<p>I have been accepted to both schools (and both schools have given comparable financial aide).
I don't know what I will major in (though I really like Classics, Linguistics, and Biology).
I was rather skeptical about these boards - but as they introduced me to Bryn Mawr in the first place, I have decided that asking strangers for help might not be such a bad idea.
Do any of you have advice?</p>
<p>Both are great schools. It really depends on what you want. Carleton is coed, Bryn Mawr is all women. Carleton has, IMO, a wonderful combination of intense, rigorous academics with a laid back Minnesota nice feel to it. I don’t know Bryn Mawr’s vibe having never visited, but I’ve found other women’s colleges to have wonderful, supportive atmospheres. Bryn Mawr has Philly; Carleton has Minneapolis/St. Paul, but my understanding is that Philly is an easy train ride away. At Carleton you need to take a bus or car – doable, but not as easily accessible. Carleton has a great classics program; that said when we were touring colleges we kept hearing raves about Bryn Mawr’s classics program. Bryn Mawr is a smaller population but it does a lot with Haverford and to lesser extent with Swarthmore and has exchange courses with both. Carleton has more snow. Both have excellent profs and a strong alumni network. Carleton, for what it is worth, has somewhat higher SAT scores.</p>
<p>Both are excellent schools and you can’t go wrong. I’d encourage you to visit and see where you feel most at home. Congratulations to you.</p>
<p>Thank you! I am unable to visit, but I really appreciate the time you took to write this. </p>
<p>Bryn Mawr is a women’s college in name only these days - the relationship with Haverford even allows you to live in a Haverford dorm! Look at it this way . . . being admitted to Bryn Mawr is like being admitted to both Bryn Mawr and Haverford (and, to a lesser extent, Swarthmore). So, visit both the Bryn Mawr and Haverford websites, look at the course offerings that would be available in your area of interest, look at the extracurriculars, and then decide which is a better fit for you. I’m a big fan of Carleton . . . but there’s a lot to be said for being able to attend TWO well-known liberal arts colleges for the price of one!</p>
<p>Check out this recent thread about Bryn Mawr:</p>
<p><a href=“Waitlisted at Every LAC - Applying to College - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1631295-waitlisted-at-every-lac-p1.html</a></p>
<p>While rank isn’t every thing 30 is a long way from 8th. Haverford would be a different story. </p>
<p>And, in this case, rank isn’t anything. If this student can get more classes in her area of interest at Bryn Mawr, then it’s the better place to be. And nothing USNWR says makes a darned bit of difference.</p>
<p>icsbicr</p>
<p>I think this really comes down not to academics but the very different personalities and environments of these schools. An all woman’s college in suburban Philly will obviously present a very different environment than a coed school on almost 1000 acres 40 miles outside Minneapolis/SP. I would hope you’ve had a chance to visit. Consider, more than anything, where you think you’d be most happy these next four years.</p>
<p>Sorry dogersmom but that is not a relevant answer. Getting classes elsewhere means little. The degree is from Bryn Mawr. If the family is paying then it’s going to be a 250K+ cost and for that money you should try to get the best return for the cost. No one considers Bryn Mawr to be an elite school. It probably isn’t fair but that’s the way it is. </p>
<p>Interesting choice-- our household is also considering Carleton (and Haverford and Smith, to triangulate around Bryn Mawr).</p>
<p>One thing to ask about is the Haverford/Bryn Mawr connection. They still have the shuttles, cross-registration, majors on either campus, and portable meal tickets. I think, however, that the social connection between the two has diminished now that Haverford is used to being co-ed. Housing exchanges in particular are much less common now.</p>
<p>camilli you are missing the point. The ability to take classes elsewhere means very little because at the end you get the degree from the school that accepts you. With the high costs today for college no rational person chooses the 30th ranked school over #7. Bryn Mawr is a good school but all the single gender schools have fallen greatly out of favor. </p>
<p>I’m certainly no expert on Bryn Mawr, and there is certainly a great debate to be had between Bryn Mawr and Carleton and the value of women’s colleges. </p>
<p>I don’t like any college not being considered simply on usnews rank. I deeply distrust usnews rankings, and Bryn Mawr has a very really gripe. Specifically,</p>
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<p>Bottom of page 4 –> <a href=“http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=cheri”>http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=cheri</a></p>
