What makes an LAC "good"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Jane Eyre was the woke juvenile literature of its day. Stop fetishizing old books written for past cultures that spoke a different version of English.

+1, and I did my senior thesis on Ezra Pound

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Accessibility of professors, academic rigor, and commitment to undergraduate teaching. Amherst, Pomona, and Carleton are highly ranked in these areas—hard to beat them.

All small LACs are highly rated in these areas. That's what makes them SLACs.

DP. LACs are usually strong in those areas, but certainly all are not strong to the same degree. The three mentioned are excellent, as are others in the top 30 or so, but even within that group there’s variation on reputations for instruction quality and rigor.

Name a top 30 lac with lower quality instruction and rigor

USNWR does not have a 30 way tie for undergrad teaching.

For rigor, look at percentages of STEM majors and grad school matriculation rates.

What a bunch of bs.

Cause all majors are equally rigorous? Maybe you have a different idea of rigor, but fine, look at grad school matriculation or acceptance rates for what you consider rigorous then.

Also look at graduation requirements.

If your humanities majors aren't rigorous, you aren't as rigorous as you think you are. True rigor is in institutions like Reed and UChicago, where, across the subjects, you will undergo intense academic rigor, akin to academic hazing.

The STEM majors at those schools may have a different opinion on whether their humanities majors are undergoing a comparably rigorous experience. It’s not that I haven’t known some, there and at similar institutions. Even pre-ChatGTP one could get As without doing the reading at some of our finest English programs. BSing to an A isn’t really a thing in STEM.

You’re talking to a physics B.S. and bioinformatics M.S. BSing to an A is 100% a thing in stem, if you’re any good. This crap take is said by stem grads who wouldn’t be able to get into a grad program or even get grant funding, because they eschew any exercise in writing/the humanities. We get it: you think you’re better than others.

I’m going to trust the most recent Chicago alums I know over someone boasting about a bioinformatics degree.

You’re talking to a Chicago grad…
Anyway, it’s always interesting meeting people who think stem is the end-all, be-all, because they’re undoubtedly stupid.

And you just graduated? Acting like it…

I didn’t say STEM was the be-all. I don’t know any STEM major who skipped all the assigned homework and got an A like I’ve known in English, but I guess you are here to tell us Chicago has some of both. They say it’s changed over the years. I guess so.

History major from HYPSM and it was a well known hack to not do all the reading. So much was assigned that it wasn't humanly possible. You had to figure out what was enough. I did, and I got As.

This was decades ago, so maybe it's different now.

It’s still like that. Skimming for content is a real skill that most employed people need.

Yes, I still use this skill today!

Doing the assigned reading isn’t precluding learning to skim supporting or reference materials or a prior book. But, anyway, skimming isn’t really the best indicator of humanities “rigor.” The equivalent in STEM is something like browsing through pictures to get some idea about a topic, and stopping there. Is it a useful skill? Sure, basic diagram interpretation, much like skimming, is usually embedded in middle and high school curriculums, but there’s a mountain of expected skill beyond that.

It’s a bit ironic to see these forum
responses defending partial reading or doing just enough to get the grade in a (sub)discussion that started on rigor. Skimming and not reading deeply are repeatedly cited as part of the learning problem in the eyes of the subject matter experts at these universities:

“Joseph Howley, the (Columbia) program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.“

And per a different Columbia prof:

“High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.”

The author also interviewed a neuroscientist who specializes in reading to discuss the limitations of skimming:

“ According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.”

All of this is orthogonal to the importance of humanities, arts, and social sciences exposure, which even STEM-dedicated schools appreciate. Nor does it suggest there are no HASS students who actually do what they're assigned, and beyond. Those valiant souls deserve extra kudos for bucking prevailing trends and committing themselves to rigorous study for reasons beyond "getting the grade." They tend to gravitate towards schools known as PhD feeders, but not exclusively.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:PP is a troll. They have no contact with top institutions and know nothing about the humanities. Don’t respond.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

...an article about how students have to read multiple books a week and aren't just "Not reading and getting As..." So the point still stands.

Maybe you didn’t read the article. Some excerpts:

“Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations.”

“Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. ‘One has to adjust to the times,’ he said.”

“The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year.”

