Tell me about St Olaf's and Carlton

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP with kid at St. Olaf. He might have gotten into Carleton, but didn't even look at it because we couldn't afford it. Both excellent schools for different reasons. If your high stats kid is looking for a safety that they could love, and you can easily afford, St. Olaf might be worth a second look. It's a pretty special place. Do Grinell and Carleton do better for grad school placements in my kids major? Yep. But not by much. https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs

You really shouldn't have posted that link if you think it supports the idea that St Olaf is anywhere near the same league as Carleton or Grinnell. Both of those schools appear in the top ten for PhDs in numerous of the fields mentioned, while St Olaf appears in none.

Actually Carleton and St. Olaf ARE in the same leagu. It’s called the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. It’s Grinnell that’s not in the same league. They’re in the Midwest Conference.

Ha ha cute. Off point, but cute.

Not as off point as you think.

Please explain why. Every single member of Carleton's athletic conference is a Minnesota private school, every single one of them, and the Minnesota private schools that are members run the gamut from nationally known Carleton and Macalester to little known Bethel and St Scholastica. Carleton has Division III athletics and a limited athletic budget, so why wouldn't it participate in a league comprised exclusively of Minnesota private schools?

Grinnell isn't a Minnesota school and none of the members of its conference are Minnesota schools either. But, like Carleton, academically it is considered the best school in its conference.

The midwest isn't the northeast. It's much larger geographically and its top colleges aren't an hour's drive from each other. Carleton and Grinnell are just being practical.

Distance isn’t the factor you’re making it out to be. Concordia is in Moorhead, across the river from Fargo. If distance were the issue, Concordia would be playing in a North Dakota conference. Grinnell is 50 miles close to Carleton than Concordia is. St. Scholastica is in Duluth, 200 miles north of Carleton. Grinnell isn’t much farther than that. If distance were the issue, Grinnell and Carleton could be in the same conference. A friend of mine is from North Dakota. He traveled hours to play HIGH SCHOOL sports. People in that part of the country are used to traveling long distances.

Collegiate athletic conferences come together for lots of reasons. One of them is a level of comfort with the academic demands at the competing colleges.

The harping on test scores as a measure of “smarter kids” ignores a lot of what we know about testing and about intelligence. We no longer refer to “intelligence” as a single entity, which was in fact the thinking when tests were created in the first half of the last century. Multiple intelligences is how we now look at cognitive abilities. SAT focused only on one kind of cognitive ability.

The one thing that SAT scores correlate with better than anything else is wealth. And the higher the scores get, the stronger the correlation becomes. Calling a group of kids “smarter” because they have higher test scores is going into very dangerous territory. There’s a lot of racist thinking that flows from that. This is the territory of the affluent and the privileged, patting themselves on the back because Todd and Muffy are just oh so smart.

Referring to the number of kids who go on for doctorates is ludicrous when then generalizing to an entire student body. That approach is so flawed that it’s not even worth commenting on further.

There's no arguing with the likes of you. You have a kid who can't get into a top school like Carleton. I get it. I've had kids like that too. But I'm not so stubborn and insecure about my kids that I'm going to insist until I'm blue in the face that just because one school, by every objective and quantifiable measure, has a stronger student body academically than another doesn't mean the average student there isn't smarter than the other school. THAT is what is ludicrous.

And if you want to talk about race and privilege, I have news for you: St Olaf is an expensive private school with less generous financial aid than Carleton and is also whiter than Carleton and has a much, much smaller African American population. It's hardly a school for minorities and the destitute. You talk as if one of these schools is for the privileged and the other isn't. In fact, they both are schools for the privileged -- one of them just happens to have privileged kids who, on average, are smarter and more accomplished.

[Anonymous]

I have several friends from grad school (PhD in the humanities) who went to St. Olaf and they are very smart and were very well prepared. Certainly held their own in a program where others had done undergrad at Swarthmore, Harvard, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, for starters it's CarlEton. And if you do a search there's actually plenty on this board about it. It's generally considered the best liberal arts college in the midwest (although Grinnell gives it a run for its money), on par with the very best liberal arts colleges anywhere else, but it's slightly less selective and a little more laid back because of its Minnesota location.

