DD working on narrowing down choices. Unable to fit in college visits to some schools and just don’t get what she needs from website tours. What are strengths or weaknesses about Williams, Cornell, Yale she should consider? What do you love about W, C, Y? What would you caution against? Thanks so much.
The caliber of the student body and the post-grad opportunities will be roughly equivalent at all three. The biggest differences are size, location, and institutional emphasis. Cornell – massive, rural, diverse in its mission since it is an unusual public/private hybrid, but really a large research university at its core; Yale – medium-sized research university in an urban environment that has some true benefits but also very real drawbacks; Williams – liberal arts college in a truly beautiful but very rural small-town setting, purely a liberal arts experience with virtually no grad students. What sort of atmosphere does she want, both geographically and in terms of educational style?
If she is truly indifferent between those three settings, here are some of the distinguishing traits that I think make Williams special among its peers:
– 7:1 student faculty ratio and generally small class sizes, profs who are totally dedicated to undergraduate teaching, very close relationships between students and professors
– very loyal and engaged alumni network
– the unique tutorial program
– Williams-Oxford, if she is interested, as a junior
– the Junior Advisor and frosh entry system
– spectacular mix of world-class arts (WCMA, MassMOCA, WCMA Walls program, Williamstown Theater Festival, the Clark, plans for even more prominent art institutions soon to come) and nature (Hopkins Forest, Outing Club, nearby rivers, Mount Greylock, abundant nature and hiking trails, Mountain Day)
– university-class facilities (especially the insane new library, the already-great and currently-expanding science facilities, and the amazing student centers) at a liberal arts college
@Ephman Wow. Thank you so much for taking the time to share a bit about Williams especially. Her college advisor has recommended she consider it and we just know nothing. She likes being close to her teachers and truly engages with them. Sounds as though that is not atypical at Williams.
All three are great choices. I can speak directly about Yale (alum and S currently attends) and indirectly about Williams (D attends a rural NE LAC, but not Williams).
Yale
Pro’s: 1. Has just about any resource you want for any field of study
2. Easy, almost expected that students explore different/change majors
3. Plenty of small seminar classes available but can also choose large lectures with famous profs
4. Clubs and groups to fit almost any interest (athletic, art, music, politics, service, culture…)
5. Great guest speakers/events
6. But what I try to sell the most is the residential college system. It gives you all the benefits of living with a smaller group of people in a diverse tight knit community similar to many LAC’s. For many of us, our residential college identity is almost as important as our association with Yale. However, you also have plenty of other opportunities through particularly #4 above to meet other great people with similar specific interests.
Cons: New Haven is not great, although I will say the areas around campus have improved from when I went there. The flip side though is that social life is centered around the campus. Good friends of mine who went to H when I visited them there or when they visited me in New Haven often remarked how H’s campus was less active during weekends because they had wonderful choices of things to do off campus in Cambridge and Boston.
Williams (assuming it has similar characteristics as D’s school)
Pro’s: 1. Small intimate community, socially and academically. Life revolves around campus
2. Easy to interact with professors
3. School/professor sponsored internships easier to get. If you want to study abroad or do an off campus semester internship, seems to be incredibly hassle free.
4. Likely easier to participate in intercollegiate sports both in making the team and time away from sport for academics and other activities.
Con’s: 1. Just not the same resources as a major national research university
2. Smaller/more insular in terms of meeting a wider variety of people. While it is easier to meet/know everyone, the flip side is it is hard to avoid people you don’t like!
Why limit yourself now in terms of applications with respect to these three unless these three are already at the bottom of a long list? If your D gets into one or more, she should definitely visit at that time.
Thank you, @BKSquared .
She is not limiting herself to these three; these are just the ones she is considering that she knows the least about. Unfortunately, getting into schools of this caliber is hard enough that even w strong stats, recs, grades, ECs, etc, her list has to be more than three. She doesn’t yet know if she wants to go big, small, rural, urban, East Coast, West Coast, etc so is aiming for varied profiles. Williams is there to meet her NE LAC feel option. Where does your student attend?
She will definitely visit after she knows what her options turn out to be. Her school limits them to 3 days off for college visits and she doesn’t even want to take off those.Trying to work in visits over breaks but family obligations strain that freedom (parent w Alzheimers, etc).
