<p>interested in:</p>
<p>academics.....social sciences & humanities
general intellectual atmosphere
quality of faculty
sporting life, varsity & club level
campus & environment
music scene</p>
<p>
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academics.....social sciences & humanities
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Same</p>
<p>
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general intellectual atmosphere
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Same. Maybe a slight edge to Pomona, but I'm not sure about that. Both are fairly pre-professional in focus. As a West Coast school, Pomona probably has little less prevalent drinking scene, which tends to detract from the "intellectual" climate at many rural Northeast schools.</p>
<p>
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quality of faculty
[/quote]
Same.</p>
<p>
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sporting life, varsity & club level
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Not even close. Williams is the "University of Miami" powerhouse of Division III sports.</p>
<p>
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campus & environment
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In the eye of the beholder. Both are very nice, but suburban La-La Land and rural New England are very different.</p>
<p>
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music scene
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Depends what you mean. If you are talking "music scene" in the surrounding community, there is no surrounding community (or "scene" of any kind) around Williamstown -except in the summer. Live music during the school year means a road trip -- Boston, SUNY Albany, Hartford, New York, Phila, UMass, etc. </p>
<p>Pomona has the ultimate "scene" (LA) available if you have a car.</p>
<p>If you are talking on-campus music department, you'd have to do some research to compare. Williams has an excellent music department, but it is not the kind of place that attracts a lot of aspiring rock/pop/hip-hop/bluegrass artists, although it has produced a few NYC jazz critics. Dunno about Pomona, but I would guess it's about the same.</p>
<p>Honestly, the choice between Pomona and Williams really boils down to location. Do you want suburban SoCal or rural New England?</p>
<p>PapaC, I've never been Pomona so this is second hand information but my son goes to Williams and a couple of his close friends go to Pomona so I can confirm that the schools attract similar personality types.</p>
<p>Academics are rigorous and topnotch at both. They are both known for small classes and accessible teaching-focused professors. I assure you that there is plenty of intellectual curiosity at Williams.</p>
<p>Both have tightknit campus communities. Pomona is part of a bigger consortium -- the Claremont-McKenna group, which is smack in the middle of Los Angeles. Williams is in an insular mountain village. </p>
<p>Sports and outdoorsy activities are BIG at Williams. The two kids I know at Pomona are both Eagle Scouts and physically active, though.</p>
<p>Williams has an excellent music department and also a focus on performing arts, including music, both jazz and classical. For some reason, a good number of my son's friends are also musicians, but there is no independent music scene in the area outside of the campus community, as there would be in LA. There are, however, many on campus opportunities to hear and perform.</p>
<p>It's called the Claremon College Consortium. One other great thing about both schools: a lot of people will not know what they are haha. O well, such is the price many pay for going to the liberal arts colleges. Both are amazing schools, and quite hard to get accepted to. Good luck!</p>
<p>Make sure you visit both. It was shocking to me how much a visit changed my opinion of the schools. Spend the night if you can.</p>
<p>don't forget the weather and location. While not particularly nearby, downtown LA can be driven in less than an hour in good traffic (a RARE commodity), and the westside (where all the action is) is only 15 minutes further.</p>
<p>All-- thanks for your posts</p>
<p>one other question.....does the Claremont group of colleges give Pomona a different feel, more akin to a multiple-college Oxford, or is this too extreme of an analogy?</p>
<p>Each Claremont College has a VERY distinctive personality. That said, while each school is seperate (e.g. own classes, own administration, own buildings), many resources overlap (e.g. library, sports team, social events, etc.). Depending on who you ask, this can be considered Pomona's greatest strength OR weakness.</p>
<p>Couple quick thoughts:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Definitely visit both schools. Personally, I decided to not even apply to Williams after visiting, somehow the notion of spending 4 years 30min away from even a supermarket made me cringe. Also, and this is only a personal feeling, Williams did not speak to me as a campus. Since the college essentially is the town, it feels very spread out and at least to me did not give off a "campus" vibe.</p></li>
