Reply to Penn or Williams for pre-med?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Penn or Williams for pre-med?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People who claim SLACs are great for getting research opportunities due to their low student-faculty ratio, overlook the fact that professors there are typically *not* leading researchers in their areas. After all, if they are doing anything cutting-edge, why are they not at an R1 pulling in millions of research fundings and churning out papers like a well-oiled machine? I mean, professors at lowly directional schools also do research, but their topics in general aren't worthy of support from NSF/NIH/DOE/DOD. If they submit research proposals to these funding agencies, the proposals would be killed right away. So how are professors at SLACs any different? And why do kids want to do research on topics that aren't significant/timely, under the supervision of professors who aren't well-known/respected in their research communities?[/quote]

The SLAC lab that my kids works in has almost a million dollars across a couple of significant NSF grants. You don’t know what you are talking about. It is true that SLACs aren’t super reliant on fed funding but that means the funding will stay in place. R1s which lose funding will direct all of what is left to keeping their grad students fed.[/quote]

You are exaggerating the funding cut issues at R1s, making it sounds like it's an ongoing crisis while SLACs are safe. An R1 received research funding that is several orders of magnitude larger than that received by any SLAC. Even if there is cut here and there (which, by the way, is an issue that has blown over), the amount available still dwarfs that at any SLAC and is more than enough for the tiny stipends undergraduates receive.

In my twenty years of working as a STEM faculty at an R1, I have never reviewed any journal/conference manuscripts written by SLAC faculty, nor evaluated any research proposals submitted to NSF/DOE that came from SLAC. I'm sure you can point out some papers/grants/contracts here and there, but they are very few and far between. Research at SLAC has never been mainstream and most likely will remain that way.

I rather my kids work with active, accomplished researchers at R1s on projects funded with hard-to-get federal money which says something about the timeliness and significance of the research, than to have them work with lesser known researchers at SLACs on pet projects that have limited impact.[/quote]

The only thing that I am sure of in your comment is that you are not STEM faculty at an R1. If you were you wouldn’t make such a ridiculous statement because 5 minutes spent researching the faculty of any top SLAC will turn up professors with long lists of publications.[/quote]

Believe what you will. Perhaps because I'm in engineering, I've never seen any SLAC faculty doing anything of note. Go to the website of any major conference in any field of engineering, and look at the schools listed in the conference program. You will be hard pressed to find a Williams or Amherst or Swarthmore paper. The papers are nearly all from both elite and non-elite-but-still-decent engineering schools, as well as schools from Asia/Europe.

Ok, if my personal anecdote isn't convincing, how about some cold hard data? According to NSF's 2024 ranking by total R&D expenditures (https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingbysource&ds=herd), which includes all areas of STEM, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Pomona are ranked 415, 388, 435, and 457, respectively. For context, schools in the northeast that no one here talks about—Temple, George Mason, ODU, and Towson—are ranked 107, 115, 202, and 315, far outperforming these top SLACs. Sure, SLACs are small, but when they are so far down the list, one has to question how much meaningful research are they generating? The answer is not much. They simply couldn't compete.[/quote]

Your thinking is a bit confusing to me. Very few LACs have engineering yet you are using engineering as your research benchmark? You might want to step back and think about that one.

Then you move on to comparing undergraduate colleges to R1s for research expenditures. Again quite confusing trying to compare the research spending of a LAC to that of a graduate school.

Top LACs generate research because their professors still perform research. It may not be cutting edge research but then again neither is the research at many of the R1s that you mentioned above. Both types of schools contribute to the body of knowledge even if they aren’t making breakthrough discoveries. Undergraduates get to participate in that research because LACs are primarily undergraduate institutions, not schools which need to graduate a large number of Phds every year just maintain their classification.

What undergraduates get from this environment is real learning, they are active participants, they are engaged in real learning which isn’t the case at a significant R1.

You are comparing apples to oranges and your conclusions just don’t make sense.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics