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College and University Discussion
Reply to "How many colleges are "better" than Williams?"
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This entire discussion is nonsensical. A school is only "better" if the area you want to study is "better." If you want to study mathematics and the mathematics department is marginal, then no it is not a better school for you. People get too caught up in names when they should be researching the underlying departments when making their decisions.[/quote] I get your premise for larger state schools, but it doesn't hold at all for liberal arts colleges and the ivies.[/quote] Actually, PP's point holds even more true for LACs because faculties are so small. A LAC could have a great physics program but no one who specializes in the kind of bio your DC is interested in. Or a poli sci department that's strong in IR and quantitative methods, but your kid loves con law and political theory. Ivies fall somewhere in the middle wrt size -- most fields/subfields will at least be represented on the faculty, but departmental (and subfield) strength can vary pretty significantly. I ended up choosing between the two Ivies I got into based on across-the-board strength vs strength in the one field I thought I was most interested in but no appealing Plan B if I changed my mind. Good call, since I did change fields. So, yeah, look at departments. But don't just focus on a single one. [/quote] Ehh. I know a kid from Pomona who's doing a mechanical engineering PhD at MIT this year. Pomona doesn't have engineering. And I know another at Amherst who was funded for a summer experience at U'Chicago since they had a research topic he was interested in that Amherst didn't. He's going to Stanford for a neuroscience PhD. Yet another is a CS major at Swarthmore, and their CS program, to put it mildly, is lackluster. Still got to intern at Google last summer. These schools and many other top liberal art colleges, despite their lack of resources compared to universities, still end up preparing their grads well. They open doors regardless of how good their individual departments are. Furthermore, their emphasis on exploration and breadth means they give much more fluidity in the courses and research endeavors students can access than those at a state university. Top Ivies like Yale and Columbia are modeled after the liberal arts college. And while they certainly offer more classes, let us not forget that most undergraduates take only around 30-40 classes total in their four years. The difference between a school like Williams offering 700 courses and another like Yale offering 2000 really isn't that vast for the real experience of an undergrad. [/quote] As a prof, I was shocked by how poorly educated/prepared some of the Amherst students I encountered were for graduate work. Smart kids (so good grades, recs, scores) but their intellectual growth had been kind of stunted by lack of exposure to a wider range of faculty. And I know that the range of course offerings in my (non-STEM) field that would have been *available* to me at a top LAC was a fraction (1/4 - 1/3) of what I actually took as an undergrad. Why do you think Columbia is modeled after a LAC? I can see why someone might, mistakenly, think that of Yale but Columbia?![/quote]
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