Sure thing, dowzerz. I recently hung out with a friend who, after graduation, met her husband through a professor she was really close with while at Williams. Not THAT, I imagine, is atypical :)! But you can be as close to faculty members as you desire, really.
One quibble with BKSquared re: intercollegiate sports. Even though it’s D3, sports are pretty serious business at Williams. Except on certain really large teams that welcome pretty much anyone, like cross country, everyone on the varsity rosters tend to be fairly serious athletes. They don’t put as much time in on average as D1 students, but they do nevertheless put SERIOUS time into practices and working out, and honestly the difference between a lot of the athletic teams at Williams and the lower-tier (athletically-speaking) Ivies is not much, and in a number of cases the Williams teams are actually better. Where there IS an advantage at Williams, however, is in being able to participate in multiple extracurricular activities, of any sort, at a high level. You can be in an acappella group, and lead a social service organization, and be an editor of the campus paper. Or be a varsity athlete and head of student government. And so on … folks tend not to be as unilaterally focused in any one endeavor, it’s not like if you want to be editor of the student paper that takes over your entire life at a place like Williams; it does, for sure at Harvard (and I imagine Yale, which I know less about). That appealed to me. Of course, the student paper is not a professional-level publication like, say, the Harvard Crimson, so it’s a matter of personal choice.
If she is just getting started, and she likes the idea of a NE LAC, I recommend she also check out Amherst, Haverford, Bowdoin and Middlebury. All, to me, are distinguishable from Williams in certain ways, but also have a ton of overlap. Obviously, I liked Williams best, but I found all four of those quite appealing as well … and other than Amherst, the other three are a BIT easier to get into, although still quite competitive. In other geographic regions, check out Carleton, Pomona and Claremont McKenna.
Seems like Williams versus Cornell would be an odd comparison. Cornell is much larger, and has several divisions with professional or specialized majors that Williams does not have.
Cornell:
Pros
- You truly can study just about anything from liberal and fine arts, architecture, business, Econ, engineering, animal science, fashion to hotel administration. It’s easy to minor in a completely different subject too as the university encourages students to take classes at the other colleges
- The campus and student body is large but not so much so that you can’t meet anybody and have meaningful friendships. The school spirit is huge too with D1 athletics and traditions such as dragon day and slope day
- The “elite but not elitist” attitude of the school.
- The finger lakes area and surrounding gorges are beautiful. Lots to do nature-wise plus Ithaca has the awesome farmers market and Cornell has their own Dairy bar (they make their own ice cream) and Beebe Lake on campus for nice trail runs.
- Great faculty and staff all the way around. No matter who I’ve had to contact, I have always reached a live person or I have received an email response quickly…that goes from FA office, the health center, dining and housing office, career office and the Cornell store. My son has never had a problem accessing any of his profs or advisors
- Great opportunities for research and internships; meaningful/impactful overseas studies and research
Cons
- Housing gets a bad rep and in many cases deservedly so. In my son’s experience not bad so far. Of the 3 colleges you’re comparing, Cornell is the largest at 14k undergrad and 6-7k grad students. That’s a lot to house! Anyway, all freshmen are guaranteed housing in North Campus and for upperclassmen and transfers the West Campus system is a great “residential college-like” dorm system. My S lives there now and West Campus has the best food of all the dining halls. After freshmen year a lot of students either move in to Greek houses or the Collegetown area for off campus housing. It’s not impossible to get off campus housing as my son has already signed a lease for next year it’s really who you know and at Cornell you WILL know people
- The rural setting isn’t for everyone. Although the town of Ithaca/Ithaca Commons is lovely
- The long dreary winters! If you have experience with east coast winters then no problem but it was a shock to my son coming from practically year round sunshine. But with this con comes a pro which it helps make for a close knit community
- The rigor. It can be stressful at Cornell and there are plenty of ambitious students. So if your D has great study habits and stays focused she should do well. But be prepared to have your tippy top student get knocked down with a dose of reality
@ucbalumnus Its funny-not knowing enough about them, they fell in to vaguely similar by both being rural northeast. This exercise is a good reminder generalizations can be too broad. Knew they were different sized and university vs college but more constructive profiles are starting to take shape.
@dowzerw, In college selection I would say that “what you love” depends equally on what the student is looking and what the college can offer. In other words, FIT.
