@MYOS1634, I’ll try… St. Mike’s is a great school, but for us the comparison with Colby was in the end pretty stark, so it’s hard to present both schools in a balanced way.
Here are some of the things that swayed us (the parents, at least); others might value different criteria, and might make a different decision…
The academic major program that my son is interested in is a well-established stand-alone program with a long history at Colby, but it apparently is a relatively new interdisciplinary offering at St. Mike’s.
While the student-faculty ratio at St. Mike’s is pretty good, and there was evidence that the students get a fair amount of personal attention, the ratio is even better at Colby, and the relationships students build with faculty is one of their hallmarks. Working in higher education myself, I am sure that Colby is better able to attract top faculty and hold them to a higher standard for tenure and promotion (which has both good and bad aspects to it…). The opportunities for students to become engaged in research seem greater at Colby (for example, we have some familiarity with Colby’s cooperative with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science), although St. Mike’s has some good efforts in this area as well (for example, through the Vermont EPSCoR).
While they downplay the religious aspect quite a bit, St. Mike’s is still a catholic school. Colby, although originally founded by baptists, is a secular college. We are not religious at all; we viewed the exposure to religion at St. Mike’s through the lens of it being a valuable part of the overall liberal arts general education experience. The liberal arts program at Colby is very similar to that at St. Mike’s, but without the required religious component.
Both schools have a foreign language requirement. Son was accepted into Colby’s global entry semester program (in Dijon, in the Burgundy region of France) which should get him well on the way to meeting that requirement (immersion seems clearly a better way to learn another language than sitting in a classroom back home). One can certainly study abroad while at St. Mike’s, although they don’t seem to have their own institutional foreign study program like Colby’s program in Dijon. Just as a side note, the Edmundite monks who founded St. Mike’s came over to North America from the Burgundy region in France, so whichever choice he had made, son would not have been able to get away from Burgundy!
The outcomes for graduates from Colby seem much better (in our minds, at least):
- The graduating seniors that were involved in the admitted students program at Colby all had multiple job offers already; the graduating seniors involved in the admitted students program at St. Mike’s were still seeking employment.
- A study of the undergraduate educations of PhD recipients, showed that Colby had been the undergrad institution for thirty-eight PhD. recipients in the year 2011, while St. Mike’s had ten. The mix of fields for the PhDs who had started at Colby matched my son’s interests better than the mix of fields for the PhDs who had started at St. Mike’s
- the Economist magazine’s study of earning power relative to expectations, limited as it is, showed that the earnings of Colby grads greatly exceeded the modeled expectations, while the earnings of St. Mike’s grads fell slightly short of what the modelling expected.
- comparing the LinkedIn profile pages for the two schools reveals differences in the types of jobs and placements between their graduates (note that these school profiles are generated by LinkedIn, gleaning the data from the individual profile pages of LinkedIn users).
My son wants to play a particular sport that is a club team at both schools, but the team at Colby travels much further and wider for competition, and is becoming more and more competitive, while the group at St. Mike’s is apparently much more informal and seems to only compete locally (in Vermont).
The overall structure, tenor, and atmosphere of the admitted students program at Colby was much more to our taste than the program at St. Mike’s; the focus seemed to be more on the academics and student outcomes and less on student life issues (at least that was our perspective).
The president at Colby is relatively young, and full of energy and grand visions for the future of the institution. Colby is well on its way to becoming a much more prominent college on a national basis. As a much more regional institution, St. Mike’s is facing a demographic decline in the size of the prospective student population, so the college’s plan is to shrink a bit (the college I work at serves much the same market, and is facing much the same challenge…)
All-in-all, Colby was just a much better fit for our son; it was his first choice from the get-go; he had applied ED but was deferred. The only hang-ups to accepting Colby’s offer of admission right away were the first-semester abroad (a surprise; see [my other thread on that](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1874899-first-semester-abroad.htm)) and the cost differential. Colby does guarantee to meet demonstrated financial need (without loans as part of the package), but of course you have to actually be willing and able to pay what they think your EFC is… Fortunately we can make it work. Obviously we decided that, for us and our son at least, the cost differential is worth it.