Carleton or Vassar or Wes?

[Anonymous]

Son chose Wes over Carleton after attending accepted students weekend at Carleton - he was disappointed in the campus and the other students attending for the weekend were not a good fit for his personality and interests. He loved his time at Wes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Son chose Wes over Carleton after attending accepted students weekend at Carleton - he was disappointed in the campus and the other students attending for the weekend were not a good fit for his personality and interests. He loved his time at Wes.

Ours had the opposite reaction from the same two schools while visiting. I do think some of the campus visit comes down to chance (how was the weather that day? Was the tour guide effective? Who else was in your tour group? Was the hotel stay pleasant?) So I encouraged ours to try to evaluate academic fit separately from campus impressions. In our case they preferred Carleton for both, but that won’t be the same for everyone, nor should it be!

[Anonymous]

Well…. I’m 50, but I was choosing between Wes & Carleton back-in-the-day.

I ended up at Wes, mostly because I didn’t want to have to fly home (grew up in the DMV). Wes was comfortably far away from my parents, so they couldn’t just SHOW UP out of the blue the way that parents would do to my friends at UMD and UD. But it was relatively easy to get home for holidays and my parents could schlep all of my stuff to and from school in the car.

This sounds silly, but I remember feeling bad for my college friends who were from far away. It really makes logistics more challenging.

Also, Carleton felt too small to me, I didn’t want to HAVE to take a foreign language (I don’t like being told what to do), and they pretty much cost the same.

My outcomes were fine. If you googled me I appear very accomplished and successful.
(Although in the privacy of my own head I still feel like a big mess - like I’m making it all up as I go along. And parenting teenagers is a challenge that no college could EVER truly prepare anyone for…)

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:For arts I would give the edge to Wesleyan while for STEM or Social Sciences it would be Carleton. I think any of the three would be fine for humanities.

For a social sciences field such as economics, Wesleyan and Vassar place much more highly than Carleton when considered by faculty publishing:

https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.uslacecon.html

If using that site be sure to filter out faculty who have left or retired, cause they don’t.

What's your basis for saying this? The site is updated monthly.

Spot checking for schools of interest in the past. They might be adding monthly on request but they don’t delete automatically when someone moves or retires where I checked. I also checked the other way, seeing if they were capturing all the publications for faculty at a certain school. They were not, as their system used more of a push model from I could tell. Between the schools I was comparing it was off by a factor of about 10 in terms of measuring based on current research (ie published in the last decade.) Like a school with 10 publications in the last decade ranked higher output than a school with over 100. I’m sure it’s more accurate for some schools than others.

Thank you for your response.