My son attended Williams for undergraduate and Cornell for graduate school. He liked Yale a lot, but since Williams was a better fit for him, he applied ED and never regretted it. For various reasons, mostly because of size, he didn’t consider Cornell for undergraduate. His graduate school experience at Cornell affirmed that a small LAC was the best choice for undergrad, again FOR HIM. It’s really a personal decision.
Has you daughter visited any of the three? They are all so immensely different, in location, size, environment and culture. Although there’s no question that she’d get a terrific education at any of these schools, I think if she considers the points of differentiation, one will rise to the top of the list.
What my son liked best about Williams
The small liberal arts college environment: small classes, focus on undergraduates, accessible and nurturing professors
The beautiful rural mountain village setting with plenty of access to nature and outdoorsy activities
The residence hall entry and junior advisor system
Winter Study
Tutorials
Focus on arts and humanities, especially art studio and art history which were his areas of interest
Close knit campus community, no Greek system
The bright, multi-talented energetic friendly student body (and in retrospect wonderful life long friends)
Excellent career/graduate school counseling and recommendations from professors who knew my son personally
Engaged alumni network network for internships and job placement
As you can see, this is a highly subjective list and many factors may be pluses or minuses depending on your daughter’s interests and preferences.
I would note that admissions committees at small LACs also consider fit, i.e., would the applicant be a good fit for the college? They understand that visits are not always practical, but expect the applicant to understand the culture of the college and to demonstrate (in essays, in recommendations, in extra-curricular resumes) why they are interested.
Cornell is also very fit-based, as it is divided into seven different colleges within the university. The college of Arts and Sciences has a broad focus, but many of the other colleges really look for students that demonstrate an interest and aptitude in the specific programs within those colleges. I think your daughter really needs to figure out whether she wants a small LAC or a large research university, or something in between. When I started the college search with my daughter, I would have guessed that she would want a small LAC like Williams or Middlebury, but after we did a lot of visits, she really gravitated toward the larger schools, and picked an area of study that surprised me, and is now a very happy engineer at Cornell. The campus is huge, and she gripes about walking about 7 miles a day (probably an exaggeration), but she couldn’t be happier. I agree with CALSmom about the housing though - it can be good or bad. My daughter has a terrible dorm room now (I think it was a single they converted to a double) and she’s nervous about how the housing lottery is going to go next spring. The housing situation is better now than when I was there in the late 80’s, but not by much. The nasty off-campus house that I lived in jr. year is still there and looks the same or worse - even back then it was so bad that my mom wouldn’t use the bathroom in it. 9We did have a lot of fun there though!)
What will her major be? Does she know what she wants to study? That could affect her choice.
Williams is a liberal arts college. Cornell is a university that has a liberal arts college. And a lot more.
Only about 30% of Cornell students are enrolled in its liberal arts college. As a result, the experience as a liberal arts student at Cornell is actually a bit different. As mentioned there are all these other specialized colleges there, in various more applied or specialized areas. Consequently there is a wider range of fellow students. You will be interacting socially with the whole gamut of these students, not just liberal arts college students.
As a further result, it offers a hugely wider range of available course offerings than a typical liberal arts college… I daresay most Cornell CAS students wind up taking at least a couple courses at its other colleges. Often these are courses that would not be available at a typical liberal arts college. Or they may be courses that just fit better in one’s schedule.
There are also graduate courses, for those who are up to it and can take them.
My D1 attended an LAC (not Williams) and couldn’t take something because of scheduling issues, with two courses both offered only every other year, given at the same time. This would be less likely to happen at Cornell. At Cornell there are more sections of more courses, few courses being offered only “every other year”. Plus there is often a happy redundancy due to the other colleges there. I think we figured out there are five different available intro stats courses, for example, with different “spins” an mathematical levels. If a CAS physics major has a scheduling issue he/she can probably find a similar course offered by the applied physics department in the engineering college. Etc.
The tradeoff for the huge course catalog is classes at Cornell will generally be larger. The large courses will often have graduate student TAs holding recitation/ review sections, labs, and grading. The professors do the lectures and manage the class. (FWIW I believe I’ve read, here on CC, Williams uses undergraduates to do grading in a few of its larger intro classes. Neither case is necessarily a disaster, they are guided as to what they should be doing).
