I go to a top LAC for history and stem. It is overrated.
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Anonymous
He is wrong. |
Anonymous
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Of course this is a troll thread. Almost every PhD program is hyper selective with admit rates under 10%. Just look at PhD placement data and stop listening to clowns trying to confuse you about “top” programs. The best data available is from the NSF, summarized nicely by Swarthmore, showing that LACs, despite their small numbers, are disproportionately represented two to one in the top 20. If you trust random Internet trolls more, I have a bridge to sell you!
https://www.swarthmore.edu/sites/default/files/assets/documents/institutional-effectiveness-research-assessment/Doct%20Rates%20Top%20100%20Tot%20Sci%20Rankings%20-Summary%20to%202022.pdf |
Anonymous
| I feel like English college courses are the kind of thing every thinks they will love, but ends up hating. I loved reading and writing and hated my English classes. Because it turns out that you can’t get tenure by essentially teaching a book club. So all the professors need some “fresh take” on the books everyone has read forever. So, yeah, you’re gong y dole a Marxist critical race theory exegesis of Jane Austen, because that’s how people get published. (Actually the only article I remember really liking were the ones that talked about legal stuff that affected the Austen books, like inheritance law — those books made so much more sense when you inderstood all that!). I just wanted to read the books — I didn’t want to dissect and do a post mortem on them. |
Anonymous
is the stem field math or physics? |
Anonymous
Physics is increasingly following in its footsteps, especially any non-experimental field. |
Anonymous
This doesn't control for the quality of the PhD program. Mudd, Reed, Williams, Amherst if you take grad courses at UMass might be exceptions, but it's not at all implausible for the rest. Why would a top grad school accept a 4.0 lac grad with no grad coursework and a bit of undergrad-friendly research over a 4.0 r1 grad with two years of graduate classes and published research of the type they intend to do in their PhD? |
Anonymous
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To add: a lot of physics research is either theoretical, which requires an extremely advanced mathematical and physics background (i.e. lots of grad courses in undergrad) or experimental, requiring some extremely expensive equipment that only a large university's department can afford. It's hard to build the requisite background for either as a LAC student.
Also, even Williams' tutorials are on predefined undergrad topics, rather than being up to the student and professor like an independent study, so it still has the same ceiling issue. |
Anonymous
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"a complete lack of translation coursework"
why would an english department have "translation coursework"? This is not a serious post. |
Anonymous
Why? Many reasons. 1. The advanced university students don’t do 2 years of grad work as undergrads. You lose all credibility saying that. 2. Advanced undergrad classes often cover the same material as intro grad classes. 3. An LAC prof is far more likely to actually know well the student they write a recommendation for, making for a more credible and meaningful letter. 4. Undergrad research led by undergrads with LAC faculty mentors is more compelling in displaying research skill than university research led by a prof mentoring a grad student who can use undergrads if needed but is not in any way evaluated for doing so. 5. Cheating is more rampant in universities because there’s less contact and fewer assessments. But all that is academic, as it were. If universities were truly better for preparing students for research you wouldn’t have higher grad school placement rates from LACs than universities, or studies like this showing students from LACs take less time to finish their PhD. From p18: “Graduates who completed undergraduate study at selective American liberal arts colleges, or whose undergraduate training was in Britain, Canada, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand, earned a Ph.D. in economics sufficiently faster than the large group of undergraduates from American Ph.D. granting universities so as to save almost a full academic year. The savings from an academic year could be viewed as a full year's opportunity cost to graduates, and/or a year of financial aid from the Ph.D. department. Applicants from Swarthmore, Williams, or Carleton, therefore, might be viewed appropriately as likely "less expensive" Ph.D. students than those with a bachelor's degree from Harvard, Berkeley, or Stanford. Accordingly, Ph.D. program admissions committees might reasonably dip further into the credentials pool for those with an undergraduate degree from a selective liberal arts college. On the other hand, expanding the pool of selective liberal arts college graduates attracted into Ph.D. study, which such a policy could induce, may add prospects whose expected time-to-degree differs from the expected length of Ph.D. study of existing matriculants.” https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/bitstream/handle/1803/15800/vu06-w11.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y |
Anonymous
Nope. You can do advanced research in math and even physics without equipment beyond the budget of an LAC, the best of which have similar endowments per student as the best universities, except it is all directed towards students undergrads at the LACs. |
Anonymous
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I trust this Nobel prize winner more than anonymous trolls:
https://www.thecollegesolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cech_article2.pdf |
Anonymous
Because English as a field has moved beyond literal English-only texts for decades now? Because liberal arts colleges typically don’t have comparative literature departments and hire inside the English department for that role? This is a silly response. |
Anonymous
All of them? |
Anonymous
I know from personal experience of someone doing a PhD in theoretical physics at a top uni who had some catching up to do in order to get on to the level of his peers despite taking grad courses in undergrad. His research mentors assumed he had a background even more extensive than the one he had, which itself included plenty of material that's graduate level at most schools. |
Anonymous
Quote didn’t work. Which LACs are overrated by DCUM? My point was field-specific, and I won't anonymously bash individual departments here (in part because that would puncture the anonymity!). I'd advise prospective students to look up the recent publication records (say, for the past ten years) of tenured faculty to see if they're still publishing semi-regularly in respected venues, whether journals or presses. (Untenured faculty are certain to be publishing, since their upcoming tenure case will turn on that. The question is whether faculty continue to publish after getting tenure.) It's no problem at all, and might even be a good sign, if an associate or full professor is publishing only sporadically -- say, one journal article every other year -- as long as it's mainstream work in a top venue. In my field, at least, LAC faculty should be publishing work that's nearly as good as the work done at research universities -- just less of it (because of all the time they devote to their students (without TAs), and to faculty governance of the college, which is done less by faceless administrators at a LAC). This is true, in my field, at the Claremonts, Amherst, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Bates, Wesleyan, and quite a few others -- but certainly not at all of them. After getting tenure, LAC faculty sometimes drift off into either not publishing at all or publishing in wacky niche sub-fields. It's possible to 'keep up with the literature' without contributing to it, but human nature makes that predictably rare. If a long tenured prof isn't publishing, the prof probably no longer knows the field. |