dagblog - Comments for "What Is a "Good" College? Two Tentative Answers"

If you'll excuse my length,

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 20:44:06 +0000

In reply to One interesting study that

If you'll excuse my length, let me try to break down the apparent preferences of faculty parents in my resources/reach model.

1. It is generally speaking, a choice for better resources over wider reach. Faculty (who by in large believe in the value of education per se) prefer the schools where they believe the undergraduate instruction will be strongest. And liberal arts colleges, which put nearly all of their resources into their undergraduate classrooms. Those colleges may have smaller budgets than big universities, but they spend all of the budget on students, rather than on graduate students, football facilities, and massive new telescopes.

I will add the caveat that university professors, being very attuned to relative educational strengths and weaknesses, are also much better able to distinguish between liberal arts colleges, both because they know more about school's reputations and because they often know many of the people who teach at local colleges. Professors tend to know which schools have national or strong regional reputations, and they tend to have a good deal of inside knowledge about less famous schools.

2. It may reflect a more nuance approach to reach. The most elite liberal arts colleges do have national reputations, but it tends to be more limited by class than by region. There are some people know about Oberlin everywhere in the country, even if it's not a place everyone knows like Yale. But the people who do know about and value Oberlin tend to be better educated, have higher incomes, and so on. An elite liberal arts degree is a national credential, albeit a slightly diluted one. It has more power in the major cities, and in prestige-oriented fields. It will help you get a job in New York publishing or a Hollywood studio, even if people don't treat it like a household name.

And, reflecting the particular preferences and biases of faculty parents, liberal arts degrees have their maximum value in graduate admissions. There are plenty of people who have not heard of Oberlin. There are no grad-school admissions deans who have not heard of Oberlin.

If we're talking about a group of parents who tend, far more than the average parents of college students, to expect their children to go to school beyond four years, then they might be making a very savvy choice about the value of those undergraduate degrees. A liberal arts BA or Bs followed by a glamorous big-school degree (oh, say Wellesley and then Yale law), can be a very smart strategy.

Thanks for the comment, Todd.

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 20:27:00 +0000

In reply to One interesting study that

Thanks for the comment, Todd. That is an excellent point.

I do want to push beyond the usual distinctions of public/private and research university/liberal arts college, though. "Liberal arts college" is sometimes too broad a category, especially for people who don't already know a great deal about the higher education market.

In greater Cleveland, it is arguably the case that the college with the strongest national reputation is a small liberal arts college, Oberlin. (The flip side of that argument is that Oberlin is only just barely behind the area's best-known research university, Case Western. I don't intend to break down the Cleveland rankings beyond the top two, but those, in some order, are the top two.) On the other hand, there are a number of other liberal arts colleges in the area, of varying resources and varying reach, and it is no disrespect to say that none of them are in the position of an Oberlin. One of these liberal arts colleges is not like the others.

By the same token, there are a number of private liberal arts colleges in your part of Washington, and there are certainly some local students and parents who view all of those schools as "better" than Washington State. (Note: Todd teaches at Washington State.) But if we looked at even traditional metrics like admissions rates or graduation rates, many of those schools are not better or even as good. If you try my How-many-professors-in-my-department? test, some of those schools will fall far short of Wazoo. Old Dagblog hand Donal once asked me about a small private school in his area that locals treated as a world-class institution, with t-shirts that read "Harvard, the ____ of the East" and so forth. I had to tell him that I had never heard that school's name before in my life. And a little basic research showed that its admissions rate was identical to that of the inglorious local branch of the state university. That little college is not more academically selective than a down-the-food-chain state college; it was only more economically and socially selective.

Small liberal arts colleges like that are not always a better deal. (I have been asked by a blog reader if tiny liberal arts college X, which had I think only six people teaching in its English department, was a good place to study Shakespeare. And I fear that the answer I gave was not welcome or expected.) In fact, I used to think that going to schools like that was simply a mistake. Sometimes, of course, great individual faculty make a department great. But that is very hard to predict. Some of this blog post has been my attempt to work out why going to a school like that wouldn't be a mistake. It can be the right move if you know a LOT about the current faculty at a place. And it can be a reasonable position to spend the extra money for local prestige if you intend to stay local.