As for housing, I thought it was fine. I think it’s better to live off campus, actually. @patatty probably had a really good time in that slum apartment, with no RAs and no university rules about what you could do there. Those places are centers for lots of social life there, in a way that a dorm room can never be. I learned to cook in mine. My D2 gave and attended dinner parties in hers, and her house was a central focus of her social life. They may have been a bit rickety, or worse, but they offered more personal space and privacy than any dorm room. Plus, there are also some new fancy ones now. Collegetown looks a lot different than it did when I attended; so built up.
My D1 who attended a different LAC (not Williams) eventually got bored there. I’ve noted before a seemingly high rate of LAC students (not specifically Williams) doing study abroad. While this is not a bad thing, I think it’s partly because they get bored at their schools. On the other hand, if one fits with the prevailing campus culture at a small school there is the potential for a fantastic experience, with a large, more homogeneous cohort of “fellow travelers”. At a larger school, the challenge is to find one’s own social cohort, sifting them out from among the masses.
I don’t know much about Yale.
@Ephman, Williams recruits heavily for XC/Track and while they still allow walk=ons for XC those that aren’t top-7 or top-14, if there is a JV event, don’t get to compete - Williams Track will likely end walk-ons this year. All of the other NESCAC XC/Track teams have pretty much eliminated walk-ons.
For a few years, she considered trying to be recruited to play lax in college but she attends a pretty competitive boarding school and eventually decided that if she went to a pretty competitive college, it would be too much to play on a sports team, too.
Her interests run from foreign service and public policy to med school or engineering or economics. She felt drawn to Middlebury as a 2.0 version of her boarding school but I think she wants too much out of school and out of life for that to be a good fit given its size and offerings.
She’s having a hard time looking beyond her BS and I think that is impacting her ability to look forward and attempt to picture what life’s next phase looks like.
re #14:
“Her interests run from foreign service and public policy to med school or engineering or economics.”
If interest in engineering is real, suggest she attend an institution that actually offers engineering.
Many liberal arts colleges, including Williams, offer a “3-2” program with an actual engineering school, but these programs require actually switching schools, and often are rarely completed.
If interest in engineering was to become focused enough, soon enough, to merit applying as an intended engineering major, it could possibly serve as an admissions “bump” at many schools, since women are somewhat underrepresented in engineering.
At Cornell, a liberal arts major who decided they would rather be an engineering major would have to do an internal transfer. Which is certainly possible, lots of people do it. Though not guaranteed. One can generally take courses though, without transferring, provided prerequisites are met. Similarly, an engineering major can take courses in economics , government, etc in its liberal arts college, as well as public policy courses offered in the Policy Studies major in its College of Human Ecology. And business-related courses offered at Dyson.
@monydad, agree that shuffling amongst colleges at Cornell may not be a straight line - I’ve heard mixed results.
By contrast, I have heard relatively few “mixed results”, actually. Everybody I knew who wanted to switch schools, did. Both in the past and also quite recently. One guy on CC said he knew somebody from the ag school who couldn’t switch to CAS, back in the day. That’s the only negative case I recall even hearing about. A possible exception is Dyson, which I’ve read was tough to switch into, yet all three three kids I know who applied for internal transfer there were all successful.
I’m pretty sure that between CAS & engineering, which is what we’re talking about here, it’s not too tough to switch. At least it wasn’t in my day. I did it myself. It was actually relatively common, between these two colleges.
There has to be a process.They can’t just accept somebody blindly, you have to show you can do the work at the destination college. That’s not necessarily self-evident, without checking first, because of the varying admissions standards and criteria among the different colleges. Not every hotel administration student can obviously succeed at the engineering college, for example. So they have to check first. If you can, it’s generally ok. IMO.
And if you can’t, you probably don’t want to be there anyway.
Inter-college transfer there is so common that they actually have a separate division to administer it.
http://internaltransfer.cornell.edu/
But you do have to go through the process, and it is not out-and-out guaranteed.
By contrast if you are attending a typical liberal arts college (these typically don’t have engineering) and decide you want to switch to engineering, there is no possible way you are staying put. Because your school doesn’t offer your desired major. At Cornell staying put is not absolutely guaranteed, but it is at least a realistic possibility that is not available at an LAC. And actually IMO it is more like a likelihood, if you are doing well.
Re: OP: maybe swing by Tufts???
She would be good at seeking out information and advocating for herself if there is a framework in place. Looks like there is at Cornell. It may be the way to go where it offers so many options.
She’s a UVA Jeff Scholar nominee, is also applying to Dartmouth, Princeton, Georgetown and Emory. Something in that mix should work.