<p>My son is just finishing his first year at Beloit so I can’t really say what the effect has been. We did visit a lot of colleges, all small LACs, many CTCL colleges. I think that there some schools that would qualify as CTCL but don’t make it into the book. Wittenburg, Gustavus Adolphus, and Roanoke come to mind. </p>
<p>It was interesting how often we ran into faculty members touring with their kids. At Hendrix, Trinity University, and Austin College we met several faculty from UT Austin and at Lawrence we talked to a guy from U of Minnesota. I certainly don’t want to contribute to the posts that have distracted many on this thread. I just thought it was reassuring that these were people who were very comfortable with their kids attending schools no one had ever heard of.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, but you’re just plain wrong about how U-Va or William and Mary admissions stacks up with the large majority of CTCL admissions. Only 27 percent of applicants to U-Va were accepted this year. Ninety-six percent of accepted applicants were in the top ten percent of their high school class, and the average SAT score was 1396. Show me comparable numbers from any CTCL school (particularly when it comes to class rank). Reed is the closest, but isn’t quite there. (And, by the way, unlike U-Va, Reed isn’t need blind and is willing to reach a little lower if you’re full pay.) </p>
<p>In any event, I’m not here to argue U-Va versus CTLC (although I happen to think it’s a no-brainer that U-Va is better). I’m here to argue whether it’s worth paying more to go to a CTCL than your typical state flagship, as well s to express and support my opinion that CTCL is a marketing gimmick targeting full pay parents. </p>
<p>And the graduate school admissions statistic that you cite? I can find the same thing on every college website. </p>
<p>Blindluck–</p>
<p>Going to a CTCL school for free instead of going to a top ranked LAC at full pay? Nobody will argue with you about that – least of all me. Congratulations on a very smart decision.</p>
<p>Family of three boys–</p>
<p>You say “a school that admits a wider range of students and actually educates them all is much more successful.” What proof do you have that U-Va students aren’t educated? I assure you that U-Va graduates applying to grad schools are being admitted to top programs in greater numbers than the typical CTCL school.</p>
<p>Redpoint–</p>
<p>Again, if what they’re teaching at Beloit is when you disagree with what you hear, then cut off the speaker from speaking, then no thank you – I’ll stick with U-Va.</p>
<p>Isn’t quite there? Reed’s acceptance rate this year was 34%. Last year’s mean SAT score for the incoming class was slightly higher than Virginia’s mean SAT score for accepted students (the test scores of the incoming class pretty much everywhere are noticeably lower than the scores of the accepted students, so the fact that Reed’s incoming class scored better on the SAT than Virginia’s admitted students means the gap between the respective student bodies was actually bigger) despite an acceptance rate of 39%. So the SAT scores of Reed’s incoming class this year will probably be higher than UVa’s, again.</p>
<p>Which is all completely immaterial in my opinion, as I don’t think student bodies can be measured by their SAT scores or by the odds of acceptance they had to overcome, or by their high-school class rank (by the way, 96% is indeed a lot… but that’s not the percentage of students in the top decile of their graduating classes who will enroll at UVa. Again, it seems you’re trying to compare the profile of UVa’s admitted students to actual student bodies at other schools, which is ridiculous). I’m just trying to show you that, even using your own premises, what you’re saying is not actually true. You keep making dismissive statements about schools you have no experience with and they keep turning out to be factually incorrect.</p>
<p>(And also I always feel the need to correct people when they are misinformed about Reed, but whatever. I know that’s annoying.)</p>
<p>familyof3boys: yes, that ought to do it. :)</p>
<p>I have friends who teach at several major universities (and in my experience too these are the people who are the most ardent fans of LACs for their own kids). I have heard a lot from them about the challenges of trying to engage students in large lecture classes. It’s difficult when they don’t even know their names, let alone have any opportunity to connect with them personally unless they come by for office hours. For some students, sitting anonymously in a large hall and passively absorbing the information–and hopefully never being called on–is their preferred learning style. Or maybe they don’t know that college can be any other way.</p>
<p>For my son, the large classes in his public high school are just plain boring. If he is not actively engaged, he checks out. (Fortunately for him, he is smart enough that he can more than get by without exerting a lot of effort.) But the classes in which he is fully engaged and expected to actively participate are the ones he loves, and he is excited about having four years of pretty much ONLY that in college. Also, the CTCL colleges do not seem to attract the cutthroat kids, but rather those who welcome an opportunity to learn with and from their peers in a more collaborative setting. This too was an important consideration for him.</p>
<p>Q: where do professors send their kids to college.