St Olaf is a tier below, a good school for sure but with a religious affiliation. My understanding is that even though the schools are in the same town they don't interact much with each other.

If you like these, especially St. Olaf, and you like the small town feel, also check out Gustavus.

Unfortunately, I don't have any helpful, recent notes about the schools, but they are all good schools. In the 90s, Carleton was known for more of a national draw than any other of the MIAC schools (MN intercollegiate athletic conference, generally small LACs in MN), who were heavily MN/WI/IA/Dakotas in student population. I know a number from around here look at Macalester these days. At that time, Carleton was also known for being more of a pressure-cooker than other MIAC schools.

I am an alum of Gustavus. In hindsight, it was too rural and small for my taste, but I was able to be an athlete and got a really good education.

A GACer! I grew up in St. Peter. About half the size of Northfield (where St. Olaf and Carleton are), but less Malt-o-Meal smell. Different people have differing, strong opinions on whether that's a pro or con for Northfield. If you were at GAC in the late 90s, sorry for being one of the high school kids that would infiltrate the campus for various events or to simply kill time. And sorry about that tornado.

I'll add that St. Olaf is particularly known for its music program, but Carleton, as you said, is more selective, generally has more rigorous classes, and has a higher pressure atmosphere academically.

Ha, this made me smile! I was mid 90s, just missed the tornado. However, I was there the night two men escaped the state hospital, with old fashion word of mouth lockdown :/

I don't remember many HS kids, but I was involved in a few things with schools and sports in town anyway, so I liked you guys

I didn't realize St. Peter was so much smaller than Northfield, I only went to St. Olaf once to drive someone to the Cities.

[Anonymous]

Let’s focus on what’s really important: Carleton is D1 for Ultimate Frisbee and St. Olaf is not. Need I say more????

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have several friends from grad school (PhD in the humanities) who went to St. Olaf and they are very smart and were very well prepared. Certainly held their own in a program where others had done undergrad at Swarthmore, Harvard, etc.

And that's a great anecdote. Thanks for sharing. Says nothing about the general quality of the student body at each school, however.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP with kid at St. Olaf. He might have gotten into Carleton, but didn't even look at it because we couldn't afford it. Both excellent schools for different reasons. If your high stats kid is looking for a safety that they could love, and you can easily afford, St. Olaf might be worth a second look. It's a pretty special place. Do Grinell and Carleton do better for grad school placements in my kids major? Yep. But not by much. https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs

You really shouldn't have posted that link if you think it supports the idea that St Olaf is anywhere near the same league as Carleton or Grinnell. Both of those schools appear in the top ten for PhDs in numerous of the fields mentioned, while St Olaf appears in none.

Actually Carleton and St. Olaf ARE in the same leagu. It’s called the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. It’s Grinnell that’s not in the same league. They’re in the Midwest Conference.

Ha ha cute. Off point, but cute.

Not as off point as you think.

Please explain why. Every single member of Carleton's athletic conference is a Minnesota private school, every single one of them, and the Minnesota private schools that are members run the gamut from nationally known Carleton and Macalester to little known Bethel and St Scholastica. Carleton has Division III athletics and a limited athletic budget, so why wouldn't it participate in a league comprised exclusively of Minnesota private schools?

Grinnell isn't a Minnesota school and none of the members of its conference are Minnesota schools either. But, like Carleton, academically it is considered the best school in its conference.

The midwest isn't the northeast. It's much larger geographically and its top colleges aren't an hour's drive from each other. Carleton and Grinnell are just being practical.

Distance isn’t the factor you’re making it out to be. Concordia is in Moorhead, across the river from Fargo. If distance were the issue, Concordia would be playing in a North Dakota conference. Grinnell is 50 miles close to Carleton than Concordia is. St. Scholastica is in Duluth, 200 miles north of Carleton. Grinnell isn’t much farther than that. If distance were the issue, Grinnell and Carleton could be in the same conference. A friend of mine is from North Dakota. He traveled hours to play HIGH SCHOOL sports. People in that part of the country are used to traveling long distances.

Collegiate athletic conferences come together for lots of reasons. One of them is a level of comfort with the academic demands at the competing colleges.

