Swarthmore/Wes VS Williams/Bowdoin
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Anonymous
What does not being a NESCAC family mean? |
Anonymous
+1. How many students/parents would choose Rhodes over Williams, for example? |
Anonymous
| Swarthmore is very liberal and diverse. There is transportation into Philly and the little town of Media. Kind of a tourist town. Swarthmore is tough academically but if you are pre professional and do well at Swarthmore you have a good chance of admission to upper tier grad programs. It’s can’t be that hard DS graduated summa. |
Anonymous
DP……NESCAC students are all very familiar with their peer institutions and that spills over into social and professional environments. It’s a network. |
Anonymous
No, they're not the same - but most kids apply to several they like and hopefully, get into more than one. |
Anonymous
At many of the lower tier schools, say in the 50-100, there's about a 10% group of v. high achieving students who receive full rides or very significant merit aid. This can be a meaningful option esp. for kids who really want a LAC but whose parents fall in the "donut hole" of financial aid--earn too much to get it but not enough to pay for the higher ranked schools. For those kids who miss getting into a T20 LAC, getting a full-ride at 50-70 ranked one can be better than going to a 25-50 one. Plus they usually get a lot of perks and then stellar recommendations from profs who have worked with them a lot. |
Anonymous
No one's saying they're all the same. They're just not as different academically as people think, so someone who likes the warmer weather and lower price at Rhodes should not feel like they're sacrificing anything in order to make that choice. Upon what do you base your assumption that people SHOULD choose Williams over Rhodes? Probably a significant part of it is that USNWR has had them significantly higher ranked for over 30 years. But WHY are they ranked higher? The 3-point difference in SAT percentiles isn't enough to yield a significant difference in the level of classroom rigor or discussion, right? So what's the real difference? Take a look at the USNWR criteria and weights used to rank and tell us honestly if they're the criteria that matter most to you in a school. The quality of education at different colleges is much closer than the impression one gets from looking at how far away they are from each another in rankings. Think about it this way. There are over 2500 4-year colleges in the US. If someone were to rank the 2500 most desirable locations on the planet to take a vacation, and you can only choose one of them to attend, would you make your decision based on the criteria those rankers chose and think that there must be a huge difference between #10 (say...Rome) and #100 (say...Zion National Park)? Not likely. There are many, many very desirable places to visit, and you would go to your own criteria for what you're looking for in a vacation and choose based on that. Your criteria would likely yield many of the same places, but in a completely different order. The same is true for colleges. The number of colleges that can satisfy any given student's needs is much large than most people believe. If you like anecdotes, consider this: My cousin's oldest daughter turned down Penn and Hopkins to attend Catholic U. She liked the scholarship they offered and the traditional Catholic education. After 4 years, she had both a bachelor's AND a Master's in biomedical engineering, and a job as a researcher at NIH waiting for her upon graduation. She could not have hoped for better results if she'd chosen one of the other two schools. |
Anonymous
Carleton is ranked #9, and the University of the South is #49. Someone might prefer the latter because: 1) it's $10k less expensive; 2) it's 32 degrees warmer there today; 3) it's closer to home; 4) it has a semester system instead of trimester; 5) they like the idea of being a big fish in a small pond; etc. And because no one is going to care once they get into the workforce. Oh, and how is the 99th percentile vs. 96th going to make any real difference in the classroom experience? |
Anonymous
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The rankings can change quite a bit over time. As I said, Vassar dropped 9 or 19 spots in one year. Do you really think the school changed that much? Reed refused to play along from the beginning and is commonly believed to be a much stronger school than the ranking would reveal.
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Anonymous
You've just named two outliers. This isn't common at all. |
Anonymous
Where did you get the idea that there's only a 3 percentage point difference between the SAT scores of entering students at Rhodes and Williams??? For the most recent entering class for which stats are available for both school -- the entering class of 2020 --the mid-50 percent range for Rhodes is 1250 to 1400 and for Williams it's 1430 to 1540. Assuming the mean for Rhodes was 1325 and doe Williams 1485, we're talking about the 88th percentile versus the 97th. That ain't three points. It helps to make sure your facts are right before you pontificate. |
Anonymous
More false facts. The entering class at the University of the South (Sewanee) in 2020 had middle 50-percent SAT scores from 1160-1340 and for Carleton 1340-1506. In other words, the top quarter ar Sewanee is equivalent to the bottom quarter of Carleton. This is around a 15 percentile point difference, not 3. |
Anonymous
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Among the 30 colleges and universities in the US with the highest SAT scores, only 6 are liberal arts colleges. In order, they are:
Harvey Mudd Amherst Williams Swarthmore Pomona Grinnell https://blog.prepscholar.com/colleges-with-highest-sat-scores |
Anonymous
Sorry, I should have made it clearer that the two paragraphs above were responding to two separate statements. Paragraph two was not referring to Carleton vs. University of the South, but rather to the claim that the 99th percentile vs. 96th percentile makes a big difference. The difference between the median SAT scores at these two colleges is indeed larger, although 13.5 not 15; you can't use scores from the 2020-21 CDS because neither school required test scores that year. That 13.5 difference does likely make for a difference in the rigor of the classes, but not enough that a student in the top few percentiles couldn't get a strong education in Sewanee. Thus, the decision to value the five factors I mentioned over classmates with higher test scores wouldn't impact a student's future negatively. And again, no one is going to care which of the two they attended once they're in the workforce. They're going to care what was made of the opportunities they were given, how capable that student is, how well they work as part of a team, whether they put in the extra hours when necessary, etc. |
Anonymous
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This whole argument about whether it makes a meaningful difference to attend a T10 SLAC or a T100 SLAC is interesting and there are reasonable points to be made on both sides. But you know, that's not what the OP asked. S/he asked about the vibe at 4 specific schools, all of which are near the top of the barrel in terms of selectivity.
Whomever it is that's writing lengthy diatribes about how rankings don't matter, why don't you start a separate post and let the OP and others of us who are interested continue to get useful feedback on the schools her kid is interested in applying to. |