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Anonymous wrote: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

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.

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.

Ha ha cute. Off point, but cute.

Not as off point as you think.

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.

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.

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.

Anonymous wrote:My husband and I went to Carleton. Yes people there are “smart,” whatever that means. Many are very achievement minded, which means they’re like the smartest rats in the maze and many tend to be fairly self-congratulatory about it. St. Olaf kids are also very dedicated students but I found them to be a bit more down to earth. I kind of like the dry campus, not everyone wants to be around drinking and drugs.

Anonymous wrote:If you can get admitted to Carleton, I would go there if you do not mind quirkiness and cold. It is a great school, one of the best in the country. But I would also suggest marrying someone from St. Olaf while you are at it. The students at St. Olaf are really nice, at least back in my time. Very normal, down-to-earth, Midwestern people, plenty smart.

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Anonymous wrote:The only parents who think St Olaf and Carleton students are on the same page intellectually are those who know their kids would never get into Carleton. Stop kidding yourselves. Yes, St Olaf is a good school -- but it ain't in Carleton's league and never will be.

So rude. Do better.

--Carleton grad

And you know I'm right.

-- Not a Carleton grad

And for some sad reason, that seems to haunt you...

LOL, hardly. I had a kid who was torn between going to Carleton for full tuition or Grinnell with a generous merit aid package. It really came down to the wire before the kid decided to go with Grinnell, which proved to be a great decision both from a "fit" and practical standpoint. The kid actually preferred Grinnell from the very beginning and the decision would have been an easier one had the kid not been a little too caught up in the rankings at the time.

St Olaf wasn't on the radar.

One nice thing about bring connected to one of the Northfield colleges is that there is really very little rivalry between them. It's kind of annoying to have people unconnected to the two come into the thread and be combative and argumentative about the possible differences between the two. Maybe you could go pick some fights about Grinnell vs. some of its neighrbors.

Interesting to hear you say that considering that, at least according to Wikipedia, Carleton considers St Olaf to be its biggest athletic rival.

I have a student currently at Carleton. It's a friendly sports rivalry. I've never heard my kid say any negative thing about St. Olaf students. The invite each other to some campus events (like concerts or get out the vote kind of stuff) and similar campus groups/clubs follow each other on social media and that kind of thing. Lots of Oles and Carls have siblings at the other school or parents/family who attended. It's annoying that posters here are so obsessed with rankings because that is not really the ethos of either of those schools. The kids all know that St. Olaf is less selective, but so what? It's still a terrific school in and of itself so who cares if the students there missed like 5 more questions on the SAT or got a couple Bs instead of As in high school.

Well, according to the most recent statistics the mid 50 percent SAT range for Carleton is 1440-1530 and for St Olaf it's 1240-1420. In other words, middle 50 percent in each school don't even overlap at the low end of Carleton. That's probably more than 5 questions.

DP: Actually, once you're in the top 20% of scores (e.g. roughly about 1230+) the differences in scores are really just a handful. But the point being, in this ranking system mentality people are acting like these differences are super meaningful. Just because there objective, consistent, distinctions in these particular measures of academic achievement (I wouldn't go so far to say "smartness" as that is a much wider, fuzzier category) doesn't make them meaningful differences in things we care about in quality of education. I think that's all the PP is getting at.

The only people who say they don't care about that kind of stuff are parents of kids who don't have the scores. Otherwise you'd see lots of kids with really high scores in every school, and you don't.

Huh? Your logic escapes me. My kid got a 1460. I really just don't think he's that much smarter than his friend who got a 1340. Got a few more questions right. I would be more tempted to believe he is less hard-working than his friends who got 1500+ because he took it one time and decided it was good enough, whereas they got lower scores initially but buckled down on prep to get a higher score. But his was high enough for his first choice school so maybe he's just more strategic.

See, here's the thing. Just because you 'think" something based on the anecdotal experience of your one kid and a few of his friends doesn't make it universally true. So, it's your "logic" that is suspect.