Reply to Why is DCUM so obsessed with small liberal arts colleges?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I believe SLAC graduates are better educated on average than graduates of research universities of similar selectivity.[/quote]
I believe that. For four years, a student at a SLAC is held accountable by professors and classmates. There's no hiding. My Intro to Bio class had 60 students - it was the largest class I ever took in college. My language lab had 3; linear algebra 18; my philosophy seminar 6 or 8? I read on average one book a day for four days a week and wrote a paper every weekend. Many of these papers were read and critiqued in class not only by my professor but my fellow seminar mates. If you think about that kind of intellectual training over the course of four years, that's a lot of practice spent reading hard texts, talking about them, and writing about them. FWIW, I'm now a professor at an R1, and my students really only get that kind of attention maybe for the last two or three semesters of college, and certainly not for most classes. If you think about the 10,000 hour rule - the amount of "practice" time it takes to become fairly good at a skill - SLAC students put in a lot more hours doing this kind of work than students at larger universities where they aren't put on the spot or held personally accountable for their academic work day in and day out from week 1 of freshman year.[/quote]

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