The harping on test scores as a measure of “smarter kids” ignores a lot of what we know about testing and about intelligence. We no longer refer to “intelligence” as a single entity, which was in fact the thinking when tests were created in the first half of the last century. Multiple intelligences is how we now look at cognitive abilities. SAT focused only on one kind of cognitive ability.

The one thing that SAT scores correlate with better than anything else is wealth. And the higher the scores get, the stronger the correlation becomes. Calling a group of kids “smarter” because they have higher test scores is going into very dangerous territory. There’s a lot of racist thinking that flows from that. This is the territory of the affluent and the privileged, patting themselves on the back because Todd and Muffy are just oh so smart.

Referring to the number of kids who go on for doctorates is ludicrous when then generalizing to an entire student body. That approach is so flawed that it’s not even worth commenting on further.

There's no arguing with the likes of you. You have a kid who can't get into a top school like Carleton. I get it. I've had kids like that too. But I'm not so stubborn and insecure about my kids that I'm going to insist until I'm blue in the face that just because one school, by every objective and quantifiable measure, has a stronger student body academically than another doesn't mean the average student there isn't smarter than the other school. THAT is what is ludicrous.

And if you want to talk about race and privilege, I have news for you: St Olaf is an expensive private school with less generous financial aid than Carleton and is also whiter than Carleton and has a much, much smaller African American population. It's hardly a school for minorities and the destitute. You talk as if one of these schools is for the privileged and the other isn't. In fact, they both are schools for the privileged -- one of them just happens to have privileged kids who, on average, are smarter and more accomplished.

How many times can we use the word privileged in one post? This word is uttered much too much thus becoming white noise to normal people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP with kid at St. Olaf. He might have gotten into Carleton, but didn't even look at it because we couldn't afford it. Both excellent schools for different reasons. If your high stats kid is looking for a safety that they could love, and you can easily afford, St. Olaf might be worth a second look. It's a pretty special place. Do Grinell and Carleton do better for grad school placements in my kids major? Yep. But not by much. https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs

You really shouldn't have posted that link if you think it supports the idea that St Olaf is anywhere near the same league as Carleton or Grinnell. Both of those schools appear in the top ten for PhDs in numerous of the fields mentioned, while St Olaf appears in none.

Actually Carleton and St. Olaf ARE in the same leagu. It’s called the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. It’s Grinnell that’s not in the same league. They’re in the Midwest Conference.

Ha ha cute. Off point, but cute.

Not as off point as you think.

Please explain why. Every single member of Carleton's athletic conference is a Minnesota private school, every single one of them, and the Minnesota private schools that are members run the gamut from nationally known Carleton and Macalester to little known Bethel and St Scholastica. Carleton has Division III athletics and a limited athletic budget, so why wouldn't it participate in a league comprised exclusively of Minnesota private schools?

Grinnell isn't a Minnesota school and none of the members of its conference are Minnesota schools either. But, like Carleton, academically it is considered the best school in its conference.

The midwest isn't the northeast. It's much larger geographically and its top colleges aren't an hour's drive from each other. Carleton and Grinnell are just being practical.

Distance isn’t the factor you’re making it out to be. Concordia is in Moorhead, across the river from Fargo. If distance were the issue, Concordia would be playing in a North Dakota conference. Grinnell is 50 miles close to Carleton than Concordia is. St. Scholastica is in Duluth, 200 miles north of Carleton. Grinnell isn’t much farther than that. If distance were the issue, Grinnell and Carleton could be in the same conference. A friend of mine is from North Dakota. He traveled hours to play HIGH SCHOOL sports. People in that part of the country are used to traveling long distances.

Collegiate athletic conferences come together for lots of reasons. One of them is a level of comfort with the academic demands at the competing colleges.

The harping on test scores as a measure of “smarter kids” ignores a lot of what we know about testing and about intelligence. We no longer refer to “intelligence” as a single entity, which was in fact the thinking when tests were created in the first half of the last century. Multiple intelligences is how we now look at cognitive abilities. SAT focused only on one kind of cognitive ability.

The one thing that SAT scores correlate with better than anything else is wealth. And the higher the scores get, the stronger the correlation becomes. Calling a group of kids “smarter” because they have higher test scores is going into very dangerous territory. There’s a lot of racist thinking that flows from that. This is the territory of the affluent and the privileged, patting themselves on the back because Todd and Muffy are just oh so smart.