“The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take… And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.”

“For years, Dames has asked his (University of Chicago) first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.”

Then there’s hours worked data like the below from Harvard’s paper comparing courses from different depts. The top 7, and 9 of the top 10, were in STEM.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/2/27/miller-harvard-course-workload-divisions/

The author noted the 3x workload difference between some STEM depts and some non-STEM ones might actually be underestimated due to how the survey capped hours reported. They also said:

“If administrators like Dean Khurana are serious about academic laxity at Harvard, they must be prepared to have frank conversations about the source of this problem and recognize its disparate incidence in humanities and social science courses.”

But in the spirit of trying to move things along it was already offered there were other ways of comparing rigor at the institutional level, like surveying grad school matriculation/ acceptance rates or graduation requirements, where there’s also distinct differences across schools. Those are probably even less uniformly agreed upon measures than hours worked or the expectation to actually do what’s assigned, though. A surly poster decided that if someone referenced differential expectations across majors they didn’t know anything, so here we are, debating STEM v the rest, which is dumb both because there’s so much data on that topic familiar to most with even lay interest in higher ed it doesn’t make sense to attack someone personally for mentioning it, and also because there are other (less triggering?) ways to compare and differentiate schools.

Resorting to personal insults and chest thumping on an anonymous forum doesn’t really strengthen one’s argument; if anything, it signals weakness in the position.

I got As in chemistry and math courses without doing every single assignment. This isn’t unique to the humanities.

There’s a huge difference between a student not turning in their weekly math or chem problem set and a student not reading the humanities book. The student who doesn’t turn in the weekly problem set but intends to get an A needs to make a real effort to learn whatever they didn’t turn in, because the material very explicitly builds on itself. The student who didn’t read the humanities book isn’t going back and reading the book a week later so they can understand the next one; at most they read a summary of it. The Atlantic article does mention the phenomena of students not reading books isn’t entirely new, but the extent and frequency of it is, to the point curriculums are actually changing.

But really the ultimate indicator is hours spent studying, which as the Harvard paper reports can be vastly different.

Maybe the STEM kids are stupider, studying more because their tiger helicopter parents pushed them into courses they can’t handle.

You lost the plot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:These comments on some popular LACs appeared in another forum in 2020:

Bates. Egalitarian founding principles still appear in student culture. Huge Fulbright producer in recent years. Former-mill-town Lewiston can be overlooked or embraced.

Colby. Classic LAC size. Relatively new president has added dynamism. Prominent and popular environmental studies programs. Central campus fairly far from Waterville. Winter cold suitable for the adventurous.

Middlebury. NESCAC in Grandma Moses country. Views of Adirondacks from Bicentennial Hall. Academically notable for environmental studies, languages, economics. Recent vandalism not inconsistent with an entitled segment among the student body.

Colgate. Beautiful campus, appealing small village. Beyond its popular social sciences programs, offers interesting course choices in physical sciences and humanities. Division I sports and residential Greek organizations.

Vassar. English major and performing arts veneer laid over a generally intellectual liberal arts college. New science building supports continuing academic ambitions.

Williams. Intellectually capable, academically engaged students. Noteworthy athletic presence. Excellent for visual arts. Perhaps too many economics majors. Mountains form backdrop that impressed Thoreau.

Amherst. Strong programs in areas such as literature and government, to name just two. Sufficienty deep to have changed its mascot. Consortium benefits, though with associated gender imbalances. Campus itself, excepting the new science building, might fall short of its rarefied academic rating.

Hamilton. Legacy of having been two colleges of complementary characteristics and emphases manifests in enhanced academic, social, architectural and spatial dimensions and balance. Beautiful campus, access to suburban amenities, proximity to Adirondacks. A writers’ college, for those who wish to enhance this skill.

I'll add this, which also first appeared in another forum:

Swarthmore: Disproportionately brilliant students appear to have chosen their school for authentic reasons. Proximity to Philadelphia, reasonably convenient to other historic East Coast cities. Lacks academic range to an extent (e.g., no geosciences department), but offers its own engineering program.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You can use IPEDS to view colleges by their number of majors in a field. For example, Swarthmore graduated five "first majors" in history in a recent year:

https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=Swarthmore&s=all&id=216287#programs

As a nearby alternative, Haverford graduated three times as many history majors, 15, in the same year:

https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=Haverford&s=all&id=212911#programs

Haverford is quite strong for grad school admissions.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Accessibility of professors, academic rigor, and commitment to undergraduate teaching. Amherst, Pomona, and Carleton are highly ranked in these areas—hard to beat them.

