions attended by their parents.…The table shows that the children of research university faculty are less likely to choose research universities and more likely to attend liberal arts colleges than their parents…Because virtually all of them hold a Ph.D., all faculty at selective liberal arts colleges will have personal experience as a graduate student and many as a teaching assistant at a Research university. The converse, however, does not hold. Faculty at Research universities need not have had personal experience with a Liberal Arts college. If personal life experience of a parent were the guide, the tilt would be toward Research universities and not toward Liberal Arts colleges.”
If you know that something is an option, there is at least a small possibility of choosing the option. But if you do not know that something is an option, you will not choose it. Why is this not obvious?
I don’t think it is true that racial diversity is greater at top publics than privates; for top public schools it seems more driven by whether the school is in a city or in a college town. Public universities in cities, examples: Cal Berkeley and UCLA at 73% BIPOC, UT Austin at 52% Public universities in college towns: U Mich at 38% BIPOC, UVA 40%, UNC Chapel Hill 36% Wisconsin 24%. (UIUC is an exception at 56%). Meanwhile, top private universities all have BIPOC representation above 50% regardless of whether they are in cities or small towns. (If diversity is defined as URM rather than BIPOC (i.e. not counting Asians), it may change things)
For state schools, it often depends on the demographics of high school and college students in the state (for mainly residential schools like many state flagships) or their local areas (for schools with mainly local commuter populations). For residential schools in particular, SES diversity may be affected by whether in-state financial aid is enough for low SES students to be able to afford attending; this may affect racial/ethnic diversity if SES distribution differs across different race/ethnicity.
For example, state schools in ME, NH, VT are expected to have less racial/ethnic diversity (however measured) than in most other states.
For states which once had a lot of racial segregation in schools, the legacy of such segregation continues to this day in the form of self-selection, with the HWCUs and HBCUs being much less diverse in race/ethnicity than what one would otherwise expect from the state population demographics.
Why do you think I am disagreeing with this? As the authors of the paper stated: “Better-informed consumers do make markedly different college choices.”. And they tilt to LACs even more so than they do towards research universities.
One thing you are missing in your formulation though: not only are they better informed about the existence of LACs, but also better informed about their advantages.
+22% (18.8% → 23.0%) for LACs versus +17% (43.1% → 50.6%) for research universities compared to the general public with high income and high education is not a big enough difference that makes for a conclusion that research university employees strongly favor LACs beyond simply knowing that they exist.
With respect to these ancient languages, I would think you mean competency rather than fluency. In any case, at least one college, Princeton, does not require its classics majors to study Latin or Greek.
Nope. Now we’re apparently arguing that instructional quality is never considered by anyone in their evaluation of which educational institutions to attend.
And we’re looking at listed enrollment capacity of classes in a certain major at a certain university that may or may not reflect actual final class sizes. [shrug]
I think the largest focus of the ranking should be academic. Students already know which schools have hugely successful football teams and school spirit, they can find out easily from recent graduates of their high school which schools have great parties or a chill vibe. They can easily figure out which schools have good weather, they know which ones are close to their home, and they can find out from Niche where the food is good. The rankings should tell them what the academic experience is like and also how the school is considered academically by academics and employers since those things are harder for a high-schooler to find out.
I think many academic parents know that top LAC’s provide a very good route to top grad and professional schools, something that the general population knows much less. Many academics are likely thinking their kids might become academics or go to professional school, so the school’s reputation with employers is less important than the school’s reputation with other educational institutions. Thus LACs are as good for their goals as research institutions. The fact that the differential between academic parents and the general population is greater for LAC’s than research universities likely reflects the general pop choosing LACs less rather than the profs specifically choosing LACs over research universities, I would think, since top LACs and research universities are both good and specific choices depend on individual factors.
The academic experience is hard to quantify for rankings other than by survey, since it is mostly a subjective determination.
How the school is considered academically by academics would best be proxied by surveying PhD programs on whether that school is viewed positively or negatively as an undergraduate origin for PhD study in the PhD major. Results would only be useful by major. Note that this is different from the USNWR peer assessment of graduate programs, and can include LACs and other schools without graduate programs.
How the school is considered by employers can be seen by post graduation outcomes by major. College Scorecard is a start, but more detail is desirable, like for law schools.
But note that the latter two can be the result of either selection effects (what students enroll) or treatment effects (the college’s actual quality of education).
I had been under the impression that Classics majors needed the Latin and Greek so that they could study Roman and Greek works in their original language… and not rely on modern English translations.
…similar to a Divinity scholar learning Hebrew and Greek to study the Bible in its original languages.
Anecdotes are not evidence, but – among my circle of academic friends, far more of us have sent our kids to LACs than to big universities. This is not because we want our kids to become academics (we don’t – the job market is tanking in our disciplines, so we have generally not encouraged our kids to follow our Ph.D. paths) but because we believe in the quality and potential of a LAC education, regardless of what our kids end up doing for a living. It helps that, because of the personal attention students get at LACs, these schools are really good at connecting them with internships and jobs. But that’s not the only reason we love them.
It’s impossible to separate the two, isn’t it? What primarily make any institution/entity great are always the people behind it. For a college, they’re the students, the faculty and the staff. We should have some ideas about the quality of its student body (less information these days than before, however), and even better ideas about its faculty (information publicly available). We wouldn’t be able (and it makes no sense) to distill all this information into a single score for the ranking purpose, but we should be able to tier colleges based on this information.
I agree that LAC’s are great options. Also agree that academic paths are not as desirable as they once were, and are more competitive than ever (like everything else). I still think that the individual choice depends on the kid, their ambitions, the available options and cost. Example, if you want to be a research mathematician, you will not be well-served by attending an LAC; you need to be in a department with a large number of high-level courses, world class mathematicians and connections. If you want to develop in a writing intensive field, I think generally LAC’s will be a better option than public research universities due to the individual attention, feedback and mentoring available. My kid attends a top private research university, and is having a great experience in small classes and doing a ton of research. I was reluctant to have her go to the university where I teach because her desired major is hugely oversubscribed and understaffed and I thought she would be frustrated, despite the fact that it is a top ranked public university. But the cost differential was so large, that it had to be high-prestige societally (not just academically) to justify the investment. In my academic circle, only two sent their kids to an LAC (one is prof is at a regional university, the other is a prof at an LAC). Everyone else, all of whom work at national research universities, has their kid at a national research university, often the one where they work but some at a high prestige alternative.
Now we’re apparently arguing that instructional quality is never considered by anyone in their evaluation of which educational institutions to attend.