Pros and Cons of Top 10 SLAC vs State Flagship Honors Program
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Anonymous
For graduate studies, sure. But for undergrad, ability to teach and connect with students, mentorship, inclusivity, care, and the ability to draw out the best potential from budding students is the most important trait in my view. And LACs are excellent in doing so. Once students have found the confidence and direction to figure out where they want to go, they can seek out the specialized experiences at top graduate programs (80% or so of grads at places like Williams or Swarthmore end up doing so). It is well documented that LAC graduates participate more in high impact practices such as research or internships than students of any other institutional classification, that they are (at times, far) more satisfied with teaching and professor accessibility than just about any other institution, and that they are overly represented not just in academia but just about any elite destination relative to their tiny size. |
Anonymous
I totally disagree with this; so few students are smart enough to benefit from top faculty that, if you are one of those, you will be lavished with attention everywhere. |
Anonymous
The research that article cites is behind a paywall but, judging from the abstract, the author (self-identified as a mom with two kids at LACs) misstates the researchers’ findings: To ask whether the best-informed consumers of higher education, the faculty, make different choices than other similarly endowed consumers, we compare the pattern of colleges chosen by 5,592 children of college and university faculty with the pattern chosen by the children of non-faculty families of similar socio-economic status. The patterns are remarkably different. The children of faculty are more likely to choose research universities and even more likely to choose selective liberal arts colleges. This evidence is consistent with the view that the level of information makes a difference in the choice of college. |
Anonymous
You're correct, but I feel that most students who go to the honors programs wouldn't be able to stand out in a top 5 LAC admissions process. Those schools are almost Ivy-level selective. I have nothing but a hunch to back this up, but at our school, about a quarter to a third of the top 10% of students apply to a top 5 LAC, while almost all apply to the state honors program as a backup (and they get in). If that's reflective of the self-selecting nature of the LAC pool, then the students applying in the first place are almost all at the state honors students- of whom as few as 7% are ultimately admitted to the top 5 LAC. Those LACs only admit 1-2 students per high school, so when there are 20 top notch applicants applying and only 1 gets in, that helps illuminate what the admissions processes at the LACs are like. Based on the references I write, there is a pre-form with the message "One of the top few encountered in my career", and those 1 or 2 students would have that checked. Being marked "Excellent (top 10%)" or "Outstanding (top 5%)" might not be enough to stand out. This is just on the admissions side, though. It would depend on what the school did to help foster those students' potential once they arrived. But my impression at this level is that the top LAC admits are a more impressive group. |
Anonymous
That’s my experience too (from a variety of different perspectives — student, faculty, parent). But that means we’re thinking this through from the perspective of extreme outliers. Most kids — even most bright kids — are going to college to have a good time and to get their ticket punched for the next stage of life. They’ll learn stuff along the way — some of which will be interesting, some of which might prove useful later — but they (and their future employers) aren’t relying on that. College just functions as a preliminary way of identifying who will show up, present well, and submit acceptable work on time. And it creates networks and peer groups. So if we stripped away all these claims about intellectual development and said LACs are happy-making places for smarter-than-the-average-bear UMC kids to produce the transcripts/GPAs necessary to get them into law or med school or finance, then, ok, it’s a fine investment if you have the $ and that’s what your kid wants. It’s a more expensive but easier/more reliable path than an excellent public flagship where, frankly, there is a lot more competition at the top, less grade inflation, and more gatekeepers. |
Anonymous
I also have a PhD from a top university and in my social science field a person would sell their arm for a tenure track job basically anywhere. SLACs can land excellent faculty. The disadvantage, for SLACs, is that they have -- by definition -- higher teaching loads than R1s and that is generally seen as a negative. Having been in/around academia for most of my adult life, you can end up with crap professors everywhere. At R1s, these are likely to be grad students or completely socially inept people who view teaching as completely beneath them (BUT you are less likely to find those in an honors program), at least for classes where that matters. At SLACs, your crap professors are likely to be sabbatical replacements -- and depending on how you define "crap" they almost certainly won't be publishing with as much regularity as their R1 counterparts. If quality of teaching is what you're after, OP, go with a SLAC. 100%, every time. My husband is on faculty at an Ivy and he was explicitly told that teaching DOES NOT matter for his tenure decision and that he should do as little as possible in that arena so long as he doesn't raise any red flags. That being said, R1 profs tend to be fairly 'high quality" people anyway and might be good teachers regardless, but at SLACs teaching quality is very important. |
