<p>^ UrSl… You mean both Post 18 and 19 can’t be explained by the fact that KarateDad’s D2 went to skidmore and S goes to Middlebury? I guess your explanation is plausible, but I’m really rather certain it is the pure magnetism of KD’s kids, LOL!</p>
<p>Well KD, now that I think about it . . . Of course, that’s a much more obvious explanation. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it myself.</p>
<p>I’m certainly open to the idea that the rape story played a hand in this. But even so, I would caution people against making the interpretation that the rape story caused an 8.2% drop in admissions. As someone has already pointed out, fluctuations in the number of applicants are normal. Especially considering the small size of Amherst, I would question whether an 8.2% difference is terribly significant. IF this makes waves with the administration, I’m hopeful it will only serve to push along positive changes that are already under way.</p>
<p>I’m not surprised that application numbers dropped this year. Though I’m not convinced that Amherst is any worse than the average college in mishandling rape cases, I can understand why numbers might have dropped, because I was swayed by intangibles as an HS senior, turning down Dartmouth and Cornell because of their reputations. If this had happened years earlier, I might not be a student here but I’m so glad that I am. Amherst is not even close to perfect but it is an amazing home with great people working to turn things around.</p>
<p>Probably not a lot of difference between Williams and Amherst. Last year, the President of Williams reported that 44 women (and 3 men) had been raped on campus in the previous year (there may have been more rapes than that, but that’s the number of students raped; that’s a much higher reported rape than in most major cities). Five students were expelled. It was endemic to the college, higher than in similar institutions (according to the President). I think the difference (besides the NY Times publicity) is that the President of Williams really took it head on.</p>
<p>On Skidmore: I read that about 1500 apps came from international students. This is not surprising as there are many B-grade international students with high financial aid need wishing to attend school in the US. If you have noticed, Skidmore is on USNews’ colleges most generous to intls list and the ‘A+ schools for B students’ list. Therefore, this surge of applications Skidmore experienced is not surprising as a lot of internationals applied, whose source of information is mainly USNews (also, many of my high-achieving friends, after seeing those lists, applied to Skidmore as a safety (ridiculous), thinking nobody else saw them.) This was the case with Grinnell too last year – a significant amount of applicants were internationals.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that a difference between Amherst’s case and Williams’ is that Adam Falk took it head on while Biddy Martin didn’t.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/us/amherst-president-tackles-sexual-assault-crisis.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/us/amherst-president-tackles-sexual-assault-crisis.html</a></p>
<p>Let’s give credit where credit is due.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, 5% of Amherst women (even higher than at Williams) reported that they had experienced “unwanted sexual penetration” in the previous year. (Likely some experienced it more than once.) Add that up over four years. Do you think Biddy Martin’s response to the number of criminals on Amherst’s campus (and I’m using that term advisedly) is commensurate with the problem? </p>
<p>How many students has Biddy Martin expelled for rape this year? And if she hasn’t because the system isn’t reporting them to her, what has she done to ensure reports are being made and investigated?</p>
<p>Are Amherst students involved in these rape reports? Or is it the people outside of the school causing campus crimes?</p>
<p>mini, I hear and appreciate what you’re saying. I do think, however, that administrators and college presidents are in a tight situation when a rape is reported. From what I know, rape is traditionally dealt with by police; college administrators have not generally been effective at doling out punishment to perpetrators. Of course, we want justice to be served, and of course, rapists should be punished severely. On the other hand, setting up the system so that administrators are predisposed to punishing accused rapists could very well result in people being punished undeservedly. As I see it, the focus at Amherst now is preventing rape and taking steps to initiate cultural change (specifically increasing awareness of rape and increasing respect for women), rather than punish. Which is not to say that administrators have not considered pursuing the latter as a main strategy, but I personally feel that the former is both more effective and more aligned with the goal of maintaining a strong community. In addition, as I’d mentioned earlier and as numerous other people have caught onto, determining guilt is a process that is difficult to carry out.</p>
<p>All this to say that I feel that administrators at Amherst are committed to investigating reports to the best of their ability. Their handling of the Angie Epifano case was terrible. The story really impacted me, as a female, and made me question the administration’s humanity, but I’ve come to empathize with administrators, too - And I don’t think that empathy for victims and empathy for administrators are mutually exclusive. We need both in large doses to move forward.</p>
<p>“Are Amherst students involved in these rape reports? Or is it the people outside of the school causing campus crimes?”</p>
<p>Amherst students (according to the reports). There are almost no crimes of violence of sex crimes committed by non-students against Amherst students. </p>
<p>Personally, I think the best preventative step that colleges like Amherst can take is ensure swift and sure punishment of its apparently sizeable criminal element. When that happens, women (and some men) will be more likely to report the crimes committed against them both to the college and to the police, and would-be criminals will think twice (perhaps) about what they are doing. I think that is by far the best way to promote and ensure cultural change.</p>
