<p>You came on this thread as a gadfly, novaparent, so it seems a bit disingenuous of you to act surprised that you have succeeded in irritating people. </p>
<p>You’re fortunate to live in a state with outstanding, reasonably priced public options for higher education. Not all of us do. There is no reason to make invidious comparisons between Virginia schools and the CTCL schools (or any other schools, for that matter).</p>
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<p>Based on what data? USNWR?</p>
<p>“Better” for the non-existent generic student?</p>
<p>These are all excellent schools.</p>
<p>RE: Thomas Aquinas College:
Forgive me–I realized after I posted that I was thinking of a different book–Donald Asher’s
Cool Colleges for the Hyper-Intelligent, Self-Directed, Late Blooming, and Just Plain Different.</p>
<p>(Sort of like CTCL, but in slightly different vein for folks looking for “different” types of colleges.)</p>
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<p>If not USNWR, then what is your criteria?</p>
<p>That’s all right, atomom. I, for one, appreciated the provocation to take a look at the Thomas Aquinas curriculum. Fascinating.</p>
<p>Thanks atomom, more great colleges to investigate! Sounds like a really interesting book. The Pope books served as a catalyst for my family to investigate a whole category of schools we knew nothing about, the lesser known liberal arts colleges that have much to offer. Looks like Asher’s book will be another eye-opener.</p>
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<p>Indeed, and IMO this is the whole point of CTCL.</p>
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Exactly…it has been many years since I read Pope’s book, but I still remember his excellent hospital analogy. It’s easy to judge the merits of a hospital that “cures” patients and releases them healthy if you limit your intake to patients with colds. If you’re also taking in patients with malaria and tuberculosis, well, you have your work cut out for you.</p>
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I consistently fail to understand why people who go to top colleges fail to understand that other colleges are good too. I suppose it’s a ranking mentality - you can’t be on top unless other colleges get squashed beneath you. </p>
<p>For the record, I attended Duke for undergrad and am a PhD student at UCLA. My boyfriend graduated from one of the CTCL, which I visited frequently while he was there…and I have been very, very impressed by it. Yes, its smaller endowment means that it doesn’t have dorms that are as nice or a library that’s as big. What it does have are intellectually diverse, interesting, committed kids, good faculty dedicated to the students there, and great job and grad/prof school placement. In the end, I think he was changed and challenged every bit as much as I was – in fact, I’d say a lot more. </p>
<p>That’s not to say that the CTCL have a monopoly on this, of course. My sister is attending UNC Asheville after turning down Chapel Hill due to its size, something many there did. She has gone from a lazy, reluctant student in high school to a motivated, active learner with an eagerness to learn that has absolutely astonished me. Everyone knows that Harvard, Vanderbilt, etc. are top-notch colleges that prepare students well for the future. I don’t have a problem with focusing on colleges that aren’t so renowned, especially since Pope’s book came out long before CC and similar sites came around.</p>
<p>In the event that I get hired in a few years (hopefully!), I would count myself pretty fortunate if I got to teach at one of the CTCL colleges.</p>
<p>Sally305-</p>
<p>You say “I did not take any pot shots at you. Your record speaks for itself. And as I am sure you know, the two kids you described would never have had a shot at top LACs, and might have been iffy for UW.”</p>
<p>Sure you did. You said that my opinion that CTCL is a marketing gimmick for second tier LACs was based on my having an axe to grind because I have underperforming children at a better school. Shooting the messenger instead of the message is, by definition, a potshot.</p>
<p>You are apparently unaware that students admitted to U-Va, whether in state or not, and whether admitted off the waitlist or not, are rarely “iffy for UW” and are routinely accepted at top LACs. One of my two U-Va’ers did, in fact, apply to UW and was accepted before Christmas. This student did not apply to any LACs at all because she knew they were not her thing. At my suggestion my other U-Va’er did apply to an LAC – just one, and it was ranked in the top ten according to US News – and got in. </p>
<p>Northern Virginia high school students routinely enroll in LACs ranked much higher than any CTCL school – not Amherst or Swarthmore, perhaps, but certainly schools along the lines of Oberlin, Grinnell, Smith, Colgate, Colby, etc. – after being denied admission to U-Va. And UW is unquestionably a notch below both U-Va and these schools. In short, you might want to do your research before taking your potshots. </p>
<p>I’m very sorry for thinking that, for the vast majority of students and their families, it makes no financial or academic sense to enroll in a second tier LAC. And apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this way, or schools in the CTCL wouldn’t have to do as much marketing as they do. And this is an opinion that one may have without it meaning there is an axe to grind.</p>
<p>novaparent, you have had no kids attend or consider a CTCL school. You keep throwing out specious claims that others have refuted with facts, and you have revealed that your sole criterion for judging the merits of a particular college is USNWR.</p>
<p>Your commenting history shows a strange and similar obsession with UW (with literally dozens of posts slamming every possible thing about the university, even though–again–you have no current personal involvement with it). You have been called a “■■■■■” on other threads for this very reason. There is no need to do the same thing here. You are not adding anything to this discussion. I am sure there are lots of questions being posted about Virginia schools that you might be able to answer with actual knowledge and first-hand experience, and that your insights and opinions would be greatly appreciated.</p>
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<p>For the vast majority of students and their families, it makes no financial sense to enroll at any private school and pay sticker price. However, the vast majority of students who attend most private LACs do not pay sticker price - and for a given student, the farther down the prestige scale you go, the better the financial package often becomes. And because there is no academic advantage to attending one of the so-called “top” schools, you could reasonably argue that students who pay more to attend a Swarthmore or Grinnell or Carleton than they would to attend a Beloit or Lawrence or Earlham are the ones being snookered.</p>
