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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Seriously, one of the most appealing aspects of going to an SLAC , apart from the superior educational experience and entirely comparable career prospects, is to get away from ignorant families that are ‘obsessed’ with so-called ‘national universities,’ obviously understand little about US higher education system, cherry pick data, and like to ridicule and pick fights with ‘obtuse’ people who have had the nerve to make choices that are different from theirs.

It’s almost as if some commenters here are trying to project attitudes that come from foreign educational environments onto a different and unique US system.  Which raises legitimate issues of whether the dismissal of US SLACs that some foolish DCUM commenters engage in stems from their coming from a society without any educational analogue to US SLACs (which are fairly unique, internationally, in providing an educational experience that rivals the top ‘national universities.’).  Families should and will choose the college or university they like best, but DCUM readers should be careful about allowing their perceptions of excellent centuries-old colleges to be shaped by a few noisy, opinionated people who are fundamentally ignorant of those schools’ strengths, for a number of reasons one of which may be that they hail from a background where quality SLACs are unknown — and who believe the ‘data’ in USNWR can be interpreted to affirm selecting the kind of educational environment they’re more comfortable with. [/quote]

+1. As the child of first generation Asian immigrants who attended and greatly benefited from a SLAC education, I am so grateful that my parents allowed me to choose my AWS (Amherst/Williams/Swarthmore) college over a comparably ranked national university. My experience with my parents was so different than many of my peers, whose parents basically forced their children to attend a college whose name their families back home would have recognized. The irony is that those children, my high school friends, are now strongly pushing their own children to apply to SLACs because now they are parents who are "in the know." They attended HYPS+ schools, went to graduate school, and are sending their kids to SLACs with the expectation that their children will also attend graduate school, but having had a better quality undergraduate experience than they did.[/quote]

This has to be a joke. I'm an Asian HYPS alum and most of my Asian friends want our kids to attend our alma maters, not schools like Amherst or Grinnell. [/quote]

You didn’t go to HYPS. [/quote]
+1[/quote]

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