Denison’s rise

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Today on Ohio Suburban Moms and Dads...

LOL, why I love DCUM

Yeah, that was a pretty good slap-down

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
It's a school very few have heard of, OP. So not a lot of people care.

Obviously, OP's kid is there.

m

Definitely not there, too preppy for my family. Just interested in how it’s able to counter the struggles a lot of non elite LACs are facing. So was hoping for people with knowledge on the situation. Seems like LACs in the top 10, maybe 20 are holding up, but in general a lot seem like they’re kind of struggling.

OK but there's no rise. Prove your point

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
It's a school very few have heard of, OP. So not a lot of people care.

Obviously, OP's kid is there.

m

Definitely not there, too preppy for my family. Just interested in how it’s able to counter the struggles a lot of non elite LACs are facing. So was hoping for people with knowledge on the situation. Seems like LACs in the top 10, maybe 20 are holding up, but in general a lot seem like they’re kind of struggling.

Many are but not Denison. Everything's not about USNWR rankings. Denison has an endowment of $1.2 billion last time I checked. Thant's nearly $600,000 per student, which is higher than Columbia, Cornell, Colgate, Middlebury, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and many other higher-ranked schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
It's a school very few have heard of, OP. So not a lot of people care.

Obviously, OP's kid is there.

m

Definitely not there, too preppy for my family. Just interested in how it’s able to counter the struggles a lot of non elite LACs are facing. So was hoping for people with knowledge on the situation. Seems like LACs in the top 10, maybe 20 are holding up, but in general a lot seem like they’re kind of struggling.

Many are but not Denison. Everything's not about USNWR rankings. Denison has an endowment of $1.2 billion last time I checked. Thant's nearly $600,000 per student, which is higher than Columbia, Cornell, Colgate, Middlebury, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and many other higher-ranked schools.

Is this true???

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
It's a school very few have heard of, OP. So not a lot of people care.

Obviously, OP's kid is there.

m

Definitely not there, too preppy for my family. Just interested in how it’s able to counter the struggles a lot of non elite LACs are facing. So was hoping for people with knowledge on the situation. Seems like LACs in the top 10, maybe 20 are holding up, but in general a lot seem like they’re kind of struggling.

Many are but not Denison. Everything's not about USNWR rankings. Denison has an endowment of $1.2 billion last time I checked. Thant's nearly $600,000 per student, which is higher than Columbia, Cornell, Colgate, Middlebury, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and many other higher-ranked schools.

Is this true???

Meaning the endowment size

“Many are but not Denison. Everything's not about USNWR rankings. Denison has an endowment of $1.2 billion last time I checked. Thant's nearly $600,000 per student, which is higher than Columbia, Cornell, Colgate, Middlebury, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and many other higher-ranked schools.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
It's a school very few have heard of, OP. So not a lot of people care.

Obviously, OP's kid is there.

m

Definitely not there, too preppy for my family. Just interested in how it’s able to counter the struggles a lot of non elite LACs are facing. So was hoping for people with knowledge on the situation. Seems like LACs in the top 10, maybe 20 are holding up, but in general a lot seem like they’re kind of struggling.

Many are but not Denison. Everything's not about USNWR rankings. Denison has an endowment of $1.2 billion last time I checked. Thant's nearly $600,000 per student, which is higher than Columbia, Cornell, Colgate, Middlebury, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and many other higher-ranked schools.

Is this true???

Meaning the endowment size

“Many are but not Denison. Everything's not about USNWR rankings. Denison has an endowment of $1.2 billion last time I checked. Thant's nearly $600,000 per student, which is higher than Columbia, Cornell, Colgate, Middlebury, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and many other higher-ranked schools.”

Yes

[Anonymous]

I've heard excellent things about Denison from students who went there and from their parents. It's rising because its reputation has grown through word-of-mouth recommendations. It is tied with Kenyon on the USNWR college rankings (for what that's worth) at #39. It meets the needs of an array of kids and appears to do well across the board -- academics, athletics, physical environment, social environment, and music teaching. It's a Goldilocks LAC -- not too big, not too small; not too woke, not too conservative; academics are not too intense, not too easy. It's a good, solid school that works for all sorts of different kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I made my son apply as a safety, he was waitlisted with very generous aid.