<p>Usnews changes criteria regularly resulting in ranking changes that are nonsense. Their goal is to sell magazines. Colleges should be considered on factors students feel are important. Carleton no longer acknowledges usnews rankings (this is good in my opinion). From official Carleton announcement of this</p>
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<p><a href=“https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/president/news/?story_id=326823”>https://apps.carleton.edu/campus/president/news/?story_id=326823</a></p>
<p>@SAY-- I was responding to the OP, not you. She wanted to make the best choice between the two options, and I gave her something to think about on the Bryn Mawr side. That is all.</p>
<p>If, in four years, she ends up believing that the value of her experience can be adequately captured by a single number in a 2014 magazine (probably calculated by people who couldn’t get into any of these colleges), then she will have thoroughly wasted her shot at a fine liberal arts education. But that is another discussion.</p>
<p>We should be clear that US News is no longer a magazine – it failed at that business – it is just a web site that ranks schools (and hospitals), in large part by having people (including me) fill out surveys saying which schools (which we’ve never visited, and often know nothing about) are better than other schools (which we’ve also never visited, and may know even less about). I’ve talked with their editor, who is pretty willing to acknowledge the limitations of their data for measuring “quality,” but they are a for-profit company and they are making a profit. If you want to outsource your decision about the biggest investment of time and money you may ever make to a formula like that, then fine. But don’t pretend that it is about “quality.”</p>
<p>I think it depends on what the OP wants to do after college. If you are headed for grad school, Carleton might be the stronger choice. Employment on the east coast, I think I would pick Bryn Mawr. Employment in Minnesota or Wisconsin, go with Carleton. Med school, I think I would pick Bryn Mawr because I suspect it would be easier to get the GPA you need.</p>
<p>^Regarding the med school comment: While it might be easier to get the GPA you want at Bryn Mawr, med schools acknowledge that Carleton’s difficult so they’re not so strict on the 3.9 GPA, etc. Carls prove themselves through their MCAT scores and through reputation – Carleton’s known for producing hard-working, intelligent students and that’s something graduate schools aren’t willing to pass up.</p>
<p>I would agree that rankings are imperfect and are not the best way to choose a school. The USNWR rankings are somewhat arbitrary but the schools take the rankings very seriously as do prospective students and parents. I would agree that you could juggle any five or six schools in any given sequence but overall the rankings do pretty closely follow general opinion about the schools. For all those USNWR skeptics can anyone name a school ranked that they believe is wrong by more than 5-6 places? All the single sex female schools have suffered greatly in the past 25 years as society has changed and over time they will surely continue to drop as a large majority of girls would never want to attend them for a number of legitimate reasons. It’s hard to even come up with a reason why single sex female schools exist in 2014. At any rate my point remains that at a cost of over 250k the focus for most students/parents has to be how to get the most “value” from going to college. </p>
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<p>To name a few…</p>
<p>For liberal arts schools Reed’s ranking of 74 is absurdly low. I would put it in the top 10 to 15. Its PhD productivity is higher than Carleton’s.</p>
<p>For National Universities, Berkeley’s rank of 20 makes no sense. It should be top 7. All public universities for that matter.</p>
<p>Basically, school that pursue different educational philosophies. An all woman’s school could certainly be considered to have a different educational philosophy.</p>
<p>Reed is a fair example but then the Forbes ranking placed them about the same at 65 though its a combined ranking. All the same Reed is a outlier because they refuse to disclose the data used in the rankings so it’s not really a valid criticism of the rankings. As for Berkeley you are greatly mistaken. The graduate schools remain top notch but the undergraduate school has been destroyed by activist admission policies. In the SF airport there is a poster where the UC proudly proclaim how 40% of the students admitted are the first in their family to go to college. Many of the students at Berkeley have SAT scores below 2000 and the drop out rate is far higher than any top ten school. Only a small percentage of the students at Berkeley would be competitive at any top 12 school. As for your last comment what exactly is the educational philosophy of an all women’s school in 2014? </p>
