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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't think there is a tremendous appeal. Has always been for near-miss kids. They all want to be at Harvard or Brown. That's the chip on the shoulder that you are observing.[/quote]

That wasn’t my son’s experience at all. [b]He was one of the highest ranked (#8) debaters in the US[/b], perfect grades, near-perfect SAT, etc. Two dozen kids per year from his hs go to Ivies and he was at the top of that cohort. And was only interested in LACs. Chose among Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore. Had a great experience at Amherst, with many classmates who very deliberately chose a top LAC over a research university (Ivies included) where you sat in a 400-student lecture hall for intro bio or Econ. 
He later went to a top-2 law school, graduating top of class, law review editor etc. There are many, many students of that caliber at AWS-level LACs. Not everyone has the Ivy fetish.[/quote]

Amherst College, Northwestern University, and Dartmouth College are probably the 3 best schools in the country for debate. Northwestern awards 2 scholarships per year for debate.[/quote]

As an aside to the main topic, it is quite odd to list Amherst as one of the three best debate schools in the country.  To start, those three schools have very, very different debate formats and structure.  Amherst is in Parliamentary (APDA), with student judges, and the whole circuit is basically student coached and run. With the absence of research and the after-dinner speaking feel and humor debateing in front of fellow college kids hung over from the party the night before, it feels almost like club or DIII debate rather than varsity or DI debate, although it has a ton of uber smart kids.  It's not a difference in ability at the top levels, but the amount of work, structure, and competitiveness makes them entirely different.  Nothing wrong with it (many consider Parli in the Northeast more fun), but Northwestern and Dartmouth are so different (policy debate (CEDA-NDT) /lots of professional coaching/lots of research and work and heavy travel) that it would be odd for a debater to consider all of them if they were really focused on debate.  Dartmouth has an APDA team as well as a Policy team, so you could opt for the much lower commitment APDA team there, but you wouldn't have the structure/coaching/research that some HS debaters crave in college.  The student judging in APDA would also be frustrating.  Frankly, if you are a top high school debater who wants to do Parli in an APDA circuit in college, there's no particular reason you would focus on Amherst over any other top academic school in the Northeast that has an APDA team.  It's not like they have a particularly unique program or set of debaters, and even if they did have a good current group (looks like they qualified 3 to nationals last year and were the #29 ranked club, which is OK, but not at all special), the students turn over every year and things change quickly.  As long as a school provides halfway decent funding and you find one other debater to partner with, you can be team of the year or speaker of the year in APDA from almost any college that competes in the circuit.  [/quote]

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