He was admitted RD to Bowdoin, Hamilton and Grinnell among others. Denison knew he likely wasn't going to Denison, but wanted a shot at him without it messing with their yield.

How does one get aid if they are waitlisted. That doesn’t make sense.

Sorry about those acceptances. Is he ok?

They say you are waitlisted but if you agree to enroll you will receive $25k in merit aid. It’s bs and Denison is the only school I am aware of that does this.

This is what people mean by gaming the rankings.

Everyone’s doing it these days.
Hello University of Chicago.
Hello TuLane.

Which is why you can’t rely on acceptance rates, yield etc. The only reliable metric is to look at CDS standardized test score data and see what pct of kids are submitting and what the range is. That is at least an indicator of the caliber of student they are able to enroll.

+1

[Anonymous]

One factor for sure...Denison's rise is related to Oberlin's fall.

With the downward trajectory of Oberlin, more and more kids who would otherwise be destined for Oberlin ended up at Kenyon instead. With a horde of pink haired boys and girls choosing Gambier, the preppier set started choosing Granville over Gambier, and Denison's more conservative vibe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Is this true???

Meaning the endowment size

“Many are but not Denison. Everything's not about USNWR rankings. Denison has an endowment of $1.2 billion last time I checked. Thant's nearly $600,000 per student, which is higher than Columbia, Cornell, Colgate, Middlebury, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon and many other higher-ranked schools.”

Yes

This is from 2021: https://www.reachhighscholars.org/college_endowments.html
This website says it is now over $1.5B: https://www.swfinstitute.org/profile/598cdaa50124e9fd2d05aeac

[Anonymous]

You are delusional - It's not on a "rise"

It's a small niche college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anyone surprised by Denison’s rise? Ohio liberal arts schools used to be Oberlin, Kenyon, Denison, Wooster in that order. Now it seems better than Oberlin, and equal to Kenyon, if not better in a certain way. Its acceptance rate has gone down a lot while many schools ranked around 40 seem to be plateauing. Formally easy acceptance at our school, now there are rejections. What are they doing right compared to other LACs that are good but not “elite”. Also not a booster, visited once and personally found it too preppy. But clearly they’re doing something right.

I think accreditation groups should push most schools to get their acceptance rates over 25 percent.

I used to think I’d be active in my alma mater’s alumni group. But then an admissions person came and talked to us about trying to attract more applications, so it could reject a lot more kids with perfect stats and get the acceptance rate below 20 percent.

It hit me then that this is an insane, cruel system, and I gave up on the alumni group.

Maybe Harvard needs to have an acceptance rate below 10 percent, because all kind of kids want that lottery ticket.

But it’s nuts for Rice, Emory, WUSTL or Bowdoin to have very low acceptance rates.

Most kids have ever heard of those schools till they got into the college application process. They’re applying because of marketing, not because they’ve always dreamed of going to Rice. The colleges are leading many of those kids on and tricking them into applying just to reject them.

Rice and WUSTL are wonderful, for example, but there’s no reason for them to attract a lot of doomed applicants. They ought to figure out how to give kids a better sense of their chances, and they and similar schools should figure out how to coordinate admissions better, to reduce the need for great kids to apply to 20 schools to have a reasonable chance to get into one solid school.

If you have an unweighted GPA of 3.8 or higher in tough subjects, SATs over 1450 or the equivalent, reasonable activities and parents willing to pay the FAFSA expected family contribution, the T15 through through T50 schools ought to have a system like the UK UCAS system that pretty much guarantees you’ll get into one of those schools without jumping through insane hoops.

The thing is, they aren’t really rejecting that many kids with those strong credentials, just the ones who seem like they have no intention of attending.

+1
In the latest common data set, Denison only admitted 33 people off the waitlist. I agree. I think Denison does a good job of knowing who is likely to attend and who isn't.

[Anonymous]

some people probably expect Denison to be located in a flat, treeless prairie-type setting, and are pleased to find its campus is lush & not flat. It feels more like a New England college than a typical Midwestern school.