A: Where they can afford. My prof dad wanted to send me to the state school where he taught, because it would be free. So did my H’s prof dad. Both of us ended up at New College because (at the time) it was dirt cheap, an honors school, and a more interesting alternative. There were several other profs kids their too, probably for the same reason.</p>
<p>First, last I checked, thirty-four percent is a higher admit rate than 27. But, far more importantly, in making your argument you completely ignore this statistic – only 63 percent of Reed’s most recently ENROLLED class ranked in the top ten percent of their high school class. This compares to 91.5 percent in U-Va’s ENROLLED class. Yes, Ghostt, that’s right – enrolled classes. Apples to apples. </p>
<p>You see, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t extol the virtues of holistic admissions, on the one hand, and then point only to slight differences in SAT scores (assuming they’re even real) to compare the quality of one incoming class with the other. Unquestionably the differences between test scores of U-Va versus Reed undergraduates are statistically insignificant, but the typical U-Va student has a much stronger high school record. In fact, your application to U-Va is pretty much DOA if you’re not top ten percent – unless, of course, you’re a graduate of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the nation’s most rigorous public high school, located in Virginia’s Washington suburbs, where the average SAT score this year was 1489/2218 (higher than any other high school, public or private, in the entire country), and where 106 graduates (1/4 of the class) enrolled at U-Va. </p>
<p>So, I’m sorry, but there really is no question that when it comes to comparing U-Va and Reed admissions, Reed looks good (especially compared to all the other CTCL schools) but unquestionably is “not quite” there yet.</p>
<p>(And also I always feel the need to correct people when they are misinformed about U-Va, but whatever. I know that’s annoying.)</p>
<p>So slightly off topic. I read half of the book, unable to finish it. I know should finish it. But from what I understand Reed gives almost no merit aid. Do any of the CTCL schools give lots of merit aid? even up to tuition? I noticed lots of people say down to costs of local flagship. But our local flagship is $28k-32k, not really cheap for most people.</p>
<p>I did look into quite a few schools, my son was very interested in Allegheny and Reed. But Reed I knew for sure gave very little merit aid. Allegheny had scholarships listed but that still left between $28k-35k a year even after their top scholarship.</p>
<p>CTCL schools, and others that are similar, are a great value. A kid from CA with solid test scores (solid in the real world, not solid in CC world) will likley get merit awards at many of the CTCL schools. In my experience the net cost of a CTCL school ends up being somewhere between a Cal State and a UC. Layer that on the difficulty in getting admitted to the choicest CA state schools and the CTCL schools are very attractive.</p>
<p>I am sold on the LAC model. Small classes, many opportunities. Worked well for my D and hopefully will for my S.</p>
<p>Reed doesn’t need to give as much merit aid as other CTCL schools because its reputation is strong enough to attract top students without it. The advantage to applying to Reed is if you’re not quite a student of Reed’s caliber but are full pay. Reed admits some of these students to keep its finances up.</p>
<p>College of Wooster is generous with merit aid. If your numbers are good enough for admission to a top LAC, you can expect 1/2 tuition from this school. I know many strong students with an interest in LACs who apply to Wooster strictly as a financial back-up.</p>
<p>santookie, I think it depends on the school and the student. My son got very nice packages from three CTCL schools. It helped that he had great test scores–good essays too (although I am not sure how much weight the schools actually put on those). Please feel free to PM me if you would like more information.</p>
<p>Interesting, again, that CTCL schools – which purport to be “holistic” in admissions – care enough about test scores to give money to kids whose only distinction in high school was test scores.</p>
