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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Students often have closer relationships with their professors.[/quote]

+1000

Much easier to build relationships with a professor when there are only 50 kids or less in a class, not 500+. Much easier to do meaningful research as an undergrad at a small school.  In my experience, at the smaller schools the profs care more (on average) about the whole student they are teaching and will go above and beyond to help them---at a larger school it requires a lot more effort from the student to get to know a prof and many only care about their grads students and research team.

Most SLAC (and under 8K universities) require the students to live on campus at least 2 years, for many it's available for 4 years.  This makes housing a bit easier---no searching for sophomore year housing off campus in Sept when you have not yet been on campus for a month. Instead you typically pick your soph year housing sometime in the spring, when you have a group of friends and much better idea who you want to live with next year.

Academics:  much easier to get help in a class with only 30-50 students, in fact the prof likely teaches the class not a TA and the prof is able to get to know all students.

[/quote]

New poster and agree with all the above, plus agree with another post above that talks about how it's much easier to navigate course selections when you personally know the professor.

DD is at a SLAC. For instance, for one class this coming fall, there was some kind of hiccup (not on her end) with registering for a course she really feels she needs, but she says that though she's not officially registered by the college yet, she knows she's on a list in the department and has an email that was sent to her by the professor, saying she'd get in, so she has that as a paper trail. A few years ago she was waitlisted for a class but talked to that professor and was assured that almost invariably the waitlisted students got in and he said that if she didn't hear by a certain time, to contact him again. This is the sort of stuff that isn't necessarily going to happen in a large university.

Remember too, OP, that a "college" by definition (yes there are exceptions) does not have grad programs, so there are no grad students, so there are no grad students acting as TAs. That removes a layer which, at big universities, is between most undergrads and their professors in many, if not most, courses. For some undergrads, it means that the undergrads get research work and contribute to research papers -- which are work and credits which would likely go to grad students at large universities.

Some SLACs have small classes from the very start. DD had a 15-person seminar as a freshman, with the professor teaching it. I think the largest class DD has had in the past three years (she's a rising senior) was about 35-40 students and that was a freshman econ 101 class considered "large" by her college. An econ 101 in a big university surely would have 100 or more students, I figure.

Another benefit is just overall it's so much simpler to communicate with the college about everything. Just an example: DD will be back on campus for a summer program in a few weeks. She wanted to get access to a studio that she's used during the school year, but her key card access to any building but the dorm for the summer program would be denied, because it's not the school year. She knew who to contact on the staff that runs that building. He made it happen for her because he knows who she is and that she's had previous access and is trained to use the facility etc. (It's not even for a class-related assignment, she just wants to use the studio for personal stuff, but they're cool with that.) It's much easier to reach out and deal with someone who remembers who you are because you're not one of 1,000 students who used that facility this past year, you're one of maybe 20.

What else do you want to know about, OP? Does this kind of anecdotal stuff help you picture what you needed to know? [/quote]

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