Sometimes when I recommend a small, liberal arts school to students, say a school like Pomona College, they're puzzled. Why in the world would they want to pay $45-50,000 a year for a school with 1,500 students (smaller than most high schools) and, in all likelihood, with limited resources? On the surface, such an objection makes sense. However, it doesn't account for the consortium of colleges to which Pomona belongs. This consortium opens a huge network of educational opportunities for all Pomona students, while maintaining Pomona's personal and intimate touch.
Pomona is part of the Claremont College Consortium. There are a total of 5 undergraduate campuses: Claremont McKenna, which specializes in business and economics; Harvey Mudd, engineering; Pitzer, behavior sciences; Scripps, foreign language; and two graduate schools. None of these colleges is much bigger than a mid-sized dorm at UCLA, yet each has its own faculty, administration, admissions office, and curriculum. They also share a number of services and facilities among themselves: art studios, a biological field station, a 2,500-seat concert hall, interscholastic athletic teams, and the Claremont library that houses over 1.9 million volumes. Students at any of the member Claremont College Consortium can cross register for over 2,500 different courses given by its members. While the average class size at Pomona College is 14 students, a Pomona student has access to almost unlimited educational resources-and I haven't even touched on Pomona's exchange programs with Swarthmore and Colby (on the East Coast), or the Study Abroad Program, or the 3-2 engineering program with Cal Tech.
The Claremont Consortium is by no means a rarity. A number of smaller schools band together to offer cross registration of courses, share study abroad programs, or their facilities. One of the best listings of consortia can be found on page 771 of "Fiske Guide to Colleges, 2009." It lists some of the "largest and oldest" of these programs:
The Associated Colleges of the Midwest (www.acm.edu ): 14 institutions including Carleton, Macalester, University of Chicago, Colorado College, and Grinnell (Iowa)
The Associated Colleges of the South (www.colleges.org): 16 institutions including Davidson, University of Richmond, and Washington and Lee
Five College Consortium (www.fivecolleges.edu) : including Smith College, Amherst College and three others; allows any undergraduate at the member schools to cross register
Great Lakes Colleges Association (www.glca.org): joins together 12 liberal arts schools including DePauw, Kenyon (Ohio), and Kalamazoo, to offer study abroad programs.The listing above is by no means comprehensive. There are consortiums among Swarthmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and the University of Pennsylvania; the Colleges of Worcester Consortium (including Tufts, Holy Cross, and others); The Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities...the list goes on.
On the flip side of small schools magnifying resources through joining a consortium, are big universities that gain the feel of a small school through special honors programs, residential colleges, and special programs. Honors programs in schools such as UCLA (http://www.ugeducation.ucla.edu/honors/hchome.html ), University of Michigan, or University of Wisconsin, emphasize small class size, select faculty, and "community atmosphere in a large university." Other schools build a sense of community through a residential college program, initiated by Oxbridge, and incorporated by Yale, Harvard, and Pennsylvania universities (among many). Then there are special programs, with very limited enrollment and very low student/faculty ratios. One example is Cornell University's College of Human Ecology and its Interior Design program. It has about 100 students and 14 faculty members, with access to a university of over 13,000 undergraduates.
The moral to take from this is to not be deceived by the size of a school. In many cases, a small school can access the resources of a giant, while a giant school might very well have programs that make it feel like an intimate community. Uncovering these features requires research, questioning and, better still, a visit, if at all possible. There are no rules for what a school's size means, only potential opportunities that beckon investigation.