SMALL COLLEGES OFFER BIG EDGES by Dodge Johnson, Educational Consultant
from his Philadelphia Inquirer Column "Countdown to College"
If you're like many seniors, you may not even consider colleges that aren't at least larger than your high school.
That's understandable. Growing up means bigger challenges, bigger achievements, and bigger responsibilities, so it's easy to assume that a bigger college will automatically make for a better experience. Yet what most students really want is a more complex environment, and that can happen on a campus of almost any size.
They may not be aware that a college of 1500 has a far richer texture than the same sized high school. For example, in a public school people mostly come from the same town or city. But at good colleges, even tiny ones, people come from all over the country, and indeed the world.
Also, while at school faces may repeat from class to class, in college the faces change. You'll see one group in English, another in psychology, and still others in the dorm, the dining hall, at the gym, the radio station.
Students are also likely to ignore small colleges because names are less familiar - they produce fewer graduates, so you're likely to meet fewer of them. Also, fewer people care how Oberlin or Williams did in football compared to Ohio State or Oklahoma.
The point here is not that everyone should look at small colleges. Students who fit the following characteristics may be happiest in a large university:
They love the hum of large-scale human busyness. Crowds excite them rather than make them feel lonely. They reach out to find friends and join groups that share their interests.
They prefer general impersonalness with people outside their own circle. It's not a question of friendliness but of 'space.' They want non-intimates to keep a discreet distance and mind their own business.
They're natural scroungers. They're resourceful in mining their environment. They've a knack for finding what they need - and for slipping in where others get closed out.
They're expert at milking bureaucracies and can tolerate endless lines. If things go wrong - with classes, roommates, life in general - they'll know where to find help and insist on getting it early, rather than late or not at all.
They're adept at learning in large lecture courses where for the most part knowledge is dispensed at the front of the hall and consumed at the back. They persist in grappling with ideas even though their own public contribution may be confined pretty much to papers and exams graded by a TA.
However, if you crave general friendliness, openness, caring - a place where knowing others and being known is easy, where people see community life as a mutual effort, and where making classes 'go' is a shared responsibility, you're probably a small college person.
Know that many faculty choose to teach in small colleges because they want close contact with undergraduates, to have them as partners in class and in research, to participate in college life. While finding role models, mentors, friends among faculty members can happen anywhere, it's the norm in small colleges.
A while ago the Chronicle of Higher Education listed the 50 institutions with the highest percentages of alums who went on for a Ph.D. That's not a measure of general educational quality since grooming future Ph.D.'s isn't a college's main job.
But unlike M.D's, MBA's or J.D's, future Ph.D's usually study a subject they fell in love with as undergrads. So this measure is a clue to which colleges really turn students on to learning.
The results are instructive (I've rounded off sizes; a college of, say, 1085 is really a college of 1000, not 1500):
Only 4 are larger than 10,000; only 3 others are larger than 5000 (2 just barely).
Only 3 Ivy League colleges made the cut and only 5 public colleges, none of which are the 'flagship campus' of any state university system.
Twenty-seven have fewer than 2000 students: Amherst, Antioch, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Caltech, Carleton, Cooper Union, Davidson, Earlham, Eckerd, Eugene Lang, Grinnell, Hamilton, Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Kalamazoo, Kenyon, New College (FL), Occidental, Pomona, Reed, St. Johns (MD), Swarthmore, Wabash, Webb, Williams, Wooster. Of these, 16 are under 1500 and 9 are under 1000. One is 72.
Only Ivies with an admit rate of 10% or under made the list - Princeton, Harvard, and Yale (numbers 21, 36 and 45 respectively). Of the others listed above, only Amherst and tuition-free Cooper Union admit under 20%. An additional 9 admit a third or less, 7 more admit half or less, and 9 admit two thirds or more, of which 3 admit 75% or more - and their proportion of future Ph.D.'s is larger than all the Ivies' except Princeton's.
If nothing else, small colleges seem to pack an educational punch out of all proportion to their size, selectiveness, and name recognition.
How do they do it? There's no one answer, of course. I suspect that the great strength of smallness is a sense of community, of knowing and being known, of feeling that you matter just as everybody matters. It's harder to hide, to be anonymous, to duck the work when you know that you aren't just one of a multitude - that you count and people around you care.
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