College suggestions/ideas?

College Search & Selection
1

Hi Guys,

I was just wondering if you guys have any suggestions for small, liberal arts colleges. I currently attend a top 50 boarding school on the East Coast. I’m not an amazing athlete so I couldn’t be recruited and I want to go into some sort of social work when I’m older. Here’s a little bit about me- I don’t want to give too much away to protect my privacy.

  • play 2 JV level sports
  • tour guide for school
  • member of 4 different clubs
  • 3.8 GPA
  • scored relatively well on diagnostic SAT and ACT
  • good with people/interviews
  • community service with kids
  • from west coast
  • full pay
  • Max number of AP classes I’ll take would be 3-4

Any suggestions for schools that I might have a chance of getting into based on my info? Thanks so much.

2

Dickinson, Muhlenberg, Goucher, St Lawrence, Hobart& WilliamSmith, St Olaf, Beloit, Allegheny.

3

Really, lots of great LACs would work out for you. It’s very helpful (and great for you) that you don’t have financial constraints.

The list above is terrific. It would be helpful to have a few more parameters–area of the country; college town v. larger town v. urban. There are so many.

You might browse through Colleges That Change Lives. Lots of possibilities here, many are LACs.

https://ctcl.org

On the above list, I personally love Dickinson (beautiful school with great academics) and have heard great things about Beloit.

Urban LACs: Macalester (St. Paul, MN), Occidental (Los Angeles), Rhodes College (Memphis), Reed College (Portland), Lewis and Clark (Portland). Macelester might be a great fit for you. Great school, more of an international vibe than a lot of LACs. I love Rhodes, and the photos on their website are pretty stunning. Reed is very offbeat intellectual. It’s in sort of a near-in suburban neighborhood. Lewis and Clark literally has a stunning rainforest-y ravine cutting right through campus, and beautiful views out to Mt. Hood (on the rare clear day).

https://www.rhodes.edu

https://www.rhodes.edu/content/about-rhodes

In Nature: Sewanee: Like above, beautiful school with great academics, and on a mountain surrounded by nature trails.

http://www.sewanee.edu/admission/why-sewanee/#the-domain

More College Town Environments: Dickinson, Denison, UNC-Asheville (public LAC, in a great, great funky Smoky Mountains town, with lots to do, and a center for art), Mount Holyoke or Smith (both all female) (members of Five College Consortium with Hampshire, Amherst, and U Mass Amherst), College of Wooster.

https://www.fivecolleges.edu

I’d think you’d be a very reasonable applicant at all these schools. Good luck!

4

I meant to include Kalamazoo College, and you might look at Holy Cross as well.

5

For those that want to go into social work, schools that offer majors in social justice and schools that have distingushed themselves in the area of community service might be a good fit for you.

Here is a list of colleges with civics/social justice related majors. Only a handful are highly selective and several are from the Colleges That Change Lives grouping. I would add Clark University ( another CTCL member which is more of a LAC than a University) for their major in Holocaust Studies.

https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-search?major=952_Peace%20and%20Conflict%20Resolution%20Studies

The Presidents Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll is the highest award given out by the government for community service.

Here are some LACs that have achieved “distingushed” status in the last three years for community service

Bates
Bryn Mawr
Hobart and WIlliam Smith
PItzer
Swarthmore
Washington and Lee

Here are some LACs that have achieved “honor roll” status in the last three years for community service

Clark
Colgate
Franklin and Marshall
Furman
Holy Cross
Middlebury
Wesleyan
Union

Here are the full lists for the last three years:
2015
https://www.nationalservice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Honor Roll 2015 General Category.pdf
2014
https://www.nationalservice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/CNCS_HonorRollProgram_GeneralCommunityService_508.pdf
2013
https://www.nationalservice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2013_hr_distinction_list.pdf
https://www.nationalservice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2013_hr_list.pdf

6

Is 3.8 weighted or unweighted? And, “relatively well” means different things to different people.

So, hard to say exactly what to target based on stats, but certainly you should have many good choices, if you want to get a general academic undergrad degree from a LAC and then do an MSW grad program.

If you want to some direct exposure to the social work field in your undergraduate program, that will narrow your choices quite a bit. Most of the schools with undergrad social work degrees are large, public universities. But there are a few small LAC’s that do have programs in this field. https://www.bestmswprograms.com/best-bsw-programs/

From this list, Skidmore seems like a really good school for you to take a close look at.
And while Fordham isn’t a small LAC, the combination of a mid-sized private U with both strong liberal arts and a social work program might be worth considering.

7

I think the term “social work” denotes a pre-professional approach or degree that many LACs might eschew. If you widen the search to include LACs with stand-alone sociology majors, you begin to gateway some of the larger ones (Wesleyan, Wellesley, Oberlin, Barnard, Richmond, etc.)