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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP with kid at St. Olaf. He might have gotten into Carleton, but didn't even look at it because we couldn't afford it. Both excellent schools for different reasons. If your high stats kid is looking for a safety that they could love, and you can easily afford, St. Olaf might be worth a second look. It's a pretty special place. Do Grinell and Carleton do better for grad school placements in my kids major? Yep. But not by much. https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-phd-programs[/quote]

You really shouldn't have posted that link if you think it supports the idea that St Olaf is anywhere near the same league as Carleton or Grinnell.  Both of those schools appear in the top ten for PhDs in numerous of the fields mentioned, while St Olaf appears in none.  [/quote]

Actually Carleton and St. Olaf ARE in the same leagu. It’s called the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. It’s Grinnell that’s not in the same league. They’re in the Midwest Conference.[/quote]

Ha ha cute.  Off point, but cute.  [/quote]

Not as off point as you think.[/quote]

Please explain why.  Every single member of Carleton's athletic conference is a Minnesota private school, every single one of them, and the Minnesota private schools that are members run the gamut from nationally known Carleton and Macalester to little known Bethel and St Scholastica.  Carleton has Division III athletics and a limited athletic budget, so why wouldn't it participate in a league comprised exclusively of Minnesota private schools?

Grinnell isn't a Minnesota school and none of the members of its conference are Minnesota schools either.  But, like Carleton, academically it is considered the best school in its conference.

The midwest isn't the northeast.  It's much larger geographically and its top colleges aren't an hour's drive from each other.  Carleton and Grinnell are just being practical.
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Distance isn’t the factor you’re making it out to be. Concordia is in Moorhead, across the river from Fargo. If distance were the issue, Concordia would be playing in a North Dakota conference. Grinnell is 50 miles close to Carleton than Concordia is. St. Scholastica is in Duluth, 200 miles north of Carleton. Grinnell isn’t much farther than that. If distance were the issue, Grinnell and Carleton could be in the same conference. A friend of mine is from North Dakota. He traveled hours to play HIGH SCHOOL sports. People in that part of the country are used to traveling long distances.

Collegiate athletic conferences come together for lots of reasons. One of them is a level of comfort with the academic demands at the competing colleges.

The harping on test scores as a measure of “smarter kids” ignores a lot of what we know about testing and about intelligence. We no longer refer to “intelligence” as a single entity, which was in fact the thinking when tests were created in the first half of the last century. Multiple intelligences is how we now look at cognitive abilities. SAT focused only on one kind of cognitive ability.

The one thing that SAT scores correlate with better than anything else is wealth. And the higher the scores get, the stronger the correlation becomes. Calling a group of kids “smarter” because they have higher test scores is going into very dangerous territory. There’s a lot of racist thinking that flows from that. This is the territory of the affluent and the privileged, patting themselves on the back because Todd and Muffy are just oh so smart.

Referring to the number of kids who go on for doctorates is ludicrous when then generalizing to an entire student body. That approach is so flawed that it’s not even worth commenting on further.[/quote]

There's no arguing with the likes of you.  You have a kid who can't get into a top school like Carleton.  I get it.  I've had kids like that too.  But I'm not so stubborn and insecure about my kids that I'm going to insist until I'm blue in the face that just because one school, by every objective and quantifiable measure, has a stronger student body academically than another doesn't mean the average student there isn't smarter than the other school.  THAT is what is ludicrous.

And if you want to talk about race and privilege, I have news for you:  St Olaf is an expensive private school with less generous financial aid than Carleton and is also whiter than Carleton and has a much, much smaller African American population.  It's hardly a school for minorities and the destitute.  You talk as if one of these schools is for the privileged and the other isn't.  In fact, they both are schools for the privileged -- one of them just happens to have privileged kids who, on average, are smarter and more accomplished.     [/quote]

Olaf is definitely whiter than Carleton. And less selective / higher admit rate. And more regional. And not as good at Ultimate, where Carleton is a powerhouse.

But if you’re chasing merit, Olaf is ahead of the game. If you don’t know qualify for need-based aid, Olaf is going to be cheaper for you. They have to offer merit because they’re less selective.  Like most of the colleges in this country.

https://wp.stolaf.edu/financialaid/merit-scholarships/
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