Pros and Cons of Top 10 SLAC vs State Flagship Honors Program

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05/09/2018 15:57

Subject: Pros and Cons of Top 10 SLAC vs State Flagship Honors Program

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not going to refute your experience, but the reality is that many of the top LACs are producing academics to a high extent. According to NSF data, the top PhD producing schools per capita largely consist of LACs and liberal art emphasizing universities, even in STEM fields: https://www.swarthmore.edu/institutional-research/doctorates-awarded There is absolutely no hand-holding at the PhD level and I know that at the top LACs, the graduate destinations do tend to overwhelmingly be top graduate programs like the Ivies, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. That would seem to suggest that their grads have gotten the analytical and research skills.

I think what you might be referring to is that some LACs are a bit wishy washy with requirements. Hamilton, Vassar, and Amherst have no core requirements at all, and their majors only entail 8-10 courses, so a student could get by with doing the minimum work and not doing the 16-20 courses a state school kid might be doing for their major. I do feel LACs give students more choices to shape their education, and sometimes it can be for the worse. I prefer LACs that have core requirements and heavy major components and required senior exercise, such as Harvey Mudd.

I’m not anti-LAC. I’m just really skeptical of the notion that LACs are inherently or uniquely intellectual places. And I’m probably most dismissive of that claim in contexts where UMC people are talking about “top” LACs as if they were all the same. I have a lot of respect for Mudd. I think Swarthmore avoids the problems I'm pointing out. I know well-educated graduates of a bunch of different Midwestern LACs.

It was in the context of teaching in a top PhD program that I developed some of these impressions of LACs. We consistently admitted their grads but they all had essentially the same credentials and some were great and others were just terrible. Even the great ones had a more narrow/skewed perspective on the field than people who came from major research universities, but they had the skills to fill in the gaps. A kid with the same credentials from a flagship public university would be a much more reliable bet.

I think there's a bit of bias built into this--because the kids who come from a flagship public university to a PhD are a much tinier set of kids from the department than the number who come from a SLAC (since a far higher percentage SLAC kids go on to do PhDs). So when you're at a flagship and have that kind of profile as an undergrad you're more exceptional in your undergrad class and then have greater experiences due to your exceptionality.

But in the first sentence you’ve bolded, I’m comparing the best students in each category (SLAC, flagship). And not wrt their brainpower or exceptionality but wrt the breadth of their training/exposure to the field as undergrads. That’s about departmental offerings, resources, scale, diversity — not students.

But, yeah, my reliable bet sentence was a variation on your theme. A kid with a 3.95 and glowing recs from a flagship is highly likely to be an exceptional student. Same credentials from a SLAC — not so likely. Numerically, btw, the state school kids outnumber the SLAC kids in PhD programs. So not a tiny sample — but a smaller percentage. The question I don’t know the answer to is which schools send their brightest/most ambitious students to PhD programs (vs business, law, med). I’m pretty confident that answer won’t be categorical — it’s more a matter of institutional culture and will often vary by field.