Reply to Pros and Cons of Top 10 SLAC vs State Flagship Honors Program

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kids did one of each. One went to a SLAC (as did I) the other to an OOS top flagship in the honors program. Both were great. Full pay at both and they were basically the same price so flagship not a price advantage. Having now been exposed to the state flagship I would choose that over a SLAC. So many more choices of classes and paths and the honors program provided structure and a small environment within a big school. Some say the teaching and focus on undergrads is better at SLACs but that is not always true. My DC at a SLAC had some weak professors and the problem was that if he didn't like them there often wasn't anyone else to take that class, or even the next class from. Some majors had only a couple of professors. Surprisingly even the career center is much better at the flagship - way more companies recruiting on campus, super loyal alumni base all over the country, and having the honors program on the resume IS a differentiator. Some of this may depend on the state flagship of course, and the nature of the honors program.[/quote]

Reading this really helps make a point clear- it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to lump-sum "top 10 LACs" vs "state flagship honors" as one comparison.

My child was deciding between OOS UCLA Honors and Pomona College. The cost was approximately the same for both. It turned out that UCLA Honors was really just about priority registration and additional distribution requirements. Most students she talked to said that it added almost nothing to the experience- class sizes were large, Honors students didn't have many opportunities to interact with one another, Honors specific courses were usually considered mediocre, and the touted benefits of research opportunities and whatnot were the same as they were for a usual student. We met at least two people who opted to DROP Honors after trying it out because they didn't want to follow the Honors specific sequence.

From the research I've done, the UCs are not regarded as having excellent Honors programs. There's a website which ranks the best ones based on specific perks and opportunites for Honors students relative to non-Honors students: http://publicuniversityhonors.com/new-top-programs-by-category/ It would be worth thoroughly investigating what Honors actually entails- or is it some gimmick for a school to lure its top candidates without translating into anything meaningful? I've heard great things about Barett at ASU, for instance, which is functionally like a Rice or WashU style undergrad college embedded within a leading research university.

Ultimately, my child did pick Pomona. Pomona is different from other top liberal art colleges in that it is within a group of five LACs, all of whom border one another and share resources and course registration together. She has access to 2700 courses a year, so the options are vast. She is a psychology major actually doing research with a professor at Claremont McKenna College, as there are none at Pomona who focus on forensic psychology. That allows her to get the focused liberal arts college experience with the resources of a mid-sized university; her complaint is largely that there are too many interesting professors and courses to take across the colleges, and wonderful new faces across the colleges that she constantly keeps meeting thanks to the joint social life between the colleges. Within her specific major, more than 90 psychology courses are offered each semester. It's not the same experience as your usual stand-alone liberal arts college. It's not a U of M or UCLA either, but it strikes her as the Goldilocks size of giving her enough options while preventing it from being impersonal or hugely overwhelming. [/quote]

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