<p>Frequently I read on CC of students applying to colleges that offer very different environments and experiences to their undergraduate students (eg, Dartmouth vs Columbia, U Chicago vs Northwestern, Hopkins vs U Virginia, etc.). Often, these are the result of a lack of understanding and first-hand knowledge of some (if not all) of the colleges. Other times, it is plainly a search for prestige and personal affirmation. And sometimes there is some personal tie/interest that is not obvious and which makes the applications appropriate. Whatever the reason, the student can sometimes ultimately find him/herself in a college that is not a great personal fit. </p>
<p>Given that the academic differences among top colleges (approximately USNWR Top 30 national universities and USNWR Top 20 LACs) are relatively small, help students understand the nature of non-academic life at the top universities and which pairs or groups of colleges might be the best fits for certain personalities.</p>
<p>Sometimes, students do this because they are <em>open</em> to a wide range of environments and experiences. Or because different environments appeal to different aspects of their personalities.</p>
<p>I agree. In hindsight, I for one can easily say that I applied to schools that have a lot of similarities to one another in terms of size, composition of student body, pre-professional vs academic feel, intensity, etc. -- and why shouldn't I have added on, say, a Seven Sisters school or a highly competitive LAC into that mix? I'm not sure that I agree that you have to look for only one "type." Some people are the kind who need just the right atmosphere, and others are able to bloom wherever they are planted. I certainly don't mean to suggest that the same student who applies to UChicago would also be happy at SMU or Arizona State, but I think it's perfectly possible that there are students who would like both NU and UChicago - just depending on what parts of their personalities they wanted to emphasize / develop / play up.</p>
<p>I'm going to agree with pg on this one, only because Northwestern was on my list for different reasons that Chicago was on my list. (And NU v. Chicago was one of the listed "either/or" dichotomies). The reasons I liked Chicago reasons beat the reasons I liked Northwestern, but I saw a lot going for me at both schools. Yes, I'm a nerd. Yes, I'm very un-preprofessional, yes, I don't wear expensive clothing, but yes, I'm pretty open and flexible to new experiences and I don't mind people who are different externally than me.</p>
<p>There were also a bunch of elite schools where I didn't see a lot going for me, and I almost completely ignored those schools.</p>
<p>Isn't there some wisdom in trying to keep the spectrum of college types open to you fairly broad? As these posters have pointed out, schools of divergent characters might be appealing for different but sound reasons and who can say that the one you favored in November will be the one you like in April (or September!)? Some room must be made for maturation/clarification of preference in the intervening six months.</p>
<p>This in mind, I'll take a preliminary shot at the OP's challenge and sketch a taxonomy of possible non-academic characteristics by which to group schools.</p>
<p>Political Atmosphere (Socialist - Liberal - Moderate - Libertarian -Conservative, not really a spectrum but descriptive nonetheless)</p>
<p>Political Activism (Highly involved - Average concern - Completely Indifferent)</p>
<p>Political Tolerance (Acceptance of other views - Listen with objection - Open hostility)</p>
<p>Estimated Introvert/Extravert Ratio</p>
<p>Availability of Profs (Office hours only - approachable at all times - invite you to dinner)</p>
<p>Likelihood of studying on average Saturdays (0 -100%)</p>
<p>Why do students go to the library? (To study - To socialize)</p>
<p>Socialization tendencies (Large parties - small gatherings - a few friends)</p>
<p>How frequently do students leave campus? (every day - never)</p>
<p>It might be helpful to use these distinctions in forming "groups".</p>
<p>Nice taxonomy. To that taxonomy, I might also add:
Concern with outward appearances / style (fashionista central - like to look nice - if it's clean, it's good to go - maybe not even clean)
Attitudes towards schools of similar intellectual caliber / prestige (collegial, have 'em over for a beer - friendly rivalry - feel superior towards, put down at every opportunity)
Attitude towards watching school's sporting teams (take it or leave it - fun but not serious - highly serious - brutally competitive and a real bummer when team loses)
Importance of school's worth acknowledged by "man on the street" (don't care - upsetting that people don't know how great we are)
Predominance of "crossing groups" in terms of socialization (have friends from all different interest groups - have friends mostly from common interest group - have exclusive Greek or similar systems)
"Look and feel" / attitude towards displaying wealth among the well-to-do students since all the schools we're talking about do have a good chunk of them (BMW's and bling - subtle old preppy money - even the richest kids look like everyone else)