<li><p>Having the rest of the Claremont Colleges around is a HUGE positive. From an academic standpoint it allows you to take a wider array of classes then you otherwise would. From a social standpoint it allows you to mingle with a student population far larger then you would at any of the individual schools, while still allowing each school to maintian its own individual character.</p></li>
<li><p>As far as sporting life goes, I take offense at the notion that Williams blows Pomona out of the water. Pomona competes in a league with only one true (and one close) academic peer. Williams on the other hand competes in a league filled with them. I'm sure all sorts of statistics could be thrown around here, but the fact remains that Pomona faces tougher competition on a regular basis then does Williams and as a result may not have the sterling win-loss record that Williams possesses.</p></li>
<li><p>The environment difference is fairly easy to describe. Williams=beautifull rural setting where you will freeze your butt off, hours away from any sort of urban distractions vs. Pomona=a beautifully maintained campus located in sunny, warm southern california 45mins from the beach, skiing, downtown LA and 3 hours from Vegas.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The comparison for athletics is not even close:</p>
<p>Spending:
Williams: $3.9 million
Pomona: $1.6 million</p>
<p>Percentage male on varsity teams:
Williams: 39%
Pomona: 24%</p>
<p>Percentage female on varsity teams:
Williams: 27%
Pomona: 17%</p>
<p>And even these percentages understate the importance of athletics in the campus culture at Williams as they do not include the numerous club sports and full JV teams including football, soccer, etc. </p>
<p>I don't believe that there is a Div III school in the country that emphasizes athletics as heavily as Williams, by any measure: budget, admissions recruiting, campus culture. In one famous quote, a Williams professor described the school as "a Nike camp with enrichment courses" indicating the sense among part of the faculty that athletics have gotten out of hand.</p>
<p>I don't believe that Pomona would even want to emphasis athletics to that same degree. That level of athletic emphasis has many effects on a college the size of a small LAC and not all of that impact is positive. It's not like a USC, or even a Stanford or Duke, where you can have massive emphasis on varsity athletics and still only be talking about a very small percentage of the overall student body. It's a different animal when professors have to accomodate the practice and competition schedules of 40% of their students and when varsity athletics considerations play a role in the admissions of a full third of each incoming class.</p>
<p>With regard to the environmental differences, I've heard that the air quality in the Claremont area is not always so nice due to LA smog. Having never been there, I'm wondering if it's really so bad? The air in Williamstown sure seems very pure and clean to me.</p>
<p>I apologize if I musunderstood your original post, but when I read:</p>
<p>"Not even close. Williams is the "University of Miami" powerhouse of Division III sports."</p>
<p>I took it to be a reference to the QUALITY of Williams sports in regards to Pomona's, not the funding or number of participants. I stand by my original post as to the nature of the quality of Pomona sports.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Approximately 40 percent of all students participate in intercollegiate sports (34 percent at the varsity level). There are 32 varsity intercollegiate teams (16 men's and 16 women's), 16 JV teams (8 men's and 8 women's), 8 club sport teams, and 11 intramural sports.Compiled by:
Office of Public Affairs
Williams College
P.O. Box 676
Williamstown, MA 01267
(413) 597-4277
<a href="mailto:news@williams.edu">news@williams.edu</a>
[/quote]
As usual, InterestedDad's antipathy to all things non-couch potato lead him to distort the Williams athletic ethos. For example, he loves to cite the allegedly "famous" Nike camp quote by an anonymous professor who shares a place on the couch with him, but neglects to cite quotes such as these, from distinguished alumni, that were actually published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
[quote]
...athletics has long been ingrained in Williams's campus culture. S. Lane Faison Jr., Whitney Stoddard, and the other art historians who made Williamstown a launch pad for many of the top curators in the profession were athletes themselves. Mr. Stoddard, for example, had been a hockey goalie during his own college days. Their students, like Kirk Varnedoe, remember them and other faculty members as avid sports fans.</p>
<p>"It's a work-hard, play-hard kind of place," recalls Mr. Varnedoe, a member of the class of 1967 who is a former senior curator of the Museum of Modern Art and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. "It wasn't a place where categories were hard and firm -- you didn't have to be an athlete or a student, and it was not considered unusual or weird to have a Phi Bet physics major playing football."</p>
<p>And from a numerical standpoint, sports were actually a much bigger deal then, when Williams was an all-male college, than they are now, Mr. Varnedoe says. "I think 60 or 70 percent of the students then played varsity sports at one time or another while they were in school."
