Reply to What is so special about UVA, W&M, VT!?!??

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am independent college counselor and I am from New England.

The only other state that has an elite trio like Virginia's is California. But the UC schools, especially Berkeley, have a huge class availability issue. Berkeley's 4-year graduation rate is in the low 80s as opposed to UVA's low 90s. I am not arguing that the UCs aren't impressive, they absolutely are, just that Virginia is the clearly second and in some ways better for students.

The only other states with three strong state schools are Florida and North Carolina. But the third school in these states are University of Southern Florida and UNC Charlotte respectively, and these can't compare to Virginia Tech. Georgia, Michigan, Texas - none of them have a very strong third school.

To OP: come on, OP. You may not care about affordability but is it such a misery why others do?[/quote]

Virginia has a good range of options, particularly given the state doesn't lavishly fund higher education.

[b]I can't really think of another state that has an equivalent of William and Mary.[/b]  There are others with similar size, but not on history and reputation.  There are state schools like Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, and Georgia Tech that have much greater scale and range in engineering than UVA, but Virginia Tech does a good job of covering that and UVA isn't nearly as large as those schools, which may appeal to some students.  Going beyond these three, VCU is top tier in art and design fields, and other schools have strengths in specific areas.[/quote]
+1

My oldest is at Berkeley (we're in California), and my younger two wanted to avoid the downsides of going to a big school when they saw what her experience there was like. They wanted a mid-size school with excellent academics and undergraduate teaching, full of "nice kids". They're both very happy at William and Mary.[/quote]

What differences do you see in teaching, advising, career services, etc.?  [/quote]
For advising, at W&M the students have a "pre-major" advisor, and then once they declare, they have a departmental advisor. In both cases, the advisor is a professor. They understand the system, are available/accessible (both for office hours, or for one-off appointments), and see connecting with and guiding the student as part of their role at the school. At Berkeley, the department advisor is a junior administrator, with (possibly) a masters or (possibly just) a certificate in higher ed administration. Appointments are harder to come by, and rather limited, in frequency, in duration, in depth. These advisors are working within a larger, more complex system, and while I'm sure they handle most cases well, the edge cases are where a good advisor is most helpful, and … that's just going to be harder in a system/scale like Berkeley's.

Similarly, for teaching, I don't have direct insights into how things are in the classroom, but will say that the kids at W&M have been very enthusiastic about their professors/classes, even going so far as to talk about changing majors, or adding a double major, or adding a minor, because of how much they enjoyed them. Even when the one at Berkeley has been in a class with a prof with high marks on Rate My Professor, there's been little enthusiasm about the classroom experience. My gut is that that has a lot to do with the classroom size. The one at Berkeley has been able to get instructor permission to get access to a few grad-level classes and has enjoyed those a lot more than the undergrad classes, and I think that maps to the classroom size theory, that when given a chance to have more direct contact with the professor, it's a more rewarding experience for the student. There have been some good regular (undergrad) classes, and one professor (who she never actually had for a class) who regularly hosts groups of students at his office hours that has been one of the highlights of her time there, but I would have a hard time giving a list of professors she loved. On the other hand, both of the W&M kids — after one semester there — have professors who have offered to write recommendation letters for summer programs / internships.

Regarding majors, another issue the oldest had was that she had to declare her major when applying. The W&M students won't have to declare until the end of sophomore year (per the liberal arts tradition of trying a bunch of things out before committing to one). That meant that the oldest (at Berkeley) had to take a lot of required courses for Major 1 that then didn't translate to Major 2 when she transferred departments after sophomore year, and now had to take new required courses. So her exposure to the breadth of classes that normally would be available to her was curtailed.

I think the clearest and most obvious summation is that W&M is, in all ways, a medium-size school, and Berkeley is, in all ways, a large school, and that overlays all of the main touchpoints the students have with the school. Even though the oldest started in the smallest college within Berkeley (in fact, their tagline at the time was something like "the small college in the great, big university"), we saw that there was no real way for it to compare to the relational experience a student would have at an actual medium-size university.

(Side note: I had harbored a small (naive) hope when Mills College was on the rocks that the UC system would acquire it and turn it into a public LAC, like a west-coast W&M (if smaller). But the UC system is all about scale, by both necessity and design, so that wasn't ever a realistic idea.)

I'm not saying that W&M is going to be better for all students than Berkeley. (I mean, clearly not for engineering, obviously, and not for many majors. Or for students looking for a big school experience.) Nor do I mean to complain about Berkeley. I'm grateful for the many great experiences my oldest has had! But I think it's easy for people to be blinded by prestige, or US News lists, or Nobel counts, or whatever metric they're using (often based on grad-level data that doesn't impact undergrads very much at all), and to minimize the importance of the undergrad experience / teaching, or of building a strong relationship with professors, or of having the kind of flourishing dynamics that exist in more intimate environments. And I'm grateful that W&M exists as a public option, both for Virginians and non-Virginians, and for the great experience my kids have had there.[/quote]

Excellent post, very informative, it is indeed unfortunate that UC didn’t see the opportunity presented by a purchase of Mills.  So many positive things UC could have done with it, including creating a SLAC (which UC Davis was close to being in the 1960s).[/quote]

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