Importance of explicitly making a lot of money after / having a "prestigious" career (whole goal of education - nice but many paths to success - not the point at all)</p>
<p>Hawkette, as I think about the schools you often cite as your favorites (Stfd, Duke, NU, Vandy, ND, Rice), I think that they often differ from one another quite significantly on some of these dimensions, which is why I am surprised that they are often lumped together as offering a similar school experience.</p>
<p>While I think these are good things to think about (the taxonomies that both pg and descartesz set up) I sometimes think that the college selection process is better if gut instinct is used rather than a pure cognitive or schematic form is used. I must admit that I liked Chicago because I liked it in my gut, and it was only after I spent a couple of months there that I found I could articulate what I liked about it.</p>
<p>Sometimes you don't really know what's right for you until you try it. For example, in high school, I was convinced, a womens' college wasn't right for me; now I think it would make a marginal difference and maybe even an improvement on college life. You have many answers for yourself as a 17-year-old, but they by no means have to be consistent with each other.</p>
<p>Oh, I agree with you, unalove, that it's often a gut reaction "this is where I feel at home." I was just trying to deconstruct what elements might contribute to that gut reaction. I wasn't suggesting an excel spreadsheet or regression analysis :-)</p>
<p>I like schools with undergrad focus, lots of access to professors and administrators, and good study abroad + thesis grants. Socially, laid back students who like to have fun (active social scene). Lots of campus life, less city distractions so the campus is more tightknit. My favorite schools:</p>
<p>Princeton
Dartmouth
Brown
Duke
Amherst
Middlebury
Northwestern</p>
<p>Schools I would not like to attend:
Chicago (too intense, not campus life)
Columbia (little campus life)
JHU (too intense)</p>
<p>I thought Georgetown seemed terrific but my daughter thought it was way too preppy - she said the way the students there acted and dressed reminded her of the students at the preppiest Catholic girls school in our town. So she would put on
"Schools I would not like to attend:"
Georgetown (too preppy)</p>
<p>Not based on anything but impressoins from a one-day visit.</p>
<p>Close by, she thought the students at GW were lively, fun, and diverse (especially compared to Georgetown).</p>
<p>She thought U Chicago was too intense and would not even consider Swarthmore, same reason. Too intense.</p>
<p>Of the top LACs, I had a really hard time distinguishing between Middlebury and Bowdoin in terms of their academic philosophy and atmospshere. They're so similar--student centered, small student body, great sports and science, but also room for the arts. It came down to location...
Same with Williams and Amherst, which I found rich with academic excellence and tradition, but a bit more tense and uptight student body wise... Again, location location</p>
<p>Interesting. My D has a similar negative reaction to excessively preppy environments. In response, I've derived a statistic I call "Preppy Quotient." I get it by looking at the statistics reported on Princeton Review for percentage of entering freshmen from public schools; 100% minus percentage from public schools = "Preppy Quotient," i.e., the percentage of entering freshmen from private schools (assuming that other options like homeschooling are a negligible factor). For Georgetown, Preppy Quotient = 48%, among the highest in the country.</p>
<p>Some other high Preppy Quotient schools: Davidson (52%), Columbia (51%), Penn (48%), Middlebury (48%), Bowdoin (46%), Yale (45%), Haverford (45%), Vanderbilt (43%), Princeton (42%)..</p>
<p>Some lower Preppy Quotient schools: generally the Seven Sisters or what's left of them (Wellesley 36%, Bryn Mawr 36%, Barnard 36%, Vassar 35%, Smith 33%; Mount Holyoke at 38% is the highest of this group); Harvard (35%, lowest of the Ivies by far); Stanford (38%, an in-between score but lower than any Ivy except Harvard); most Midwestern schools (Chicago 37%, Northwestern 27%, Carleton 27%, Grinnell 26%; the outlier here is Oberlin at 40%); all state schools.</p>
<p>Generally, there's a pretty strong correlation between Preppy Quotient and D's gut reaction: the higher the Preppy Quotient, the greater her negative reaction to the school. No doubt others would have just the opposite reaction.</p>
<p>Another litmus test for us: Greek Scene. D thinks the whole Greek idea is absolutely silly. Princeton Review reports---accurately I hope---the percentage of students at each school enrolled in fraternities and sororities. For most LACs the reported scores are zero. I assume this means they have no fraternities or sororities, which in a way makes sense; at a small school , the entire student body can be your peer group and you don't need to subdivide into exclusive peer groups like fraternities and sororities. But among bigger schools, there's a sharp bifurcation. At the high end, Dartmouth reports 38% of male students are in fraternities and 38% of the female students are in sororities. Penn is not far behind, 30% m and 26% f, followed among the Ivies by Cornell, 28% m, 22% f. Duke is also high, 29% m, 42% f. Most top schools are considerably lower. Brown, at a low extreme, reports 12% m, and only 2% f.; Columbia, 15% m, 10% f. Again, I don't want to put a value judgment on it; for some people, the lively Greek scene at Dartmouth is a highly attractive feature. For my D, it's a complete turn-off. It's a matter of taste and cultural style.</p>
