<p>from the chicago land area and hoping to go somewhere where I could meet some other kids from the chicagoland area as well... trying to decide whether to do a midwest LAC, east coast LAC, or west coast LAC</p>
<p>i know midwest LACs have kids from all over...but mostly midwest kids i believe? not really sure on the facts on this, hoping someone can fill me in. also wondering if the west coast LAC kids are mostly from the west coast, and if the east coast kids are mostly from the e. coast.</p>
<p>The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great resource available for checking this question. It is an interactive map available online called “Where Does Your Freshman Class Come From?” You type in the name of the college, and the map pops up the number of students from each state at that school.</p>
<p>For selective national LACs and universities the relative number of students from the Midwest will be quite close to the national percentage of the Midwest relative to the U.S. population. For less selective colleges the student body will tend to be primarily from the region where the college is located.</p>
<p>^^Not really. My daughter is at a pretty selective northeastern LAC (25% admit rate) and the closer you are to the school, the more students come from there. Midwesterners are rare, though they’d love to have more. What you say is truer for Harvard and Yale, but the LACs and other Ivies are dominated by kids from their region. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut make up about 40% of Columbia’s class, Penn is dominated by the mid-Atlantic. Even Stanford is dominated by around 40% of its kids coming from California. Most people still prefer to stay closer to home. For those willing to travel, there is a slight geographic bump at most schools.</p>
<p>In the Midwest, few people have even heard of most of the top LACs, even Amherst and Williams. The further you get from almost all colleges, the fewer people that will apply or attend.</p>
<p>You can check out a school’s national drawing power with the Chronicle tool mentioned above. Below are a few pairs of colleges (with the first one significantly more selective than the second in each pair).</p>
<p>Generally, more selective/prestigious colleges tend to have more out-of-region drawing power than less selective/prestigious colleges. However, it is also the case that colleges tend to draw more students from inside their own regions. </p>
<p>The vast majority of kids want to go to college within 3 - 4 hours of home. This is straight from the guidance office at an average public school, so I expect can be extrapolated across the population.</p>
<p>My kids all went further from home (12/6/18 hours respectively) and at each of their schools there are more students from within that 3 - 4 hour window, but there are also students from much farther away. Many (private + higher level public) schools do pull students from the majority of states and several foreign countries. I’m not so sure about smaller public schools.</p>
<p>Chicagoland is such a large area that I doubt you’ll be alone where you choose, but you should have a larger majority closer to home if that’s what you’re looking for.</p>
<p>ps I love that interactive map - thanks for sharing it!</p>
<p>Assuming the years are close to the same, my guys were 1 of 8, 1 of 68, and 1 of 13 from their state at their respective schools. The 1 of 8 also attended the smallest school of the three.</p>
<p>IMO there’s really very little difference between people from the suburbs of Chicago and those from the suburbs of LA, Atlanta, Seattle, etc other than perhaps their fast food preferences and cold tolerances. </p>
<p>Actually you would be surprised at how many regional differences there really are. My daughter reports back that her fellow Midwesterners have more in common than do the East Coast kids regarding certain foods and traditions. She and her Midwest buds all made Puppy Chow for the East Coast crew and the East Coast crew had never heard of it. They were grateful, but somewhat confused.</p>
<p>She also says for the first time in her life, she’s being told she has an accent. They are all educating each other about what they all thought was common knowledge and stuff everybody did. Every region has something different, which makes it fun.</p>
<p>You might take a look at Tulane University. Not a LAC, but has students from all over the country, and will not be dominated by any particular region.</p>
<p>If anyone knows a way of posting a spreadsheet, let me know… Bclintonk and I collaborated on an analysis of regionality for the top 20 unis and top 20 LACs. Essentially, every single one is over indexed to its home region. The Ivies are no different and in fact are some of the most regionally skewed. </p>
<p>There were only 3 notable exceptions - Duke, Oberlin and WashU. They were more event balanced between a northeast skew and a “home region” skew. </p>
<p>“She and her Midwest buds all made Puppy Chow for the East Coast crew and the East Coast crew had never heard of it. They were grateful, but somewhat confused.”</p>
<p>I’ve lived in the Midwest for 30 years - I don’t know what you mean by puppy chow! (Other than dog food) </p>
<p>you can search the school for that information. Look up the common data set and they give out all types of information. 1 part of the form requires the school to say the region the student came from aside from who they accepted and how many applications they received</p>
<p>Cappex also has a map for each school showing the states represented by the freshman class and how many. I was surprised to find that many highly ranked LAC’ s are essentially regional. </p>
<p>ALL top colleges are highly regional to their home region. I really wish I could figure out how to put a spreadsheet somewhere anonymously so you all could see. </p>
<p>Probably should be “almost all” instead of “all”. The military service academies are probably much less regionally biased to their local regions, due to the appointment system in the application process.</p>
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