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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, you're right, but the point still remains that it is graduates of LACs that are heavily represented for PhD production (http://www.swarthmore.edu/institutional-research/doctorates-awarded)

Keep in mind that that's the writing load of the average intro course, not upper-levels. I didn't go to Swarthmore, but a peer school, and I had comparable levels of writing at my intro courses and 25+ page papers in my later ones. My thesis was actually a little shorter than one of my papers for a seminar course (70 pages or so, and yes I got extensive feedback on it).

The point I wanted to highlight was more about Swarthmore vs. Drexel, not Swarthmore vs. Columbia. I think top LACs and top universities are equally rigorous. And I think they are more rigorous than other universities. [/quote]

Well, but then the point is that highly selective schools with a reputation for academic rigor have more difficult courseloads than comparatively easy-to-get-into schools that serve a group of undergrads with a much broader range of interests.  Quel surprise!

If you want to make an argument about LACs, you have to hold something like student qualifications relatively constant.  Maybe it'd turn out that the killer app for LACs is for B students or B+ students rather than the most intellectual students.[/quote]

The only argument I want to make about elite LACs is that they're comparable to their university peers. Not better overall, not worse overall. My personal belief is that many of the top universities have adapted LAC-like models in one or more undergraduate colleges, either from the start or from teaching revamps after studying LACs, so the liberal arts education does appear to be the gold standard, though one does not need to attend an LAC to get one. I was responding to the remarks made by a previous poster who didn't clarify until after the post that they were referring to elite universities, so I wanted to point out that the elite LACs are more rigorous than non-elite universities with an actual study. And while obviously a flawed metric for intellectualism, I used the grad school stat to mention that LACs do have many of the types commonly associated as being "intellectual". It feels like a better indicator than something completely subjective like Unigo's "Nietzschean Supermen (and Superwomen)" ranking. 
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