<p>I find I can predict D's gut reaction to a school fairly accurately, largely on the basis of Preppy Quotient and Greek Scene: If either is high, she won't like it much. If both are high, she'll absolutely detest it. </p>
<p>But these are matters of personal preference that don't show up in the US News rankings, but they're cultural and lifestyle litmus-test questions that I think go a long way toward explaining why some otherwise seemingly evenly matched schools invite such different visceral reactions. Example: Brown with its extremely low Greek Scene numbers is in D's mind the polar opposite of Dartmouth with its extremely high Greek Scene score, even though in most respects they're pretty comparable. Similarly, although Brown's 40% Preppy quotient is fairly high by national standards, it's among the lowest in the Ivy League, significantly lower than Columbia's 51% or Penn's 48%, for example. These two factors combined suggest why D has a very warm, positive feeling toward Brown and a generally much less positive view of the other Ivies which generally have either a big Greek Scene or a high Preppy quotient, or in some cases both.</p>
<p>Interesting theory, bclintonk. But it's clearly not an exact science if your conclusion is that Oberlin has a high Preppy Quotient. Nothing could be further from the truth!</p>
<p>This can work if you have an idea what you like about a school.
DD likes Yale. Residential colleges are a significant factor in that affection, so I encourage her to look at Rice. Swarthmore and Reed are often paired because of their reputed academic intensity. </p>
<p>These groupings would be more useful if they included at least one match and one safety for a student with an SAT score of, say, 2000 - 2200. I think it is fairly easy to come up with a fist full of dream schools. It is harder, but likely more important, to find matches and safeties with many of the attributes that make the dream schools so desirable.</p>
<p>To round at your specific example, Chicago and Smith have the "Yale" academic aspect and the "Yale" house system. Chicago and Smith would both be matches to the right candidate with those scores.</p>
<p>Safety/Low match? I'd probably look at a school like Whitman (no residence colleges, though) or even an honors college at a state school with honors housing.</p>
<p>unalove-- We visited UChic, and it's a definite possibility. Do students retain their house affiliation all four years? Is there some healthy rivalry among houses?</p>
<p>I think the drawback of honors housing is segregation. I suppose, though, that within honors there is quite a bit of diversity of interests.</p>
<p>In my view, honors housing would be fun because it's easier to identify the strongest students academically, and I would think that socially, an honors college within a state U that has separate housing feels a lot like a more selective school.</p>
<p>Chicago students do maintain house affiliation throughout their stay in housing (students tend to move off after two years, though you can become an "associate member" and continue to participate in house activities) but houses tend to be the primary social blocks. Most of my friends are in-house, and if I become very friendly with somebody outside of the house, I end up meeting all of their housemates pretty fast.</p>
<p>House rivalries are playful, and probably exhibit themselves the most in intramural sports games and occasional pranks.</p>
<p>An example of what I think is an inappropriate group would be a single student applying to all eight of the Ivy colleges. These are very different colleges which offer very different experiences. IMO, such an application strategy would be letting the prestige of a certain college or group of colleges overwhelm an intelligent search for a college that is both academically excellent and a good personal fit. </p>
<p>As for an example of a student making a list of colleges that have some similarities in academic caliber and undergraduate experience, I have often posted in favor of colleges that IMO offer the premier undergraduate experiences, ie, those with excellent academics, a socially oriented student body, and active, nationally competitive sports scene. If a student were interested in this type of undergraduate experience, then the groupings would go as follows:</p>
<p>BEST CHOICES
Stanford
Duke
Northwestern
Vanderbilt
Notre Dame</p>
<p>NEXT BEST CHOICES
Rice
Georgetown
USC
Wake Forest</p>
<p>“IF YOU HAVE TO HAVE IVY” CHOICES
Cornell
U Penn
Princeton</p>
<p>PUBLIC CHOICES
UC Berkeley
U Virginia
UCLA
U Michigan
U North Carolina</p>