Colleges that prioritize the humanities side of liberal arts

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DC attends a university known for STEM, especially engineering. However, she is a humanities major and receiving what I consider a fabulous education. The liberal arts colleges in many "tech" schools are often excellent and have a wide breadth of majors and class choices, as opposed to small schools that have much narrower offerings. I attended a SLAC myself and the difference between the opportunities her school has offered and my own experience is night and day. I highly recommend a larger university for liberal arts majors.

So you think liberal arts colleges are useless?

You are swimming against the consensus here on DCUM. Most believe that an elite SLAC provides a better undergraduate experience.

What do you mean by elite SLAC?

Elite SLAC such as Bucknell

Why study liberal arts when you can study the art of The Street?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid is at one of those schools and has friends happily in humanities majors. Just because a school emphasizes the STEM offerings doesn't mean they're not strong for humanities.

+1 - The STEM buildings are often new and have fancy labs and expensive equipment that the schools want to show off. A building for English lectures looks like a building with classrooms. But that doesn't mean they don't recruit and support excellent faculty. Carleton's president is an English prof and teaches a course every year (or two?). Many of these schools have art collections. You can always ask to speak to a student in "x" department - pretty sure all schools have some sort of ambassador program for exactly this reason.

+1

OP, your kid can dig deeper than what's offered on campus tours and websites. It's fine to reach out and ask to be put in contact with specific departments, and to look online at the departments' course offerings, read the professors' bios, check out where recent grads (or even undergrads) have published, etc. And like PP notes, schools often have student ambassadors or whatever term each school wants--students who are in various majors and who are willing to talk to prospective students about those departments. But your kid will need to be proactive to look up these things and contact the school to ask to speak with people.

STEM is the big-deal shiny new thing and naturally gets a lot of focus when tours are putting on the Ritz for visiting students--and especially for visiting parents.

[Anonymous]

OP, has your student looked into the difference between places with a fixed core curriculum requirement, and those with open curriculum? That is one way to add or eliminate colleges for a humanities student's college list. I wont' get into the weeds here trying to explain the differences, because your student can find that out online. I've put a basic link below.)

For some students, open curriculum allows much more flexibility to take courses in a variety of topics much sooner after starting college. And classses can be much smaller early on, too; humanities studies benefit from smaller classes where students can get into more in-depth discussions, rather than listening to 100-student lectures for all of freshman year.

https://blog.collegevine.com/open-curriculum-schools-11-colleges-that-allow-students-to-direct-their-own-learning

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yale is a great idea for this student. You’ll have a lot more tailored humanities support at Yale compared to almost any lac.

Great idea for the 5% of applicants that can get accepted to Yale.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DC attends a university known for STEM, especially engineering. However, she is a humanities major and receiving what I consider a fabulous education. The liberal arts colleges in many "tech" schools are often excellent and have a wide breadth of majors and class choices, as opposed to small schools that have much narrower offerings. I attended a SLAC myself and the difference between the opportunities her school has offered and my own experience is night and day. I highly recommend a larger university for liberal arts majors.

So you think liberal arts colleges are useless?

You are swimming against the consensus here on DCUM. Most believe that an elite SLAC provides a better undergraduate experience.

I’m not making any argument at all, I was asking a comprehension question.

There’s very few- WASP, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Carleton, and Mudd

But Harvey Mudd is very STEM. And Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, and Wellesley will all have a sizable number of pre-professional students.

I think if you're really fixated on humanities, the best options are universities with core curriculums like Chicago and Columbia. The higher level class options in literature, history, philosophy and so on at liberal arts colleges are far too limited.

Seriously. If you are not STEM, there is no good reason to choose Mudd over one of the other Claremont colleges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Univ of Chicago’s required core curriculum is intense and reminds me of philosophy classes I took in college. In one semester the first year, our daughter read Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, Durkheim, Arendt, and Freud. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many. https://college.uchicago.edu/academics/core-curriculum

A humanities kid having to take core classes with a bunch of Econ majors (30% of Chicago students major in Econ) and STEM kids sounds like a living hell to me…

Well I guess only St. John’s or a theological seminary would suit you, then. I hope your student, however, will survive a few classes with people who have perspectives and goals that differ from hers. The world would likely be in better shape if the econ kids and the STEM kids had studied philosophy and literature.

No, how about a school without an excessive core and with more humanities students? Call me crazy, but then you get to take humanities courses with other kids who are actually interested in the humanities. STEM kids having to take science classes with kids who have no interest and/or background in science is a major buzzkill. The same is true when a humanities kid has to be surrounded by STEM, Econ, and preprofessional types in their “beginner” humanities classes. Lame. They should be given a tuition reduction just for having to deal with it and serve as unofficial TAs.

+1, all stem kids do in core classes is complain about the 100+ pages of reading and hardly get anything out of it other than an opportunity to kvetch incessantly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale is a great idea for this student. You’ll have a lot more tailored humanities support at Yale compared to almost any lac.

Great idea for the 5% of applicants that can get accepted to Yale.

They’re considering Pomona and Williams, so their chances weren’t high in the first place.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DC attends a university known for STEM, especially engineering. However, she is a humanities major and receiving what I consider a fabulous education. The liberal arts colleges in many "tech" schools are often excellent and have a wide breadth of majors and class choices, as opposed to small schools that have much narrower offerings. I attended a SLAC myself and the difference between the opportunities her school has offered and my own experience is night and day. I highly recommend a larger university for liberal arts majors.

