<p>@ monydad:</p>
<p>[xkcd:</a> University Website](<a href=“http://xkcd.com/773/]xkcd:”>xkcd: University Website)</p>
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<p>I couldn’t agree more. My daughter graduated HS in 2009. Her guidance counselor was useless. I don’t think anyone in her HS administrative offices had ever heard of Oberlin. My daughter and I did all the research ourselves. </p>
<p>Sometimes Oberlin seems “quaint,” sort of behind the times when it comes to marketing the College of Arts and Sciences.</p>
<p>I agree. Especially at this level, students applying to schools like Oberlin are quite self directed and probably not relying on school guidance counselors. We certainly didn’t and neither did our daughter’s friends. The internet has made a lot of this kind of information more broadly accessible if you are inclined to search it out, and the expectation now is that colleges will therefore make that information internet accessible.</p>
<p>Why isn’t Oberlin one of the CTCL? Seemed odd to me.</p>
<p>@amandakayak: I never read the book, so I don’t know if he stuck to a list of 40 or if they decided amongst themselves that they were the ones that were most prominently mentioned:</p>
<p>[Why</a> These Schools | Colleges That Change Lives](<a href=“http://www.ctcl.org/about/why-ctcl]Why”>http://www.ctcl.org/about/why-ctcl)</p>
<p>In another book of his, “Looking Beyond The Ivies” (or something like that, I passed my copy along to someone else with kids a little younger), Loren Pope mentioned Oberlin prominently and favorably. At one point he reprinted an entire letter to the Oberlin school newspaper (at least I recall that it was Oberlin, though I could be wrong!) in which a visiting student from Williams(?) explained why she thought Oberlin was so amazing and different.</p>
<p>Somewhere else here I think an Oberlin professor who posts on this forum listed the schools that Oberlin benchmarks against as peer institutions and I don’t believe there was substantial overlap with the 40 CTCL members. </p>
<p>When I looked at the list just now I was more surprised that Warren Wilson College didn’t make the “cut:”</p>
<p>[The</a> Story Behind: Work Day 2010](<a href=“http://www.warren-wilson.edu/admission/story/workday10.php]The”>http://www.warren-wilson.edu/admission/story/workday10.php)</p>
<p>I’m not sure, but wasn’t that CTCL thing intended to draw applicant attention to less well known schools? At the time it was written, Oberlin was probably considered one of the top five or ten liberal arts colleges in the country, hardly under the radar. That was its long-held historical reputation.</p>
<p>During the 80s-90s the country, and the applicant pool in general, shifted to the right, college-age applicants became scarce, many colleges had budgetary issues, and US News got big and expanded their rating categories beyond peer review. These may have had some effect on prior long-held perceptions. But in the prior decades Oberlin was quite famous, not a candidate for CTCL promotion. Many might say that its current peer review scores indicate that nothing has really changed much, in this regard. While others may differ.</p>
<p>It’s true, many students no longer depend on guidance counselors for information about colleges (I didn’t use mine at all during my college search), but I’m continually surprised by how often I encounter students who are looking at Oberlin because of a guidance counselor suggestion. </p>
<p>Anyway, about the class profile–we don’t really have a good reason for not having this on our website. Actually, we had planned to put it up on our website a long time ago, it was just a low priority and we hadn’t gotten around to it. Much (but not all) of the information it contains was already included elsewhere on our website. Now that we have the new profile for the class of 2014, it should be up on the website soon.</p>
<p>Good move.</p>