Referring to the number of kids who go on for doctorates is ludicrous when then generalizing to an entire student body. That approach is so flawed that it’s not even worth commenting on further.

There's no arguing with the likes of you. You have a kid who can't get into a top school like Carleton. I get it. I've had kids like that too. But I'm not so stubborn and insecure about my kids that I'm going to insist until I'm blue in the face that just because one school, by every objective and quantifiable measure, has a stronger student body academically than another doesn't mean the average student there isn't smarter than the other school. THAT is what is ludicrous.

And if you want to talk about race and privilege, I have news for you: St Olaf is an expensive private school with less generous financial aid than Carleton and is also whiter than Carleton and has a much, much smaller African American population. It's hardly a school for minorities and the destitute. You talk as if one of these schools is for the privileged and the other isn't. In fact, they both are schools for the privileged -- one of them just happens to have privileged kids who, on average, are smarter and more accomplished.

How many times can we use the word privileged in one post? This word is uttered much too much thus becoming white noise to normal people.

I wrote this, and I don't disagree with you. I'm merely responding to a poster who used the word in a ridiculous attempt to write off the clearly quantifiable differences between the typical St Olaf student and the typical Carleton student.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only parents who think St Olaf and Carleton students are on the same page intellectually are those who know their kids would never get into Carleton. Stop kidding yourselves. Yes, St Olaf is a good school -- but it ain't in Carleton's league and never will be.

So rude. Do better.

--Carleton grad

And you know I'm right.

-- Not a Carleton grad

And for some sad reason, that seems to haunt you...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only parents who think St Olaf and Carleton students are on the same page intellectually are those who know their kids would never get into Carleton. Stop kidding yourselves. Yes, St Olaf is a good school -- but it ain't in Carleton's league and never will be.

So rude. Do better.

--Carleton grad

And you know I'm right.

-- Not a Carleton grad

And for some sad reason, that seems to haunt you...

LOL, hardly. I had a kid who was torn between going to Carleton for full tuition or Grinnell with a generous merit aid package. It really came down to the wire before the kid decided to go with Grinnell, which proved to be a great decision both from a "fit" and practical standpoint. The kid actually preferred Grinnell from the very beginning and the decision would have been an easier one had the kid not been a little too caught up in the rankings at the time.

St Olaf wasn't on the radar.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP with kid at St. Olaf. He might have gotten into Carleton, but didn't even look at it because we couldn't afford it. Both excellent schools for different reasons. If your high stats kid is looking for a safety that they could love, and you can easily afford, St. Olaf might be worth a second look. It's a pretty special place. Do Grinell and Carleton do better for grad school placements in my kids major? Yep. But not by much. https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs

You really shouldn't have posted that link if you think it supports the idea that St Olaf is anywhere near the same league as Carleton or Grinnell. Both of those schools appear in the top ten for PhDs in numerous of the fields mentioned, while St Olaf appears in none.

Actually Carleton and St. Olaf ARE in the same leagu. It’s called the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. It’s Grinnell that’s not in the same league. They’re in the Midwest Conference.

Ha ha cute. Off point, but cute.

Not as off point as you think.

Please explain why. Every single member of Carleton's athletic conference is a Minnesota private school, every single one of them, and the Minnesota private schools that are members run the gamut from nationally known Carleton and Macalester to little known Bethel and St Scholastica. Carleton has Division III athletics and a limited athletic budget, so why wouldn't it participate in a league comprised exclusively of Minnesota private schools?

Grinnell isn't a Minnesota school and none of the members of its conference are Minnesota schools either. But, like Carleton, academically it is considered the best school in its conference.

The midwest isn't the northeast. It's much larger geographically and its top colleges aren't an hour's drive from each other. Carleton and Grinnell are just being practical.

Distance isn’t the factor you’re making it out to be. Concordia is in Moorhead, across the river from Fargo. If distance were the issue, Concordia would be playing in a North Dakota conference. Grinnell is 50 miles close to Carleton than Concordia is. St. Scholastica is in Duluth, 200 miles north of Carleton. Grinnell isn’t much farther than that. If distance were the issue, Grinnell and Carleton could be in the same conference. A friend of mine is from North Dakota. He traveled hours to play HIGH SCHOOL sports. People in that part of the country are used to traveling long distances.