So you think liberal arts colleges are useless?

You are swimming against the consensus here on DCUM. Most believe that an elite SLAC provides a better undergraduate experience.

I’m not making any argument at all, I was asking a comprehension question.

There’s very few- WASP, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Carleton, and Mudd

But Harvey Mudd is very STEM. And Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, and Wellesley will all have a sizable number of pre-professional students.

I think if you're really fixated on humanities, the best options are universities with core curriculums like Chicago and Columbia. The higher level class options in literature, history, philosophy and so on at liberal arts colleges are far too limited.

-1, swarthmore especially has a non existent pre-professional student population compared to the data analyst/consulting feeder schools that are UChicago and Columbia.

[Anonymous]

Look at Kenyon. English is the biggest major on campus. Kenyon, at 1700 students, has more English majors than Harvard (at 7000 students).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Look at Kenyon. English is the biggest major on campus. Kenyon, at 1700 students, has more English majors than Harvard (at 7000 students).

That’s impressive

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Look at Kenyon. English is the biggest major on campus. Kenyon, at 1700 students, has more English majors than Harvard (at 7000 students).

This may be true, and perhaps the PP has extensive knowledge of each school's course offerings, but I wouldn't take it at face value without doing a little digging into what majors are offered at each school. Harvard may have 6 majors under the general English/literature discipline while Kenyon has only one umbrella major. Universities often have a lot of sub-majors, which makes comparisons like this difficult. I haven't looked at either school's course catalog, but you should do that before you make assumptions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Univ of Chicago’s required core curriculum is intense and reminds me of philosophy classes I took in college. In one semester the first year, our daughter read Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, Durkheim, Arendt, and Freud. I’m sure I’ve forgotten many. https://college.uchicago.edu/academics/core-curriculum

A humanities kid having to take core classes with a bunch of Econ majors (30% of Chicago students major in Econ) and STEM kids sounds like a living hell to me…

Well I guess only St. John’s or a theological seminary would suit you, then. I hope your student, however, will survive a few classes with people who have perspectives and goals that differ from hers. The world would likely be in better shape if the econ kids and the STEM kids had studied philosophy and literature.

No, how about a school without an excessive core and with more humanities students? Call me crazy, but then you get to take humanities courses with other kids who are actually interested in the humanities. STEM kids having to take science classes with kids who have no interest and/or background in science is a major buzzkill. The same is true when a humanities kid has to be surrounded by STEM, Econ, and preprofessional types in their “beginner” humanities classes. Lame. They should be given a tuition reduction just for having to deal with it and serve as unofficial TAs.

Sure, find a school with more humanities than econ students if you can, and if you need to have the classrooms cleansed of novices, avoid all schools with core requirements. Sounds like you have your own marching orders. BTW a first year student who has read enough Aristotle and Spinoza to serve as an unofficial TA is a very rare breed and would probably be a perfect fit for St. John’s.

Most humanities students at a decent college can skip the intro courses. DD did her entire degree without touching an intro and started upper division first semester at Pomona, though op hates it so

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Look at Kenyon. English is the biggest major on campus. Kenyon, at 1700 students, has more English majors than Harvard (at 7000 students).

This may be true, and perhaps the PP has extensive knowledge of each school's course offerings, but I wouldn't take it at face value without doing a little digging into what majors are offered at each school. Harvard may have 6 majors under the general English/literature discipline while Kenyon has only one umbrella major. Universities often have a lot of sub-majors, which makes comparisons like this difficult. I haven't looked at either school's course catalog, but you should do that before you make assumptions.

This would make sense if the example wasn’t English. Kenyon’s basically a specialty school in English and programs like the kenyon review set them apart.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Look at Kenyon. English is the biggest major on campus. Kenyon, at 1700 students, has more English majors than Harvard (at 7000 students).

This may be true, and perhaps the PP has extensive knowledge of each school's course offerings, but I wouldn't take it at face value without doing a little digging into what majors are offered at each school. Harvard may have 6 majors under the general English/literature discipline while Kenyon has only one umbrella major. Universities often have a lot of sub-majors, which makes comparisons like this difficult. I haven't looked at either school's course catalog, but you should do that before you make assumptions.

No...not really. This is an apt comparison between public research universities and lacs, but not overgrown LACs like Harvard- Harvard has 1 English concentration where you can specialize in English or creative writing like any other English department. Kenyon, in its own right, is really a specialty college in English with opportunities like the Kenyon Review.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DC attends a university known for STEM, especially engineering. However, she is a humanities major and receiving what I consider a fabulous education. The liberal arts colleges in many "tech" schools are often excellent and have a wide breadth of majors and class choices, as opposed to small schools that have much narrower offerings. I attended a SLAC myself and the difference between the opportunities her school has offered and my own experience is night and day. I highly recommend a larger university for liberal arts majors.

So you think liberal arts colleges are useless?

You are swimming against the consensus here on DCUM. Most believe that an elite SLAC provides a better undergraduate experience.

I’m not making any argument at all, I was asking a comprehension question.

There’s very few- WASP, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Carleton, and Mudd

But Harvey Mudd is very STEM. And Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, and Wellesley will all have a sizable number of pre-professional students.

I think if you're really fixated on humanities, the best options are universities with core curriculums like Chicago and Columbia. The higher level class options in literature, history, philosophy and so on at liberal arts colleges are far too limited.

+100
There's really no comparison.