<p>annasdad (with whom I have sometimes disagreed) introduced us on another thread to an interesting USA Today site for searching the National Survey of Student Engagement data. I averaged the NSSE numbers for Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, Grinnell, Kenyon, St. Olaf, Centre College, Bennington, and Earlham. The first 3 are USNWR top 20 LACs; Centre, Earlham and St. Olaf are CTCL schools. </p>
<p>What I expected to find is that, for measures of student-faculty interaction and other signs of “engagement”, the averages would pretty much track the USNWR rankings. That’s not what I found. The one with the highest composite average is Centre College. Middlebury has the highest score for “level of academic challenge”, but the lowest for both “active and collaborative learning” and “student-faculty interaction”. However, all 8 schools have composite “Senior” averages between 55 and 62, which appears to be too narrow a range to very clearly differentiate them. This leads me to wonder if USNWR doesn’t exaggerate the differences of schools that in fact offer very similar learning experiences, at least from an “engagement” perspective.</p>
<p>Numbers for Reed and UVa are not reported. I did average the scores for several Big Ten schools (Michigan, Wisconsin, UIUC, Minnesota, and TOSU). These scores, too, are tightly clustered (46.7 to 51.7 out of 100, which is somewhat lower in every case than the LAC averages.) I could not find numbers for UT-Austin, UNC-CH, Berkeley, UCLA, any of the Ivies, or any of the NESCAC colleges other than Middlebury.</p>
<p>How do you know that test scores were their only (or even their most significant) distinction? (Not that I’d deny that scores must have been a factor.)</p>
<p>tk21769, there is no question that my son’s scores helped him at CTCL and other schools with much lower rates of admission. And you are right–he had other points of distinction as well. Of course various factors go into admissions at every school. I am sure we have both seen threads featuring kids with near-perfect SAT scores and legacy status who have gotten rejected by Harvard or MIT. But I digress…</p>
<p>I don’t have experience with a CTCL, but did I read the CTCL book awhile ago, when DS was beginning his sophomore year, does that count to be able to post? Pope’s book opened up a very different world of schools, and what was great about them. I wish I would have read this when I was a junior. My take, though, is that he was writing about these schools as an example of what a great education a young person could get at an LAC. I didn’t think his message was that these were the only colleges that change lives.</p>
<p>I don’t blame CTCL’s for marketing this term for all that its worth, but I do know that though these LAC’s did not necessarily work within DS’s parameters, it did assist in leading us to some other very good LAC’s that are on his list, such as Trinity University, Occidental, and University of Puget Sound. Though two of those have ‘university’ in their title, they are for all intents and purposes, LAC’s.</p>
<p>I do feel bad for all of the wonderful LAC’s that weren’t included in CTCL, and hope that people not only look at the CTCL schools, but other LAC’s or LAC-like schools that appear to do just as good a job.</p>
<p>I beleve this was his intention. He was providing examples of schools that were less well-known, but wonderful institutions. He also focused on schools that were not super-selective. As some of his original choices became more selective and more prominent, he replaced them with new schools.</p>
<p>For those of us who read the book, it was obvious that the listed schools were not the only schools he promoted. He gave information about which facets he felt were worth looking into (ie professor/student interaction.) He made it clear that one need not attend a prestigious, nationally-renowned university to obtain a fabulous education.</p>
<p>As far as admitting by test scores only, my D applied to one of the CTCL schools and had ACT right squarely in the middle of the middle 50% range. She did not get in.</p>
<p>Yes, some CTCLs (maybe all of them, I don’t know) market their inclusion in Pope’s book. That, it seems to me, is neither better nor worse than the schools that market their ranking in the USNWR listing. (Or, in at least one case, marketed just their inclusion as a “national university,” not bothering to mention that they were number 180-something out of what, 250 or so).</p>