Collegiate athletic conferences come together for lots of reasons. One of them is a level of comfort with the academic demands at the competing colleges.

The harping on test scores as a measure of “smarter kids” ignores a lot of what we know about testing and about intelligence. We no longer refer to “intelligence” as a single entity, which was in fact the thinking when tests were created in the first half of the last century. Multiple intelligences is how we now look at cognitive abilities. SAT focused only on one kind of cognitive ability.

The one thing that SAT scores correlate with better than anything else is wealth. And the higher the scores get, the stronger the correlation becomes. Calling a group of kids “smarter” because they have higher test scores is going into very dangerous territory. There’s a lot of racist thinking that flows from that. This is the territory of the affluent and the privileged, patting themselves on the back because Todd and Muffy are just oh so smart.

Referring to the number of kids who go on for doctorates is ludicrous when then generalizing to an entire student body. That approach is so flawed that it’s not even worth commenting on further.

There's no arguing with the likes of you. You have a kid who can't get into a top school like Carleton. I get it. I've had kids like that too. But I'm not so stubborn and insecure about my kids that I'm going to insist until I'm blue in the face that just because one school, by every objective and quantifiable measure, has a stronger student body academically than another doesn't mean the average student there isn't smarter than the other school. THAT is what is ludicrous.

And if you want to talk about race and privilege, I have news for you: St Olaf is an expensive private school with less generous financial aid than Carleton and is also whiter than Carleton and has a much, much smaller African American population. It's hardly a school for minorities and the destitute. You talk as if one of these schools is for the privileged and the other isn't. In fact, they both are schools for the privileged -- one of them just happens to have privileged kids who, on average, are smarter and more accomplished.

You’re right. I don’t have kids that go to Carleton. My two go to Harvard and Rice. The two Carleton grads I know personally are farmers. Should I generalize from that small sample?

My point about these two schools is that they are different and with different strengths. St. Olaf has an excellent Music program. That can’t be measured by test scores. This is just one example of why test scores are not objective and why something that’s quantifiable misses things. Both are very good and I have no need to go beyond that and say which is “stronger”. That is a meaningless descriptor of colleges and says nothing about the educational experience that a student will have at either school. Students should pick the one where they’re more likely to thrive. And students can thrive at either of these 2 schools.

I know full well what the composition of the student body at St. Olaf is. And that is beside the point when it comes to what the SAT measures. St. Olaf’s racial mix doesn’t change the fact that high SAT scores are a by-product of wealth more than anything else. They’re not objective as you claim. Thy have a bias.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only parents who think St Olaf and Carleton students are on the same page intellectually are those who know their kids would never get into Carleton. Stop kidding yourselves. Yes, St Olaf is a good school -- but it ain't in Carleton's league and never will be.

So rude. Do better.

--Carleton grad

And you know I'm right.

-- Not a Carleton grad

And for some sad reason, that seems to haunt you...

LOL, hardly. I had a kid who was torn between going to Carleton for full tuition or Grinnell with a generous merit aid package. It really came down to the wire before the kid decided to go with Grinnell, which proved to be a great decision both from a "fit" and practical standpoint. The kid actually preferred Grinnell from the very beginning and the decision would have been an easier one had the kid not been a little too caught up in the rankings at the time.

St Olaf wasn't on the radar.

One nice thing about bring connected to one of the Northfield colleges is that there is really very little rivalry between them. It's kind of annoying to have people unconnected to the two come into the thread and be combative and argumentative about the possible differences between the two. Maybe you could go pick some fights about Grinnell vs. some of its neighrbors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP with kid at St. Olaf. He might have gotten into Carleton, but didn't even look at it because we couldn't afford it. Both excellent schools for different reasons. If your high stats kid is looking for a safety that they could love, and you can easily afford, St. Olaf might be worth a second look. It's a pretty special place. Do Grinell and Carleton do better for grad school placements in my kids major? Yep. But not by much. https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs

You really shouldn't have posted that link if you think it supports the idea that St Olaf is anywhere near the same league as Carleton or Grinnell. Both of those schools appear in the top ten for PhDs in numerous of the fields mentioned, while St Olaf appears in none.

