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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Macalester has a fantastic reputation.  It used to be an excellent regional school but now has a much wider reach.  Its particularly good for kids who are interested in international affairs.[/quote]

It has no reputation.  Small regional school that would be an enormous disappointment for most Big 3 parents.
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I don't care for the US News Rankings, but for those who do, Macalester ranks above Oberlin, Kenyon, Connecticut College -- these are all schools students attend from Big 3 schools.  Macalester has a unique international bent.  We looked at it but DC thought it would be too cold.[/quote]

to be honest nor do bates, colby, trinity, conn college, hamilton etc... all those NESCAC schools aside from amherst, williams, maybe bowdoin are just finishing schools for full-pay kids from the suburbs.[/quote]

+1  Agree.  Not sure why parents spend so much money for these schools (add Boston U, Tufts, etc.) to the list.  The private colleges and universities worth the 50K + college costs are the Ivies and equivalent like Stanford and the "little ivies" like Williams, Amherst, etc.  The rest are simply not worth the cost compared to public state universities and certainly not worth the 100K+ in student debt that some people take out to send their kids for undergrad.

Seriously, employers are not going to care that Macalester is ranked above Oberlin and Kenyon nor are they going to prefer undergrads from these schools over UCs, U of Texas, U of Wisconsin, etc.[/quote]
I attended Macalester, so I'm  biased.  I chose it because it had an academic/political culture that I liked, and because the varied nature of the curriculum was interesting to me.  I was from the midwest, so I was focussed on midwest schools - the ones I declined were Grinnell, Carleton, U of Chicago and Northwestern.  I never spent a single minute during my four years thinking about how an employer would view it.  It was just 4 years of pursuing interesting academic pursuits, and further building analytic, writing and speaking skills that I'd use in grad/law school.  I subsequently attended a top 15/20 law school (after declining some top 5-10s for geographic reasons) and made law review, magna, order of the coif, etc.  In fact, law school was really no challenge comparatively to be honest, and I talked to several counselors at highly ranked law schools who said their history with Mac grads was that they did very well in their respective law schools.  For example, I graduated with no honors at Mac - basically middle of the class, but I was in the top one percentile in law school, missing summa by one slot.  (In fairness, much of that is due to being disciplined academically in law school than in my first few years of college.)  When I was a 2L, I received offers from all of the "white shoe" firms that I interviewed with, and my general sense was that people in the interviewing positions looked more favorably on my undergraduate experience than if I'd attended a large university setting.

If you view the goal of college as purchasing a piece of paper with some inherent economic value when viewed by the average Joe, then I agree that a school like Macalester (which has a stronger regional reputation than it does nationally) is not worth the money.  But if that's how you are choosing a college, I think that you're already going into the process with the wrong perspective.  If you're looking for a setting where you can be challenged academically in a small class setting with individual attention (thereby further developing skills that are difficult to improve if you're at a large university in a lecture hall with 100 students), a school like that can be a great value if you make the most of it.

As for costs, when I attended, they offered financial aid that essentially caused me to graduate with total accumulated debt of about $15k.  That's now about what I save after tax in 3 months of working.  If you are intelligent and hard working, college and grad school costs are not going to be a concern for you in the long run anyway, wherever you attend.[/quote]

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