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[quote=Anonymous]I would not recommend a SLAC for CS/Engineering. I went to one for science and you are restricted by limited offerings and resources. No way can a small school match the courses, robotics teams, research opportunities of a big school like Michigan or Cornell. And you won’t get the variety of professors either.

Smaller schools come with different advantages that larger schools lack like small classes, connections with professors, and research opprotunities from the very first semester, zero or minimal competition with grad students for opportunities, tight knit and very loyal alumni networks, Etc.

Problem is all those resources you mentioned are available mainly to grad students, not to undergrads. This is where LACs come in. High performing students even research with profs and PUBLISH their papers in professional journals. How can you beat that?"

All of these things are somewhat true but also blatantly false depending on which SLAC and which university you try to compare it with.

The vast majority of SLACs have too few majors in many STEM subjects and so don't offer the most advanced courses that EVERY university with a grad school offers every year for their grad students.

While some resources are restricted to grad students, at almost all universities all that means is you need to show some perseverance.  You don't get to "lead" a project as a junior but if you bother to join the lab after freshman year, as a senior with 3 years of growing responsibility, there is no reason why you can't be tutoring first year grad students about how to use all the labs resources.  This might not be true at MIT or other tippy top schools where each grad student is hand picked because of prior publications.  But at most flagship universities there is no lack of resources due to grad/undergrad status.  Which is not the same as time based restrictions where undergrads just don't have the time (have more classes to complete) to devote to research to get the best projects.

Then you have to balance the quality of the professors (sophistication of the research) and the projects they can offer to undergrads at SLACs.  This issue is vanishingly small if you are interested in the SLAC's star professor's research but it can be a big deal if you are only interested in the work of assistant professors who need to make their teaching mark as well as their (constantly limited) research mark for tenure.

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