Reply to Should LACs no longer be considered the model of excellence?

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[quote=Anonymous]Thanks for your detailed response. Let me respond to these as a graduate of a top LAC.

[quote]In the quest for tenure-track jobs, IME, the grad students who are the best teachers don't seek out jobs at LACs[/quote]
In my experience, this is not true. Many of my professors at my LAC have won national distinctions for teaching. Some examples: the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching of Mathematics, widely considered the best teaching award in math. Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Sociological Association. My favorite professor won the coveted Princeton Graduate Teaching Award as a grad student.

I think you're equating the best researchers with the best teachers. They seldom overlap. The LACs often turn down better researchers for whomever is perceived as 
the better teacher. This doesn't happen at the universities. Also, keep in mind that tenure track at places like A/W/S/P pays incredibly well- better than most universities, save the tippy top. They do attract tons of applicants. Most of their searches for one professor get over 200 applications.

[quote]It's easier, more fun, and safer to be the cool/popular prof in this environment than to be the demanding/challenging prof.[/quote]

The perception I get from this and your preceding paragraph- please correct me if I'm incorrect- is that you believe that by having grad students, professors at universities are forced to adapt the material and make it rigorous, while LAC professors don't have that pressure and keep the courses easy to appease to course ratings. In my experience, that has not been the case. Every professor I've had would bring the current perspectives to keep us as up-to-date on the field as possible. And my courses were almost never easy. I echo what the above poster mentioned about their experience. Lots of lengthy papers, discussions to lead and manage, independent coursework. I actually think my least favorite professors were those who weren't rigorous. Made me feel like I wasn't getting my worth.

[quote]WRT the student experience,  being forced to write papers in college doesn't make you a good writer, especially when the lowest grade you're likely to get, regardless of what you turn in, is a B.  Similarly, participating in small seminars doesn't make you a critical thinker.  In fact, it makes lots of kids good bullshitters.  They quickly discover that they can get by without doing the reading in many classes if they talk regularly in class and figure out which are the magic words the instructor wants to hear.  All that's before we get to the fact that kids who go to universities also have plenty of access to seminars and courses that require writing.  So in both contexts, the kids who want to improve their writing and to think more critically can do so.[/quote]
I went to a LAC notorious for grade inflation (you read that right), and my first college paper in the required writing seminar, despite my getting a 5 on AP Lit and Lang, was a C+. Pretty similar thing happened to everyone else in the course. I ended up with a B+ in the course, but that was because it made me a lot more serious about improvement. Here's something to consider- the LACs are incredibly supportive. When students get low grades, professors will give it to them as a learning lesson and work with them to improve. If there is improvement- and the kids at these LACs are cream of the crop, so there almost always is- the grades will rise. My final papers were an A, and they genuinely felt much better than my first.

On the whole, I can agree with these points to a general extent. But the kids who are admitted to the top LACs can't be the kids you're referencing. Most of these colleges turn down 1 in 7 or 8 applicants for reasons largely related to how the recommendations or essays come across, not test scores/GPA (everyone's comparable on the latter). I'm not going to deny that there weren't people like your example in some of my courses. But they were disliked by most of us and called out by the professor for not critically engaging or reading. Most of us took our work extremely seriously. I sat next to my peers, and they'd bring 30 pages of handwritten notes for the reading.

On the whole- and this is from sitting in on discussions at my LAC and my state university- the intellectual robustness felt much more apparent at my LAC. Having communicated with many of my friends who did choose a university, I feel really fortunate to have gotten the academic experiences I did. One thing a lot of people don't consider is that it's not just about the teachers, but the students too. I arguably learned just as much from my incredibly bright peers as I did from my professors. That's not something you readily get at many state schools.

[quote]To me, they're more like glorified high schools.[/quote]
Honestly, I'm curious about what high school you attended, because I went to a public one ranked in the top 30 by US News and my educational experience was so much better at my LAC that it's honestly a little funny looking back at it. If you're thinking of Phillips Andover or Choate Rosemary, well, yes, LACs are glorified boarding schools, but those schools are known for providing the best high school education in the first place. [/quote]

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