Anonymous
I agree with you. All I’m saying is if you go to Harvard or Berkeley, your impression of how smart and hardworking you have to be to make it as a professor is pretty daunting. If you go to even a top SLAC, it doesn’t look so hard. Small seminars, schmoozing with undergrads, fewer dramatic tenure battles. So at Harvard, you might think don’t even consider academia unless you think you’re in the top 2% of your class. At a SLAC, it might look more like a top 20% destination. The real masters of the universe are headed to finance. Getting into grad school is different from finishing your PhD is different from getting a faculty position is different from getting tenure. At Harvard or Berkeley, you see the desperate PhDs. You don’t at a LAC. And if you liked your time at a LAC, you might define a successful academic career in different terms and have a fairly straightforward not-too-grueling vision of how to get there from here. Abstractly, if you look at the output required for tenure, it’s hardly staggering. Hubris, politics, and conflicting imperatives make high-profile academics much more competitive than it has to be. |
Anonymous
academia is a winner takes all place. quantitatively speaking, majority of phds would take tenure track job anywhere, but top grads are almost never going to teach at slacs. those on the top get multiple offers from the best schools and slacs are really not on their radar. |
Anonymous
Mmmm, not what I've seen at all. There are so many reasons why someone awesome might take a job at Amherst over Yale, including factors completely unrelated to the school. There's also a self-selection bias. Those people who want Ivy jobs are going to apply to Ivys and their ilk, but that's sort of a special group. The kind of person who will land at Michigan is, indeed, the same kind of person who might land at Williams, at least from what I've seen. There's also a fair amount of shuffling around. |
Anonymous
| PP parent here who passed over UCali with full tuition for a SLAC. If OP can make SLAC work financially, do the SLAC for undergrad. Reseve the flagship/ivy for grad. If the student does the flagship for undergrad, there is no possibility of doing the SLAC at the grad level. You can have the best of the both worlds: SLAC for undergrad, Ivy or flagship for grad. |
Anonymous
honestly you have no clue. i mean sure someone who can get the bed job will on occasion will take an inferior job to be close to family, illness etc, but overall this is not the case at all. people who to slacs to do research are considered losers. |
Anonymous
This is true in my science field. |
Anonymous
"top grads are almost never going to teach at slacs." "Top grads" refer to to lo researchers. This is what makes SLACs so great. People who neglect teaching are not hired at top SLACs. Only those who have the time for undergrads are considered at SLACs. |
Anonymous
Maybe this is a question of field or even subfield. My sense is that the last poster is a scientist and that the poster s/he is responding to is a social scientist. People in the humanities and social sciences typically don't have the capital/equipment/overhead needs that most scientists do. Also, some of us are in subfields where even research institutions might only have 1-3 faculty. This means that the number of jobs available nationwide in any given year may be very small and it’s unpredictable which category (public, private, MRU, SLAC) the most desirable or prestigious one will be in any given year. Since many of us are do-it-yourself researchers whose colleagues will mostly be elsewhere, it’s not a huge sacrifice to be outside an MRU. So the trade offs can look different, especially if there’s a partner in the mix and/or strong regional preferences. And people do move around and across institutional divides all the times. Sometimes colleagues influence choices, sometimes family circumstances, sometimes amazing offers (start a program for us). And even though my preference structure is such that having grad students is highly desirable, that’s only true if the grad students I’d have would be employable (and thatks true only for a handful of schools in my subfield). So top LAC might even trump a very good MRU is the strength of the grad program jst wasn’t there. Bottom line: I agree that there are good (and bad) teachers everywhere and that faculty move around and don’t typically self-select along the public flagship vs SLAC divide. But that also makes me skeptical of the claim that teaching is better at SLACs. You may have to be a reasonably well-liked teacher to get tenure at a SLAC, but there are lots of ways to be well-liked (easy, entertaining, flattering, sociable) and I’ve seen smart faculty burn out, lose interest, start phoning it in after spending a decade talking shop primarily with undergrads |
Anonymous
| Slac professors don't have the publish or perish pressure. Their full-time job is to teach. Professors at research institutions must publish or perish. Research, not teaching, is their primary duty. |