<p>Other examples of usnews rankings that I disagree with and I believe are way off…</p>
<p>Grinnell - I would put it as a top ten liberal arts school. This is due to its high PhD productivity, top financial aid generosity, one of the highest endowments for a liberal arts college, and famous alumni…the problem is usnews sells best out east and not in Iowa.</p>
<p>Military Academies ranked with liberal arts schools - These are profoundly different types of educational institutions. To rank them together makes no sense. When Usnews news put in West Point and Annapolis in the rankings, it ended up lowering other liberal arts college’s rankings, like Bryn Mawr, for no good reason.</p>
<p>Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, and University of Virginia are all ranked lower by 10-15 slots in the usnews rankings as far as I’m concerned. - In the umich forum where I post sometimes, there is an endless argument about the usnews rankings. While this is not the thread for it, if you had said only a small percentage of umich undergrads would be competitive in a top 12 school, people would be going effing crazy and giving you endless statistics to show the percentage is significant. </p>
<p>The point its that some schools may attract a different group of students (i.e. mid-western students, students hoping for lower tuition at a state school, military cadets, all woman schools). This may slightly lower the stats of the incoming class and affect a usnews ranking, but it won’t affect the opportunities (in terms of jobs, acceptance into grad school, and the education you receive) that a motivated student can get at that college/universities. </p>
<p>The other big, big error in all of this is to confuse precision with accuracy. After all, what does it really mean to say that something is #13 vs #16? Obviously, people do like to build hierarchies that reaffirm their status, but there’s only so much you can learn from that. When I was in junior high school, I was at one of the allegedly better day schools in NY. Students there assured each other that they were “#2 in the country” behind Andover. I have no idea where this came from. This was before internet as well as annual magazine rankings, so it must have appeared in a book somewhere in the early 70s. As it happened, my family moved to Andover so I later transferred to Phillips Academy. They were certainly both good schools in certain areas, but there were enough real differences that it would be hard to compare them on a single linear scale. BTW, a guy I knew was also leaving that year to go to a boarding school in New Jersey. He leaned over confidentially and said, “it’s number 9.” Such wackiness.</p>
<p>There is a similar example of purely arbitrary ranking practice in our current home area. A local glossy mag did a ranking and my daughter’s school came up #1. Why? Well, probably the faculty:student ratio and the average SAT scores. Easy numbers to feed into a spreadsheet, and both useful numbers if you’re getting the sense of a place, but hardly the kind of thing that would make a kid prefer this school to one of the other good ones in town. It was her first choice and ours for her, but we wouldn’t tell you that it is the best option for every kid.<br>
The traditional two favorites in town (among the older families) score well in different magazines’ ratings because they send a lot of kids to Ivy League schools. Never mind how the other kids in the class wind up. One of them actually feeds that madness by holding faculty meetings to see how they can boost their percentage with the Ivies. So there’s stuff that gets discussed internally about what UPenn’s admissions office is looking for, or whatever. Heaven forbid a smart kid’s best college match would be CalTech or UChicago-- or Carleton, instead of Columbia. That wouldn’t feed the publicity machine quite as cleanly. (As it happens, my daughter refused to go to that one, so we don’t have better first-hand info on it. Although we do hear from very reliable sources that it is an excellent place for those who like it.)</p>
<p>I’m reminded of one of the more hyperactive NY wine merchants, who obviously does a lot of business on Wall Street. Everything is points-- preferably Parker points. One of their better hysterical lines was “this was rated a 93 (out of 100), but we think it’s worth at least a 95!” Really-- at that point, who cares? If you’re buying to re-sell later to someone who also doesn’t want to drink it, and reads the same newsletters, that’s one thing. But to decide what to put in your own cellar and pull out for a nice dinner 10 years from now? </p>
<p>A joke also rears its head-- “Did you ever sleep with a 10?” “No, but one night I had two 4s and a 2.”</p>
<p>Stupidity.</p>