<p>warblersrule, thank you for your thoughtful post. It’s nice to hear another perspective. A lot of professors who end up teaching at small LACs, whether they are CTCL schools or not, do so because they genuinely believe they can make a bigger difference in students’ lives through the personal attention and innovative teaching they can offer with a smaller, more focused student body. I don’t know about all the CTCL schools, but Hendrix and Wooster, in particular, seem especially focused on encouraging undergraduate research–which is probably why their graduates’ rates of admission into PhD programs is so high.</p>
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<p>And there are some - sadly, not many - who discover in graduate school that they have a passion and a gift for teaching and choose a LAC, where the path to a tenured position is often less dependent on research than at a big university.</p>
<p>novaparent: Reed, Whitman, Rhodes, College of Wooster, etc… second tier??? Are you nuts? I don’t give a flying fig what your kids wanted, my kid doesn’t want the same thing. I’ll wager that a whole lot of extremely bright students are attending these institutions with the help of financial aid and big walloping merit awards. My kid is!!! Have you been paying attention to this year’s admission threads? Scores of students have been applying to the same 25 institutions, and are devastated by the increasing selectivity, rejections and wait-lists are becoming the norm. These are people who don’t want to go to UVA, or their state flagships, and there are a lot of really good alternatives, the CTCL list is a way of introducing people to a few of them. Marketing? Every private school, even Harvard, sinks a lot into advertising, marketing is just part of this society’s economic model. </p>
<p>Do you think you’re enlightening anyone? No, you are just stating your personal preferences over and over. OK, we get the picture. You wouldn’t pay full price, you think these are second tier schools, your kids are fabulous. So what?</p>
<p>sally305-</p>
<p>Please. Enough of the potshots. There are many posters on this thread besides me whose kids don’t attend CTLC schools. If they are allowed to express their opinions, why can’t I? Because they agree with you?</p>
<p>annasdad-</p>
<p>You left out that these schools are also easier for new Ph.D’s to get hired at than big research universities. That, too, might have some thing to do with the decision making involved. And while I don’t really disagree that first tier LACs might also not be worth full sticker price compared to fine schools like U-Va, I strongly disagree that it has been proven that there is “no academic advantage” to a first tier LAC over a second. You see a lot of these posts, for example, of lists of LACs where the most students went on to get Ph.D’s. What you don’t see is where the graduates actually got their Ph.D’s FROM. I That’s the thing about statistics. Everybody has one. Nobody has them all.</p>
<p>bopambo-</p>
<p>Reed, Whitman, Rhodes, and College of Wooster are all fine schools, and probably in that order. Reed is the only one that approaches first tier, however. At least in my view. But you’re right that Wooster gives out lots and lots of money. Let’s agree to disagree without being shrill.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s bad to have a contrary view expressed on a CTLC thread that the schools aren’t worth what they charge. You can all move along now, without me.</p>
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<p>The poster child for this lately has been UChicago, which shamelessly boosts its applicant count be sending multiple mailings to thousands of kids who realistically stand no chance of admission.</p>
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<p>That may well be true - so what?</p>
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<p>You got any evidence to back that up? As in: studies controlled for the capabilities of incoming students that show demonstrably greater academic gains at so-called “top tier” schools, as opposed to those farther down the prestige chain? If so, do enlighten us.</p>
<p>Wow - I was really enjoying this thread until it became obsessive to novaparent. The utmost concern for our family is the quality of education for each individual child so I have no problem with my older daughter turning down Yale and Dartmouth for Northwestern or my younger daughter turning down Bard or the Claremont Consortium for one of the CTCL. These are schools where each will succeed in a far better environment FOR THEM than any school they turned down. That is all that matters and each child will be more successful in life having gone to the school that will develop their abilities better than a status school for the sake of status. Are there other schools that could have worked for each kid? Absolutely, there are at least 50 great schools for each student in this country and if I needed to look at the list of CTCL to find some of those schools than that is what I did. It’s just another resource for parents of more undefined kids. (Couldn’t come up with a word that described, sorry.)</p>
<p>So, yes, I hope and truly believe that my daughter’s CTCL school will change her life in so many ways. BTW, she also turned down some other CTCL schools because they were not as good a match. The school she chose is nuturing, creative, and individualized which is perfect for her. Novaparent, I wish the best for your kids but please, don’t tell me how to spend my money.</p>
<p>annasdad-</p>
<p>I have no more – or less – evidence than you do for the contrary proposition. There are no easy answers. But so far, all I’ve seen from the proponents of your view is long lists of the proportion of students from given schools who earn Ph.D.'s in given fields. That’s only a starting point. Again, just using U-Va as an example, it has an undergrad business school, engineering school, architecture school, nursing school, and arts and sciences school. Do these lists take into account all of U-Va’s undergraduate schools, or just arts and sciences? Clearly many U-Va students and students at similar universities have zero interest from the get go in getting a Ph.D., but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those that do are at a disadvantage. </p>
<p>Similarly, as I said before, the lists don’t show that Beloit Ph.Ds are routinely obtained at the same top programs as Amherst Ph.Ds.</p>