Actually Carleton and St. Olaf ARE in the same leagu. It’s called the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. It’s Grinnell that’s not in the same league. They’re in the Midwest Conference.

Ha ha cute. Off point, but cute.

Not as off point as you think.

Please explain why. Every single member of Carleton's athletic conference is a Minnesota private school, every single one of them, and the Minnesota private schools that are members run the gamut from nationally known Carleton and Macalester to little known Bethel and St Scholastica. Carleton has Division III athletics and a limited athletic budget, so why wouldn't it participate in a league comprised exclusively of Minnesota private schools?

Grinnell isn't a Minnesota school and none of the members of its conference are Minnesota schools either. But, like Carleton, academically it is considered the best school in its conference.

The midwest isn't the northeast. It's much larger geographically and its top colleges aren't an hour's drive from each other. Carleton and Grinnell are just being practical.

Distance isn’t the factor you’re making it out to be. Concordia is in Moorhead, across the river from Fargo. If distance were the issue, Concordia would be playing in a North Dakota conference. Grinnell is 50 miles close to Carleton than Concordia is. St. Scholastica is in Duluth, 200 miles north of Carleton. Grinnell isn’t much farther than that. If distance were the issue, Grinnell and Carleton could be in the same conference. A friend of mine is from North Dakota. He traveled hours to play HIGH SCHOOL sports. People in that part of the country are used to traveling long distances.

Collegiate athletic conferences come together for lots of reasons. One of them is a level of comfort with the academic demands at the competing colleges.

The harping on test scores as a measure of “smarter kids” ignores a lot of what we know about testing and about intelligence. We no longer refer to “intelligence” as a single entity, which was in fact the thinking when tests were created in the first half of the last century. Multiple intelligences is how we now look at cognitive abilities. SAT focused only on one kind of cognitive ability.

The one thing that SAT scores correlate with better than anything else is wealth. And the higher the scores get, the stronger the correlation becomes. Calling a group of kids “smarter” because they have higher test scores is going into very dangerous territory. There’s a lot of racist thinking that flows from that. This is the territory of the affluent and the privileged, patting themselves on the back because Todd and Muffy are just oh so smart.

Referring to the number of kids who go on for doctorates is ludicrous when then generalizing to an entire student body. That approach is so flawed that it’s not even worth commenting on further.

There's no arguing with the likes of you. You have a kid who can't get into a top school like Carleton. I get it. I've had kids like that too. But I'm not so stubborn and insecure about my kids that I'm going to insist until I'm blue in the face that just because one school, by every objective and quantifiable measure, has a stronger student body academically than another doesn't mean the average student there isn't smarter than the other school. THAT is what is ludicrous.

And if you want to talk about race and privilege, I have news for you: St Olaf is an expensive private school with less generous financial aid than Carleton and is also whiter than Carleton and has a much, much smaller African American population. It's hardly a school for minorities and the destitute. You talk as if one of these schools is for the privileged and the other isn't. In fact, they both are schools for the privileged -- one of them just happens to have privileged kids who, on average, are smarter and more accomplished.

How many times can we use the word privileged in one post? This word is uttered much too much thus becoming white noise to normal people.

I wrote this, and I don't disagree with you. I'm merely responding to a poster who used the word in a ridiculous attempt to write off the clearly quantifiable differences between the typical St Olaf student and the typical Carleton student.

Seems logical but if someone can't see the "clearly quantifiable differences" maybe they aren't so "quantifiable." Could care less about either school, not sure why people are being so defensive about either one.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Carleton is more like Grinnell - really super liberal and intense academics (but in a cool midwestern way, bien sur)

St. Olaf is friendlier, no less smart but less intense about it, fewer east coasters

They have a really different vibe -your kid will like one or the other, but prob not both.

Depends on how you define "no less smart." The stats for entering students suggest otherwise.

There's a reason why Carleton is ranked 9th and St Olaf 62nd.

Whatever the reason is, it’s spurious and doesn’t matter in terms of what the educational envelope one will get. Both are very good schools with different strengths. A student should go to the one adhere s/he is more likely to thrive.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't make the statement that the students at St Olaf are "no less smart" any more accurate. The criteria for admissions to Carleton are much more stringent.

