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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Taught at William and Mary and faculty there get a lot more training in teaching, how to give good feedback on essays,how to help students improve their writing, etc.  This is something that you don't see at a Research University.

My kids are all at SLACS and they have opportunities like the chance to attend a job talk and give input into department hiring decisions.  At a research university, these activities are for grad students, not undergrad students.  
THere are more undergraduate research opportunities, and funding for undergrad research usually.  MacAlester has some huge percent of students getting NSF grants for grad school because so many of them co-author with faculty.  Very unusual for undergraduates. We toured one college where they had a boat that natural resource majors used to gather samples, etc.  Not sure you would see this for undergrads elsewhere.  
In my opinion, you get better letters of recommendation from faculty at SLACS because they know your student more.  
I go to academic conferences in my field and uniformly if a faculty member brings a student along and has them present their senior thesis, etc.  this is someone who teaches at a SLAC, not an R1.[/quote]
OK, I'll bite.  What is the "huge" percentage of MacAlester students getting NSF grants for grad school?  Less than 1%?[/quote]
The vast majority of the NSF grad fellowships are awarded to R1 students (86%) .  My DC just graduated from Stanford and 20% of the seniors in DC's major received NSF grad research fellowships.

https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/08/nsf-graduate-fellowships-disproportionately-go-students-few-top-schools[/quote]

NP: Yes but SLACs have so few numbers enrolled, and relatively few STEM majors so they aren't going to show up in that kind of measure. If you go to a SLAC with a good STEM program and are a STEM major you have a strong chance of getting STEM phd and of getting a fellowship if you want to take that path.  There may be less than 10 students at your school who want to.  Sure, Stanford or other tippy top schools are going to have more, but given all the STEM majors at less stellar R1s, SLACs are a more viable route for many students.[/quote]

You would need to divide number of graduate fellowships by number of undergraduates to get a common denominator.

I looked at the data behind the graduate fellowships and note that for 2020 among the R1 institutions in Virginia (where I live) UVA has 12, VT has 4, VCU has 3, and GMU has 0.  William and Mary, which is not an R1 and has more limited research programs and a much smaller enrollment has 11.   Swarthmore, which is considerably smaller than even William and Mary and has little funded research, has 9.

On a per undergraduate basis, if you take VCU as the base, VT has slightly more (1.1X) fellowship winners on a per capita basis, UVA has 6X as many, William and Mary has 14X as many, and Swarthmore has 45X as many.   For the heck of it, I also looked up Stanford and it has over 37X as many, so not as many as Swarthmore on a per capita basis.  Research intensity doesn't explain the numbers.[/quote]

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