A small liberal arts college like Whitworth University, for example, is not necessarily stronger in terms of educational resources than Washington State. In fact, it may have fewer educational resources for students. But within a limited geographical area, Whitworth graduates are sometimes presumed to be smarter/better prepared/better job candidates than Wazoo graduates, and there is a case to be made that spending the tuition money for that social advantage is reasonable (even if you or I would not do it). On the other hand, the Whitworth advantage evaporates very quickly outside that area. I only discovered the school's existence this morning, as I was surfing the web looking for examples. The Whitworth degree is not a better investment if you're planning to move to LA after graduation. You'd almost certainly be better off paying in-state tuition at Washington State.

One interesting study that

Todd Butler — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 17:39:08 +0000

In reply to What Is a "Good" College? Two Tentative Answers

One interesting study that squares with some of what you say here, especially in regards to the issue of regional (rather than national) reputation. The authors surveyed where faculty send their children on the presumption--which also animates the queries you mention at the start of your post--that faculty, being closely involved in the business of education, would have some particular expertise in such matters.

The result? An emphasis on small, liberal-arts colleges for children of faculty, even when controlling for race, income, and educational levels. One reason? Awareness of these schools:

"Most leading research universities have strong national reputations, while only a few elite liberal arts colleges are known outside their geographic region. . . Because of their small scale, more modest emphasis on athletics as a public spectacle, and lower research profile, the liberal arts colleges do not garner the press, television exposure, and national name-recognition enjoyed by the nation's premier research universities."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/where-professors-send-their-children-to-coll...

Sure. That is why the most

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 20:41:49 +0000

In reply to Some of us are just happy to

Sure. That is why the most important thing is to have a strong network of public colleges and universities: not just strong state flagships, but strong local and regional universities. But since I teach at a regional public university, I'm not necessarily the one to make that case.

Some of us are just happy to

trkingmomoe — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 16:27:33 +0000

In reply to Well, Hal, choosing a college

Some of us are just happy to have a college near by to go to or can send our kids to. Shopping for a college isn't even in our lexicon.

Doc - your response feels

HSG — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 12:54:50 +0000

In reply to Well, Hal, choosing a college

Doc - your response feels right on all counts.

Well, Hal, choosing a college

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 04:01:45 +0000

In reply to On paper, my undergraduate

Well, Hal, choosing a college is the ultimate unrepeatable experiment, isn't it? You can never know what would happen if you had chosen differently. Even if you end up leaving college and going back to another school later, you're not the same student and it's not the same experience.

It's true that there are so many small variables, and so many unknowns, that you can't really predict how any college choice will work out. Nothing can tell you whether you'll meet that professor who changes your whole viewpoint during junior year, or if you'll be randomly assigned the roommate who ends up as your best man/maid/matron of honor. You can't know. If I'd made a different college decision, I might have met Mike Wolraich years earlier, and he would have known better than to blog with me now: lucky escape for me! So, yes, all of the unknowns and variables together are "luck."

This is why I have grown less interested in the idea of "fit," which suggests to students that there's one perfect school out their tailor-made for them, and have taken to framing it more as a school where you can make a successful adaptation. Because either way, a student has to adapt to a new stage of their education, and a new stage of their life, and that is actually good for them.

There isn't one ideal school for each student. There is always a range of different schools where any student would succeed and be happy.

And what you think will be best for you when you're seventeen doesn't always turn out to be what you end up wanting or needing. You might think a small liberal-arts colleges would be best for you, but end up thriving at a much bigger school, or vice versa. We are bad at predicting what will help us grow as people.

On paper, my undergraduate

HSG — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:57:42 +0000

In reply to What Is a "Good" College? Two Tentative Answers

On paper, my undergraduate university was perfect for me. The emphasis on liberal arts, the progressive students and faculty, the small but not too small class size, and location were all ideal. Yet, I was only fitfully happy there. Maybe, I would have been even less content elsewhere. But, I do wonder how big a role luck plays in determining whether your college is the truly the right fit.