Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All to go to an ugly campus with nothing but mediocre hills and sparse buildings. Disappointing.

Yup, definitely Amherst troll at it again. I can't tell if you or Bucknell troll is more annoying.

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Anonymous wrote:How does it justify costing a full $10K more than peer institutions like Williams, Bowdoin, Swarthmore?

That’s not the cost differential.

Yes, it is. All three are ~82K.

Sigh. Once again: tuition and room and board costs vs. tuition and room and board costs and personal expenses and travel etc. Apples and oranges.

Difference is maybe 2 grand at most. Maybe Amherst should not put these other expenses on their website — Williams does not, though they are obviously budgeted for financial aid — to avoid this confusion. But at a certain point, if this thread wants to willfully stay confused, have at it.

Personal expenses and travel are not budgeted for mainstream financial aid. Maybe they are for special "dirt poor" programs.

Amherst has always budgeted travel for financial aid as well as all food and board. It’s one reason why their financial aid packages are better than some others. I’m also a little confused by the stat that 50% are in the top 10% of income. If that’s right that means Amherst is giving financial aid to many students in the top 10% of income which would suggest the whole middle class is getting financial aid (since 65% of class gets financial aid).

Always may be a stretch. I think this is a more recent phenomenon.

I graduated 25 years ago, and my financial aid covered two trips home a year, books, and personal expenses. There was also a check for $300 in my campus mailbox when I first opened it to cover expenses for outfitting my dorm room and getting winter gear. Amherst definitely did right by me and my family. They also transferred my financial aid when I wanted to do two different study abroad programs, one of which led to my career.

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Anonymous wrote:“For undergraduate STEM education leading to a job, maybe they were correct.“

The STEM fanatics are nowhere near as obnoxious as Mr. Wall Street, but they are inching in that direction. Do they not have the saying “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” in the DMV?

If you love Amherst you probably didn’t also apply to CalTech or Wharton. They know what they are getting there, & are smart enough to know it’s not a vocational degree. So everybody can just stop with the attempts to shame the OP for not sending her kid to school to learn a trade. They learn how to think deeply, read between the lines, & write precisely at places like Amherst & Williams—probably better than at any other schools in the country, including Ivies. And those kinds of skills can be applied almost anywhere, as opposed to the sliver of specialized expertise some people here prefer.

You can gain those skills but also gain ones that lead to direct employment also, such as a top STEM education. They are not mutually exclusive.

My workplace is filled with people who have top STEM degrees (doctors and engineers and pharmacists etc). For the most part they do not have non-STEM skills (thinking, writing, etc).

You can teach STEM people to write, but you cannot teach soft majors STEM, because it takes a much higher level of aptitude. People who don't get calculus will never 'get it', and it gets a lot worse the more advanced you get.

Anonymous wrote:They expect upper middle class to pay almost a $100K per year per child.

https://www.amherst.edu/tuition

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All to go to an ugly campus with nothing but mediocre hills and sparse buildings. Disappointing.

Yup, definitely Amherst troll at it again. I can't tell if you or Bucknell troll is more annoying.

It seems everyone on this site is trolls according to you people

Troll.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All to go to an ugly campus with nothing but mediocre hills and sparse buildings. Disappointing.

Yup, definitely Amherst troll at it again. I can't tell if you or Bucknell troll is more annoying.

It seems everyone on this site is trolls according to you people

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All to go to an ugly campus with nothing but mediocre hills and sparse buildings. Disappointing.

Yup, definitely Amherst troll at it again. I can't tell if you or Bucknell troll is more annoying.

Anonymous wrote:All to go to an ugly campus with nothing but mediocre hills and sparse buildings. Disappointing.

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Anonymous wrote:[mastodon]

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Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand the focus on Amherst. Every top private costs about this much nowadays. And Amherst is among the best of them.

No LAC is a top school.

+1 third tier

This is simply not true. The quality of UG education is often far superior. Grad school admissions committees adore LACs.

keep thinking that lol

I don’t know that they adore all LACs but they adore Amherst. My fellow students all went to Ivy or similar graduate schools. I see lots of Harvard, Yale, Columbia grad school resumes and Amherst grads are over-represented in these graduate programs. Saying otherwise just betrays your ignorance. There are some exceptions, like CS, and of course they don’t have an engineering school.

What field are you in? LACs are a joke for STEM.

For engineering but that is not universally true for STEM by any means. Elite LACs have excellent med school admission outcomes, for example.

Premed courses are very basic and med schools do not care about major. The biggest weakness at LACs is STEM.

Anonymous wrote:And I'd gladly pay it for either of my kids to go there. It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me.

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How does it justify costing a full $10K more than peer institutions like Williams, Bowdoin, Swarthmore?

That’s not the cost differential.

Yes, it is. All three are ~82K.

Sigh. Once again: tuition and room and board costs vs. tuition and room and board costs and personal expenses and travel etc. Apples and oranges.

Difference is maybe 2 grand at most. Maybe Amherst should not put these other expenses on their website — Williams does not, though they are obviously budgeted for financial aid — to avoid this confusion. But at a certain point, if this thread wants to willfully stay confused, have at it.

Personal expenses and travel are not budgeted for mainstream financial aid. Maybe they are for special "dirt poor" programs.

Amherst has always budgeted travel for financial aid as well as all food and board. It’s one reason why their financial aid packages are better than some others. I’m also a little confused by the stat that 50% are in the top 10% of income. If that’s right that means Amherst is giving financial aid to many students in the top 10% of income which would suggest the whole middle class is getting financial aid (since 65% of class gets financial aid).

Always may be a stretch. I think this is a more recent phenomenon.

I graduated 25 years ago, and my financial aid covered two trips home a year, books, and personal expenses. There was also a check for $300 in my campus mailbox when I first opened it to cover expenses for outfitting my dorm room and getting winter gear. Amherst definitely did right by me and my family. They also transferred my financial aid when I wanted to do two different study abroad programs, one of which led to my career.