By your logic, no students at any college are any smarter than at any other college.

This board is devoid of logic...it's simply $hitty takes by quite simply weird tiger parents that think HYPSM...blah blah blah are the only avenue in life. St. Olaf's, Carlton, go visit and find out...it's a big investment, would you buy a house unseen? FFS people, I'll pick St Olaf because it sounds Viking and my heritage is from Sweden, Carleton sounds Carolingian and they were conquered by almost everybody...that's how I make life changing decisions, almost like asking stupid questions on an anonymous board and expecting a real answers...time for a cup of tea.

WOW OP HERE. THANKS FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO WERE HELPFUL.
FOR OTHERS: AT LEAST I HEAR PEOPLE ARE NICER IN THE MIDWEST. I ASKED FOR INPUT ABOUT TWO SCHOOLS WE DO NOT HEAR A LOT ABOUT AND NOT ONE, NOT TWO, BUT THREE PEOPLE CALLED ME STUPID, IDIOTIC ECT. UMMM THAT IS WHAT THE "COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY DISCUSSION BOARD" IS FOR IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN? TO DISCUSS AND ASK QUESTIONS? WHY DO YOU NEED TO TAKE THE TIME TO POST BE A RUDE DISMISSIVE A-HOLE? GET SOME THERAPY, MAN.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Carleton is more like Grinnell - really super liberal and intense academics (but in a cool midwestern way, bien sur)

St. Olaf is friendlier, no less smart but less intense about it, fewer east coasters

They have a really different vibe -your kid will like one or the other, but prob not both.

Depends on how you define "no less smart." The stats for entering students suggest otherwise.

There's a reason why Carleton is ranked 9th and St Olaf 62nd.

Whatever the reason is, it’s spurious and doesn’t matter in terms of what the educational envelope one will get. Both are very good schools with different strengths. A student should go to the one adhere s/he is more likely to thrive.

That's all well and good, but it doesn't make the statement that the students at St Olaf are "no less smart" any more accurate. The criteria for admissions to Carleton are much more stringent.

By your logic, no students at any college are any smarter than at any other college.

This board is devoid of logic...it's simply $hitty takes by quite simply weird tiger parents that think HYPSM...blah blah blah are the only avenue in life. St. Olaf's, Carlton, go visit and find out...it's a big investment, would you buy a house unseen? FFS people, I'll pick St Olaf because it sounds Viking and my heritage is from Sweden, Carleton sounds Carolingian and they were conquered by almost everybody...that's how I make life changing decisions, almost like asking stupid questions on an anonymous board and expecting a real answers...time for a cup of tea.

WOW OP HERE. THANKS FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO WERE HELPFUL.
FOR OTHERS: AT LEAST I HEAR PEOPLE ARE NICER IN THE MIDWEST. I ASKED FOR INPUT ABOUT TWO SCHOOLS WE DO NOT HEAR A LOT ABOUT AND NOT ONE, NOT TWO, BUT THREE PEOPLE CALLED ME STUPID, IDIOTIC ECT. UMMM THAT IS WHAT THE "COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY DISCUSSION BOARD" IS FOR IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN? TO DISCUSS AND ASK QUESTIONS? WHY DO YOU NEED TO TAKE THE TIME TO POST BE A RUDE DISMISSIVE A-HOLE? GET SOME THERAPY, MAN.

NP-Don't misgender people unless you know what they are.

[Anonymous]

I'm the PP who posted that PhD link. Yes, the kids at Carleton are more academically minded. And Carleton's rankings on those lists are exceptional. I just linked to it to point out that St. Olaf, in some fields, ranks far above expectations, above Ivies and NESCACs even. It deserve a second look, and maybe a place on a college list. Not in the same ranking with Carleton, of course, but as a safety or target that your kid could love. And their merit aid is exceptional. Is it a best choice for any old major? Or course not. But they do music, math, bio, and prehealth very well. For others I might look elsewhere.

As to MN winters, just remember that those sunny days are also the coldest. As in, snotcicle cold. But lots more sun than MI or upstate NY.

OP, I think both schools are worth a second look. I really don't understand this forum sometimes. But I have a feeling many of the posters creating drama probably wouldn't thrive in the Midwest anyway.