And, while we still joke around about Ohio, Granville is an adorable village with a New England vibe

You sort of have to admire how unabashed DCUM's self-styled coastal sophisticates are about advertising ... uh ... the gaps in their historical awareness. Ohio was originally settled as Connecticut's Western Reserve (name ring a bell?), extending from Pennsylvania's western border theoretically as far as the Pacific. And while the Western Reserve didn't cover all of Ohio, and the territorial claims were soon ceded by Connecticut in the early 19th century, a lot of the development of the northern half of Ohio prior to the Industrial Revolution followed New England cultural patterns. That explains why a lot of small Ohio villages look a lot like New England ones, and why Ohio has a lot of rural SLACs on the New England model, relative to other Great Lakes states (and also why Cleveland was build around a 'public square" like cities in New England, and also why abolitionist sentiment was so strong in Ohio, like in New England, making Ohio the 'northern trunk line' of the Underground Railroad). That Granville (founded 1802) and Denison (founded 1831) have a New England feel is hardly surprising.

As for expecting Ohio to be flat and treeless like Kansas or Illinois ... can't help you there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

some people probably expect Denison to be located in a flat, treeless prairie-type setting, and are pleased to find its campus is lush & not flat. It feels more like a New England college than a typical Midwestern school.

And, while we still joke around about Ohio, Granville is an adorable village with a New England vibe

You sort of have to admire how unabashed DCUM's self-styled coastal sophisticates are about advertising ... uh ... the gaps in their historical awareness. Ohio was originally settled as Connecticut's Western Reserve (name ring a bell?), extending from Pennsylvania's western border theoretically as far as the Pacific. And while the Western Reserve didn't cover all of Ohio, and the territorial claims were soon ceded by Connecticut in the early 19th century, a lot of the development of the northern half of Ohio prior to the Industrial Revolution followed New England cultural patterns. That explains why a lot of small Ohio villages look a lot like New England ones, and why Ohio has a lot of rural SLACs on the New England model, relative to other Great Lakes states (and also why Cleveland was build around a 'public square" like cities in New England, and also why abolitionist sentiment was so strong in Ohio, like in New England, making Ohio the 'northern trunk line' of the Underground Railroad). That Granville (founded 1802) and Denison (founded 1831) have a New England feel is hardly surprising.

As for expecting Ohio to be flat and treeless like Kansas or Illinois ... can't help you there.

The flat, treeless farmland is further west. Even then, there can be fields running over rolling hills, which is especially beautiful in autumn when the crops are fading and the leaves are changing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anyone surprised by Denison’s rise? Ohio liberal arts schools used to be Oberlin, Kenyon, Denison, Wooster in that order. Now it seems better than Oberlin, and equal to Kenyon, if not better in a certain way. Its acceptance rate has gone down a lot while many schools ranked around 40 seem to be plateauing. Formally easy acceptance at our school, now there are rejections. What are they doing right compared to other LACs that are good but not “elite”. Also not a booster, visited once and personally found it too preppy. But clearly they’re doing something right.

I think accreditation groups should push most schools to get their acceptance rates over 25 percent.

I used to think I’d be active in my alma mater’s alumni group. But then an admissions person came and talked to us about trying to attract more applications, so it could reject a lot more kids with perfect stats and get the acceptance rate below 20 percent.

It hit me then that this is an insane, cruel system, and I gave up on the alumni group.

Maybe Harvard needs to have an acceptance rate below 10 percent, because all kind of kids want that lottery ticket.

But it’s nuts for Rice, Emory, WUSTL or Bowdoin to have very low acceptance rates.

Most kids have ever heard of those schools till they got into the college application process. They’re applying because of marketing, not because they’ve always dreamed of going to Rice. The colleges are leading many of those kids on and tricking them into applying just to reject them.

Rice and WUSTL are wonderful, for example, but there’s no reason for them to attract a lot of doomed applicants. They ought to figure out how to give kids a better sense of their chances, and they and similar schools should figure out how to coordinate admissions better, to reduce the need for great kids to apply to 20 schools to have a reasonable chance to get into one solid school.

If you have an unweighted GPA of 3.8 or higher in tough subjects, SATs over 1450 or the equivalent, reasonable activities and parents willing to pay the FAFSA expected family contribution, the T15 through through T50 schools ought to have a system like the UK UCAS system that pretty much guarantees you’ll get into one of those schools without jumping through insane hoops.

+1. A UK UCAS adjacent system would serve us well