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Small By Choice Home

Small colleges offer curricula and a teaching environment with important advantages.

The teaching and learning process is noticeably different at small colleges.

• Classes are small, affording students more opportunity for personal participation and more interaction with professors. It is difficult to hide in a class of but twelve. There is immediate, real-time feedback from professor to student.
• Students are taught by full-time senior professors, not graduate assistants.
• Small colleges are legendary for teaching all students communication skills - writing, public speaking, and newer literacies involving computers. Frequent classroom participation, possible because of small-sized classes and seminars, fosters (indeed, forces) students to think critically and to express themselves clearly, in full view of professor and peers. Demanding writing assignments are common.
• Innovation in curriculum and teaching occurs more readily at small colleges. Professors, not bound by departmental constraints, find it easier to develop with colleagues new kinds of cross-disciplinary courses of study designed to meet today's needs. For students, custom-tailored curricula are easier to implement, including off-campus internships, foreign study, cooperative work-study programs, faculty-student research projects, and independent study.
• Interaction with faculty is fostered in a small-scale environment, especially accidental and unplanned interaction. For most students, one or two faculty members become role models, mentors of enormous influence who oftentimes become lifelong friends and colleagues. The curmudgeonly economics professor (whose 8 o'clock class is always filled) is, in his own special way, a charismatic figure to students, challenging them intellectually and forcing them to exceed even their own expectations. Similarly, the English professor who ruthlessly critiques student manuscripts is likely to be the kind of professor who emerges as a model of great influence.

Learn more about the difference leadership can make at a small college ...

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