Success in Higher Education: Small Colleges vs Big Universities

The Wall Street Journal had a pretty good article today about the current state of higher education.  You can see it here (hopefully): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304177104577307580650834716.html

This article does a good job of mixing statistics (30% of US adults have four-year degrees, which lags behind 14 other countries) with concrete anecdotes about young people that have or haven't gone to college.

I'm a big proponent of education.  As long as you're smart about what you're getting into, I think that the time, money, and effort invested in education will always benefit you. The article does a good job of describing the situation.  In this blog I like to offer ideas on how to improve the situation. 

From my own experience, I saw that there are substantial pros and cons to what kind of school a person attends.  I've written previous posts about how to choose what to study.  In this post I want to focus on WHERE to study.

Big vs Little

Let's simplify the problem a little by dividing school choices into two
groups: Small Colleges vs Big Universities.  For this post, I define a college as school that has an open-enrollment policy and offers four-year degrees.  I define a university as a school with competitive enrollment and opportunity for advanced degrees (like masters, doctorates, etc.) (I've written before about two-year degrees, so this post will focus on schools that offer four-year degrees or more.)  (I realize that many schools fit somewhere in between.  You should still be able to recognize these traits when evaluating them.)

To start with, let's look at the benefits of small colleges

Low cost!

Small colleges (especially the close-to-home variety) can be a bargain.  Cost of tuition at community colleges and in-state colleges might be a fraction of the cost of tuition at big-name universities.  For example, the community college near where I grew up (Clackamas Community College) charges $1,155 per semester.  Big name schools could charge ten times that much.  This is a huge advantage for students that don't yet know what they want to study.  Lower costs can free up a student to try out different things without losing sleep over their escalating student loans.

Teachers are there to teach

Every story I've ever heard about an awful, crabby professor has come from a large university.  It's kind of counter intuitive, but the best teachers are often at small schools.  At universities, professors have  enormous responsibilities to perform research. They delegate responsibilities to graduate students and teaching assistants.  To illustrate, I took a Manufacturing Methods class from a professor that was renowned for his work in an innovative method for joining metals.  The very semester that I took his class, he received a major international award for his research.  Wow... what a great opportunity, right?  Nope.  The class was awful.  He was never there.  Several times we showed up to find a note on the door that class was cancelled.  Twice he even forgot to have the secretary put up a note.  Even when he was there, I sensed that he was ever prepared for class.

In colleges, the teachers are there to teach.  There are certainly bad teachers in colleges, but it's typically not hard to get help from the teacher when needed.  Teachers are more likely to have time to walk you through course material if you catch them outside of class.

In defense of fancy universities

In my opinion, the biggest shortcoming of open-enrollment colleges is the general lack of ambition of classmates.  I did my first year of school at a state college and was amazed at the general apathy of my fellow students.  I couldn't find anyone else to study with because no one else was studying.  I had a history class for which the only requirements for an A were to turn in the homework and familiarize myself with a short list of practice questions that would be repeated verbatim on the final.  It's a nice feeling to get one of the highest grades in the class just by doing minimum work... but it's tough to challenge yourself when expectations are so low.  If you have big plans for yourself, you don't want to get pulled down to someone else's level of mediocrity.

When I later transferred to a more prestigious school, I worked in groups with some people that had some pretty big goals for themselves.  These people had a big influence on me. (This is not to say that there aren't some sucky people at big universities.  I met plenty of super-competitive jerks, too.)

Recruiters

If you're going to school with the intentions of getting a good job, (which is the best reason to go to school in my opinion,) the importance of recruiters can not be over emphasized.  The sad reality is that companies only recruit at a limited number of schools.  Some companies will only hire students from particular schools.  For good or bad, your first job out of school will influence the work that you are doing for years to come.

The best of both worlds?

One of the secrets of starting at a smaller school is that even if employers are picky about where you graduate from, they typically won't care if you got started at a less prestigious school. In my case, my grades out of high school weren't good enough to get me in to a competitive university.  I was planning on being a writer anyway, though, so I didn't really care.  At first, I just used school as an excuse to move away from home and get closer to bigger mountains.  (I was pretty serious about snowboarding...) As I mentioned, the state school I started at pretty easy.  Not only was I later accepted into a better school (BYU), but the higher grades I got during that first year qualified me for a scholarship.  The classes were a lot harder at BYU, so I was thankful for the boost to my GPA from my first year at an easier school.  At graduation, I interviewed with some companies that had pretty strict rules for graduating GPA.  None of them cared that I had started at a different school.

Obviously there is a long list of factors to consider when choosing a school. Hopefully this list gives you another perspective on how to make that choice.  If you've already been through school, what are some of the other things that you noticed about universities vs colleges?  Join the discussion in the comments.