All small LACs are highly rated in these areas. That's what makes them SLACs.

DP. LACs are usually strong in those areas, but certainly all are not strong to the same degree. The three mentioned are excellent, as are others in the top 30 or so, but even within that group there’s variation on reputations for instruction quality and rigor.

Name a top 30 lac with lower quality instruction and rigor

USNWR does not have a 30 way tie for undergrad teaching.

For rigor, look at percentages of STEM majors and grad school matriculation rates.

What a bunch of bs.

Cause all majors are equally rigorous? Maybe you have a different idea of rigor, but fine, look at grad school matriculation or acceptance rates for what you consider rigorous then.

Also look at graduation requirements.

If your humanities majors aren't rigorous, you aren't as rigorous as you think you are. True rigor is in institutions like Reed and UChicago, where, across the subjects, you will undergo intense academic rigor, akin to academic hazing.

The STEM majors at those schools may have a different opinion on whether their humanities majors are undergoing a comparably rigorous experience. It’s not that I haven’t known some, there and at similar institutions. Even pre-ChatGTP one could get As without doing the reading at some of our finest English programs. BSing to an A isn’t really a thing in STEM.

You’re talking to a physics B.S. and bioinformatics M.S. BSing to an A is 100% a thing in stem, if you’re any good. This crap take is said by stem grads who wouldn’t be able to get into a grad program or even get grant funding, because they eschew any exercise in writing/the humanities. We get it: you think you’re better than others.

I’m going to trust the most recent Chicago alums I know over someone boasting about a bioinformatics degree.

You’re talking to a Chicago grad…
Anyway, it’s always interesting meeting people who think stem is the end-all, be-all, because they’re undoubtedly stupid.

And you just graduated? Acting like it…

I didn’t say STEM was the be-all. I don’t know any STEM major who skipped all the assigned homework and got an A like I’ve known in English, but I guess you are here to tell us Chicago has some of both. They say it’s changed over the years. I guess so.

History major from HYPSM and it was a well known hack to not do all the reading. So much was assigned that it wasn't humanly possible. You had to figure out what was enough. I did, and I got As.

This was decades ago, so maybe it's different now.

It’s still like that. Skimming for content is a real skill that most employed people need.

Yes, I still use this skill today!

Doing the assigned reading isn’t precluding learning to skim supporting or reference materials or a prior book. But, anyway, skimming isn’t really the best indicator of humanities “rigor.” The equivalent in STEM is something like browsing through pictures to get some idea about a topic, and stopping there. Is it a useful skill? Sure, basic diagram interpretation, much like skimming, is usually embedded in middle and high school curriculums, but there’s a mountain of expected skill beyond that.

It’s a bit ironic to see these forum
responses defending partial reading or doing just enough to get the grade in a (sub)discussion that started on rigor. Skimming and not reading deeply are repeatedly cited as part of the learning problem in the eyes of the subject matter experts at these universities:

“Joseph Howley, the (Columbia) program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.“

And per a different Columbia prof:

“High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.”

The author also interviewed a neuroscientist who specializes in reading to discuss the limitations of skimming:

“ According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.”

All of this is orthogonal to the importance of humanities, arts, and social sciences exposure, which even STEM-dedicated schools appreciate. Nor does it suggest there are no HASS students who actually do what they're assigned, and beyond. Those valiant souls deserve extra kudos for bucking prevailing trends and committing themselves to rigorous study for reasons beyond "getting the grade." They tend to gravitate towards schools known as PhD feeders, but not exclusively.

This is a lot of yap, but it’s outright wrong. The type of careers that humanities students go into require reading intensely, quickly, and communicating the most important elements. The rigor comes in trying to get something intelligible out of Derrida or Ishmael Reed or Talal asad and then getting into the classroom where you’re debating, discussing, and learning with professors and students on the subject matter.

And I say all of that as a hard science major grad, who adored the humanities.