<p>I was going to apply, but I just decided I didn’t like small LACs and I wouldn’t have much of a shot of getting in. I wasn’t even aware of the crime issue.</p>
<p>I had encouraged my D to look at Amherst, and we even visited during Junior year. In the end, she thought it was too isolated and small. Though to be honest, on that trip she also saw Tufts and Brown, so Amherst was the odd man out. I would have pushed her not to let the smallness sway her too much since there are a very small number of schools in the medium sized selective categories outside of the ivies (and she did end up applying to a bunch of similarly sized schools in the end, by the way). What led me to stop advocating Amherst was that they have accepted fewer than 5 students from our HS in the last 8 years, and none in the last 2. Swat, Middlebury, Carleton, Williams, Bowdoin, and Haverford (not to mention the ivies, Wash U, Duke) all have healthy numbers of admissions for our kids. The patterns seem too strong to be random, so I assumed there was either an admissions policy difference at amherst or their regional rep has something against our school.</p>
<p>I think the article’s numbers might be slightly off because the RD acceptance email says
and this article says 7,863 applications. But anyways, how did the acceptance rate actually decrease from last year’s 11.7%!?</p>
<p>I do find it deeply ironic that the sudden unprecedented drop in applications (when other LAC and the Ivy League this year have seen surges in applications) comes in the aftermath of rape accusations–even a suicide–when Biddy Martin, an open lesbian and person one would expect to be concerned about sexual harassment and sympathetic to women students, has in less than a year or so assumed the presidency of the College.</p>
<p>It seems to me that persons in the administration have made some serious mistakes, which of the course the College will refute. But to protect some at the expense of the reputation of the College seems to me a serious mistake.</p>
<p>I think highly of Biddy Martin, but I wouldn’t overestimate her ability to change a culture that has existed for decades. She hasn’t been there that long, and we don’t know what institutional priorities the college’s governing board has set. She may also have learned a lesson about trying to do too much too quickly during her time at UW–even if she was trying to do the “right” thing. She made a lot of enemies by thinking and acting independently in the short time she was there.</p>
<p>I think that the reason why the acceptance rate dropped slightly this year is because of overenrollment in the past few years. Amherst extends offers to a certain number of students based on how many they believe will actually come to Amherst. However, more people than expected chose Amherst. They may be trying to get the numbers back to usual.</p>
<p>The Amherst admissions rate is higher than last year, so it’s not an overenrollment issue.</p>
<p>There’s no question the rape allegations had an effect. It will be transitory but nevertheless felt this year and perhaps next year.</p>
<p>Mini’s “criminal element” garbage notwithstanding, it’s obvious these incidents got notoriety because Amherst is an elite school. If it happened at Ohio State, no one cares, though they should.</p>
<p>Just to remind people, the accuser in the Amherst rape incident made her accusation after she had long left the school. No due process was ever undertaken and to this day we have no idea if the incident ever occurred. </p>
<p>If a rape occurs, you go to the police and report a crime. Don’t look for some sugarcoated procedure run by a college to make it easy or anonymous for you. It’s serious business.</p>
<p>I am not attempting to justify or rationalize inappropriate behavior but a lot of this crap is due to the prevalence of the “hookup” culture and too much drinking. Avoid that and a lot of this goes away.</p>
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<p>I think people do care. The problem isn’t that sexual assault only happens at Amherst. The problem is that it was preceded by a spate of incidents that gave it a particular traction. Any time Amherst knocks Wesleyan off the front page for essentially the same horrendous event - the sexual assault of a student - there has to be some underlying nerve that has been hit: <a href=“http://wesleyanargus.com/2012/10/18/lawsuit-against-wesleyan-and-beta-makes-national-headlines/[/url]”>http://wesleyanargus.com/2012/10/18/lawsuit-against-wesleyan-and-beta-makes-national-headlines/</a></p>
<p>Mini’s point seems to be that these assaults are not accidental by-products of too much drinking but are predatory in nature. I guess reasonable people can disagree as to the extent people with criminal intent wind their way through the admissions process, but it’s something to think about.</p>
<p>Boysintheband: The admissions rate is in fact lower this year. I was trying to account for both the decrease in applications and the decrease in admissions rates. Those are two figures you would expect to be inversely correlated.</p>
<p>This is off thread, but permit a final comment on this. If you mean by “predatory” that these are thought-out deliberations by sober men trying to take advantage of sober women, then we do disagree. </p>
<p>I am not trying to diminish the seriousness of unwanted sexual advances in the least. In fact, just the opposite. I want it stopped.</p>
<p>The vast majority of complaints about unwanted sexual advances on campus involve alcohol. Invariably too much by the man, and often too much by the woman too. That’s in incontrovertible fact. </p>
<p>It’s also true that existing “hookup” culture pervading campuses–which the Amherst report euphemistically calls “sexual experimentation”–creates a climate where sexual advances are encouraged. Lines get blurred, expectations get misunderstood. The normal fire breaks that used to exist are no longer there. </p>
<p>Again, to emphasize, I’m not trying to justify inappropriate behavior. However, I am saying that if you change the environment, this can change. Let me be blunt: for men it means quit getting drunk and start treating women with respect. For women it means quit thinking you have to sleep around to be cool. </p>
<p>I know this sounds old fashioned and not politically correct, but hormones+alcohol+excessive partying=trouble. That’s a math equation we can all remember.</p>