Reply to Middlebury or Vassar (Parchment says Vassar)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Vassar kids are quirky, kind of artsy (even if majoring in math or history). Kids from NYC schools like St. Ann's. Lots of future academics. [b]Just shy of getting into Brown.[/b]

Middlebury is waspy and preppy. Mid-ranked kids from top NYC privates, Darien, Bronxville, etc. [b]Bright but not quite Ivy bright (this is not an insult).[/b] Sporty. More pre-professional.

They are two pretty different places.[/quote]

They are two very different places but they don’t give up anything to each other or the Ivies. Checking the latest info both have test and GPA ranges that are basically identical to Dartmouth.

The top SLACs are academic peers of any T10.[/quote]

Agree that the very top SLACs Williams, Amherst, Pomona) are equivalent to, or perhaps even harder to get into, than Ivies. There are fewer seats, particularly if you are not hooked for sports, URM or legacy.

Vassar and Middlebury are a notch below. Still incredible schools - not knocking them. I know several kids at these schools who aspired to Ivies but applied early to these because they didn't think they would make an Ivy. In hindsight, they might have, but they felt it was safer. And these were white, upper middle class kids from major metros without any connections.

If I had to guess, I would say that Middlebury is tougher to get into than Vassar, but I am not 100% confident in that and others might be better informed (wow - someone on this board admitting they are not the world's leading expert!). And as I noted, they definitely have some overlap in applicants but they are fairly different places.[/quote]

One data point of support: Midd grad here who also got into Dartmouth Brown Penn (Harvard waitlisted, didn’t apply to them all)[/quote]

From my competitive suburban public HS class in the mid-90s:

Two classmates went to Middlebury: I know one really wanted Princeton and didn't get in (I think they were very focused on chemistry or biology?). I believe the other wanted Penn or Dartmouth and didn't get in, though less sure of that.
One classmate to Vassar wanted Brown and didn't get in
The only LAC's that consistently had a chance of taking students from Ivies were Williams and Amherst (almost no one applied to west coast liberal arts colleges so I can't opine on those). There were definitely a few, but it was not common. I can think of one at Haverford, one at Swarthmore, one at Wesleyan, and one at Oberlin from my class and the classes above and below.[/quote]

DP, not the person to whom you're responding. Not putting down your response, PP, but I wonder if information based on the mid-90s is really still applicable today, 30 years later. The landscape seems to have changed, or at least, to have gotten more intensely focused (at least on this forum) on every single detail of test scores, every .00001 of GPA, and "Which extracurriculars can we game to get DC into HYPS" etc. I went to college a before you did, and my experience back then isn't very instructive for parents of teens right now. My own DC just graduated from college two years ago and [u]her[/u] experience isn't even really comparable to what I see on this forum--things are so much more cutthroat and competitive, and not focused on "fit" as much as on supposed "prestige" schools.[/quote]

I don't disagree - that is why I (unlike many others) thought it was very important to make it clear what time frame I was referring to. My experience has some relevance, but I agree that things have changed.

I have a very close friend whose child is currently at one of the two schools, and strongly considered both - the one they go to was their top choice, the other was probably roughly third. They got in ED.

Child was a great candidate and likely could have made an Ivy (probably Brown or Dartmouth), but chose this school because they thought they were just shy of Ivies (I disagreed, but they didn't want to risk it and felt very comfortable at the chosen school). My description of the schools a few posts up is based on what the parents told me.[/quote]

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