Carlton or Reed for a student who wants to study pure math?

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12/13/2025 08:28

Subject: Carlton or Reed for a student who wants to study pure math?

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looking to build a good college list and would love some advice: My DC wants to study pure math, and by the time he graduates high school, would have completed Calc IV (multivariable calculus) and Linear Algebra. Both classes were fairly easy for him.

Would either Carlton or Reed be a good school for him to continue study math, mainly:
- are math classes there challenging?
- will he "run out of" higher level math classes during his undergrad years?
- will he find a good "math kid" crowd at either school?
- other things he should be aware?

He'll likely go on to get a masters or PhD in math.

He has other schools on his list (e.g. Umich, Wisconsin, etc), and his counselor suggested these two, and we're not familiar with either.

It depends on how pure he wants to be. Most high school students don't realize that most of what they think of as math is applied math, not pure math.

Reed, for example has a math & statistics department that doesn't have the "grad-level" courses that would be junior/senior courses at an MIT or a Harvard.

But it offers several CS theory and Statistics courses.

If he really wants to go hard-line advanced pure math through grad school, not applied or mixed with science in the more liberal arts tradition, he's better off at a big state university where he can dip into grad courses, or, more realistically, a T10 school.

The small liberal arts colleges are a great foundation for grad school, but they absolutely are not accelerated, as haven't adapted to the modern (past 20 years) trend of doing calc (1-4) and linear algebra courses (plus after school math clubs/courses for deeply enticed algebra, geometry, and discrete math and proofs) in high school

https://www.reed.edu/math-stats/courses.html

There’s nothing to adapt to…you skip calc 1-4 if you can pass the placement test, same for linear algebra. What tends to happen at DD’s lac (Pomona) is students come in having taken a very basic, linear algebra course and then get near 0s on the 1-on-1 placement exams with professors for higher level courses, because the first year first semester linear algebra course is entirely proof based and some years introduces Jordan Canonical forms and markov/stochastic processes that would not be typically introduced in a high school course.

Reed is actually a great example, because very few can place past Intro Analysis there. You can do advanced coursework early, but you’re going to actually need a rigorous proof background.

There literally aren't enough courses in the catalog unless you branch out to the applied fields.

There are enough courses, but very few free choices. You would need to take almost every course including "Advanced Topics" "whatever the professor wants to talk about" courses, and not go deep in one area of pure math, like Algebra or Analysis. Not necessarily a bad thing for an undergrad though, and very much in the liberal arts tradition. The lack of choices can prevent students from choosing bad in-major electives before they know what all the subjects mean.