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</p>
<p>As for professors who "have to accomodate the practice and competition schedules of 40% of their students"--remember that they are accomodating the schedule of not only varsity players, but all club and intramural players, plus musicians, singers, actors, and anyone else who has the opportunity to use Williams' long term policy of having no classes end later than 3:50 PM to their own benefit. I have no problem with that.</p>
<p>This is another typical anti-athlete IDism:
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varsity athletics considerations play a role in the admissions of a full third of each incoming class.
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Lots of things play a role in admissions. There are a lot of true scholar-athletes at Williams, kids who could have gotten into almost any school, who got special attention because Williams particularly values the scholar-athletes they can get.</p>
<p>I've read that Pomona does have some shared D3 teams with other Claremont colleges.....do they have a limited conference? They must travel quite a bit.....true? Williams' NESCAC is certainly very competitive. How about club sports at Pomona.....a decent amount & variety of teams?</p>
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I took it to be a reference to the QUALITY of Williams sports in regards to Pomona's, not the funding or number of participants.
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</p>
<p>Quality, too. </p>
<p>Look, there is no denying the fact that Williams is the powerhouse school in Division III sports. They have won 14 NCAA National Championships and won the overall Div III "Directors Cup" nine of the ten years it has been awarded, including the last seven in a row.</p>
<p>Athletics is one Williams defining institutional characteristics. Among the top handful of liberal arts colleges, it is Williams most defining characteristics -- the thing that makes it different from Pomona, Swarthmore, Amherst, Carleton, etc.</p>
<p>Pomona-Pitzer share teams, and Harvey Mudd, Scripps and Claremont-McKenna share the other teams in the Claremont Colleges.</p>
<p>Pomona - resources of the consortium (i don't know anyone who would call this a negative)
Williams - possibly more name recognition?</p>
<p>Do you think Williams & Pomona are the top 2 LACs? Discuss. ;)</p>
<p>Really, really, really the biggest differences are the location and the weather. I went to one of them, my d. (a music major) looked at both of them. There is definitely a more athletic feel at Williams, of which they are very proud (58% of white male students participate in varsity athletics, and that's not counting jvs, club sports, or intramurals.) And there are many, many scholar-athletes. There is also a larger music department, and greater musical participation at Williams (but, obviously, no music scene outside of it - if it ain't there, it ain't there.) </p>
<p>Most people have never heard of either of them. Graduate and professional schools know them both. </p>
<p>The top two LACs? You'd have to ask for whom? Williams is clearly outsized in some areas - the art history department is unparalleled anywhere, the math and astrophysics departments are probably the best among all the LACs, and for scholar-athletes it is heaven. It would also likely not make the top 50 in foreign languages (and wouldn't be in the same league with Pomona and its language-study living center.) You'll learn how to write well and think effectively at either place. Economic diversity is not a top value at either. </p>
<p>But unless if you have a very specific need, really weather and geography should trump all.</p>
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Really, really, really the biggest differences are the location and the weather.
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Mimi Schapiro, wife of the current Williams president told a few parents (with tongue firmly in cheek) that she was hoping to persuade the trustees to buy Pomona, so there could be a Williams West, and a Williams East. They moved there from USC, and I think she misses the southern California weather. :)</p>
<p>The students at Pomona love their college , great academics, friendly down to earth students and they have had a lot of successs athletically. My S as a freshman got to go compete in Hawaii for a meet his first month of school, all expenses paid! I know little about Williams but I do know that the students at Pomona for the most part would not trade their college for any other anywhere. It has been compared to the best summer camp with intense academics, and that is a fairly accurate description. My S gets to the beach most weekends, loves his classes, and is involved in a host of other activities. If you visit and stay overnight it is hard to not fall in love with the school. Good luck, both are great schools. The smog is not much of an issue during the school year. It can be an issue in the summer months but most students are not on campus then.</p>