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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People who insist upon situating LACs in opposition to universities reveal their ignorance and/or lack of intelligence. No one--neither classmates, nor parents nor faculty--at my Ivy feeder alma mater would have blinked an eye at anyone choosing, say, Williams over Yale (and some of my classmates ended up at an Ivy precisely because they didn't get accepted to, say, Amherst or Swarthmore), in no small part because they were wise enough to understand that the value of these schools is in the quality of education and opportunities they offer and that on those grounds, any differences between them were negligible because anyone "worth" impressing would recognize the value of all of these schools. Plenty of students at my LAC chose it over an Ivy or Stanford. Those in my social circles--people who by and large have attended "top" schools--would think very poorly of anyone who insisted that WUSTL was better than Bowdoin just because the former is a university ranked in the top 20. More than a few of my friends who graduated from Ivies have observed that, as with any school, fit matters for those who have the luxury of choosing where to matriculate based upon metrics other than finances. [/quote]
I agree with most everything you say. But at the same time (for mainly all the wrong reasons, with the exception of the crazy athlete proportions at SLACs), there has been [b]a moderate prestige shift in the past decade[/b] or two away from SLACs and towards national universities. The reality, unfortunately, is that a smaller proportion of kids at top SLACs chose it over the top Ivys than in your time. To be sure, nobody blinks an eye these days at someone choosing, say, Swarthmore over Penn, or Williams over Brown. But Amherst over Harvard? Not so sure. [/quote]
According to whom? Do you have a source? I think so much depends, as a PP alluded to above, on your social/class/economic circles. For better or for worse, in "elite" prep school circles there has been little if any change in perception of prestige that I've noticed over the last forty years. The only major shift that I can think that would affect changes in perception of prestige would be due to the masses who rely too heavily on social media for information. [/quote]
This is not complicated: top kids — from all social strata — are voting with their feet in the direction of universities (relative to before; not all, certainly). This is common knowledge in admissions circles. Rest assured, WASP still has kids who chose them over the Ivys; but far fewer than you may remember. Go ahead, ask someone from your circles attending these schools (who will know where their peers were admitted), and compare and contrast to your day: you will find a marked difference. And, no, I am not talking about first gen kids or kids receiving financial aid (who tend to be even more university focused), nor am I talking about ED-applying athletes.

As for elite prep school circles, you are clearly out of touch. You may likely encountering parents from certain circles rationalizing “lesser” choices (not objectively, but as their kids define them) as equally desirable. Of course, in your time, they were; but you are missing the nuance here: these parents don’t really believe it — even if their parents did. [/quote]

Rest assured that you are wrong; very wrong. From someone who runs in the circles of the elite prep schools on the West Coast nobody is rationalizing “lesser” choices. Rather, they are quietly laughing about the ignorance of so many around them. The crazy obsession towards the T20 by certain groups just gets a knowing head shake since they are pretty clueless of the elite LACs as an alternative.[/quote]

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