<p>PT is right. You guys are getting your pants in a wad over the statement that it isn’t well known and hence has relatively few applicants versus research unis. But that’s the truth. It’s not well known among the general public. My D goes to a Wellesley and it’s the same exact thing - even with Hillary, John Q Public hasn’t heard of it unless he lives in Boston. </p>
<p>That doesn’t make it not a great school, though. You are getting the idea of “not well known among the public” confused with “not a good school,”. Of COURSE Williams and all the rest of the top LACs are great schools. They just aren’t well known among the masses, that’s all. No big deal. </p>
<p>“Williams is a tiny LAC that most people have not heard of or value.”</p>
<p>Wow PurpleTitan thats pretty harsh. I always thought of Williams as a very good school. Wasn’t on my D’s list but a lot of her classmates had it among their top choices.
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<p>This is what I mean. It’s not “harsh” to say that LACs aren’t well known in the general pop. It’s not a statement on their quality. It’s not the insult you all took it to be. It just is. </p>
<p>Thank you, @Pizzagirl, that’s what I meant.</p>
<p>One interesting phenomenon is that the admit rates for the top LACs and certain Ivy/Ivy-equivalent RU’s have diverged over the past 20 years.</p>
<p>20 years ago, the top LACs had lower admit rates than some Ivies/equivalents. Now the opposite is true.</p>
<p>Possibly because internationals and immigrant families don’t know of or value LAC’s as much? Possibly because the overall mentality about and rationale for going to college has gotten more pre-professional over the past 2 decades? Just speculating.</p>
<p>I fear we have taken this thread off course so my last thought is as follows. It was the not the "few have heard of " part that caught my attention. It was the “few people value.” If someone has an interest in attending an LAC -which many, many people do - it seems they would value the top LAC’s in the country which include Williams, Wellesley, Amherst and places like Swat and Haverford. </p>
<p>And on the other point of name recognition - I have only been on CC for 2 years but I can honestly say of all the colleges mentioned on this board during that time there were only 2 that I never heard of - Knox and Sewanee. I looked them up and know them now. If you have children in High School you get pretty familiar with things that will become important. </p>
<p>Of course, but in great swathes of this country there just is little interest in attending an LAC. Far more students are “swept out” by large state unis, esp in the Midwest and CA. They are niche schools, fundamentally. </p>
<p>“If someone has an interest in attending an LAC -which many, many people do”</p>
<p>In the grand scheme of things, a small fraction of the relevant population has this interest. The vast majority of college-bound students doesn’t look at LACs, even among middle-class families in the Northeast. Maybe they’re all making a giant mistake – but that doesn’t change the fact that this is not a very popular option among college-bound students. Look at the ED admit rates versus the scores of enrolled students. I don’t know anyone who’d claim that Williams is academically inferior to Georgetown or Brown. It’s just less popular. That’s how it goes.</p>
<p>@HarvestMoon1: Not just a regional thing. A very small percentage of the global applicant pool to US colleges attend boarding school.</p>
<p>Interest in LACs among the boarding school crowd far far exceeds that of the general populace at large.</p>
<p>That could be part of the reason why admit rates of the top LACs have not fallen as far as those of Ivy-level RU’s, come to think of it. Over the past 20 years, a greater swath of society has gotten interested in going to college, while the boarding school population has stayed the same or may even have fallen (at least, would have fallen without an influx of foreign students).</p>
<p>As someone who was rejected at WashU Ed this year I do wish I had applied elsewhere I liked with a more, er, generous ED acceptance rate. At this point I want to be accepted to a school that will give a lot of need-based aid (thus, selective). As I add lots of more highly-ranked lacs to my RD list, my mother has not heard any of them. The first question she asks when I tell her about a new school I’ve found :“Where’s it at??”. She has, however, heard of Rice University. Although we do live in the Midwest, and I doubt very many people would know that Colorado, Reed, Grinnell, Swarthmore, Williams, or Carleton exist… despite some of them being in fact, in the midwest.</p>
<p>The lack of prestigious LACs in the Midwest (bar Illinois) compared to the Northeast is probably another geographical factor… There are so many great state flagships here (Umich, Uminneosta, UIUC, etc.) that the ‘average family’, even one that is applying to out-of-state universities, doesn’t look the way towards LACs.</p>
<p>I resolved to apply to Williams this week as well. Of the 13-ish universities I plan to apply to/have already applied to, their net price is the lowest. Plus, I actually have a decent shot at getting in, even in RD, compared to highly-ranked universities where the average test scores, GPA, and class rank are stellar high.</p>
<p>@hanna IF your premise is true, and it’s a big if, then I’m thankful I had less competition to get accepted into my dream LAC, Swarthmore. At this college(and also at Williams, Amherst ect.), I would have had the best of both worlds: personal interactions with professors without having to compete with graduate students for research opportunities combined with mingling with highly intellectually gifted classmates then receiving top-notch financial aid on top of it all. I thought I had top shelf stats and ECs ect. but apparently many of my equally qualified peers had the same idea and alas, I was rejected. So in my little corner of the admissions process, the initial premise put forth by some people on this post that LACs are not as popular to top notch candidates and are easier to get into ED is pure hogwash. My tears have confirmed as much.</p>
<p>If you look at the range of SAT I scores for Williams College, the 25th percentile scores and 75th percentile scores are:
CR: 670-780
M: 660-780
W: 680-780</p>
<p>The 25th percentile and 75th percentile scores for Stanford are not so different:
CR: 680-780
M: 700-790
W: 690-790</p>
<p>and not that different at Harvard, either:
CR: 690-790
M: 700-800
W: 690-790</p>
<p>These data come from the Common Data Set for each college (first-time freshman admissions). I should note that while all are recent, they are not from identical years, because the colleges update their Common Data Sets at different rates, in terms of the easy web accessibility.</p>
<p>At Williams, 92% of the students were in the top tenth of their high school class, while at Harvard, this figure was 95.4%. At Williams, 97% of the students were in the top quarter of their high school classes, while at Harvard, this figure was 99.7%.</p>
<p>Williams is among the LACs with the highest academic statistics of the entering class.</p>
<p>I don’t have any connection with Williams. However, when we looked into the college, we found out about the academic strength of the students there. A fact of incidental interest: President James A. Garfield was a Williams alumnus. It is said that he was able to write in Latin with one hand while simultaneously writing in Greek with the other hand. I can’t verify this (!), but I can believe it. </p>
<p>@threegoodapps, I’m sorry that you’re facing this disappointment. Popularity, by definition, isn’t about one person’s experience. If you are denied at your dream school, your feelings won’t have anything to do with whether 3 or 7 or 10 students were denied for every one that was admitted. That’s only of interest to adults who are looking at national trends, not to students coping with heartbreak. A thread comparing ED/EA rates is necessarily about large patterns.</p>
<p>@quantmech, exactly. That’s what I was getting at with my comment about comparing ED admit rates to academic qualifications. Popularity doesn’t tell you much about academic quality. Put another way, Harvard’s student body doesn’t necessarily get any smarter when their app pool grows and they begin to reject 95% instead of 75%. Once you have enough superb students applying to fill the seats in the class, becoming more “selective” doesn’t change the class profile that much.</p>
<p>Sorry to hear, @threegoodapps. It’s still tough to get in to a top LAC, where you need good/great stats, ECs, essays, & recs. It’s just not <em>as</em> tough as getting in to HYPSM.</p>
<p>Good luck as you look elsewhere.</p>
<p>If it makes you feel better, I’ve looked through a few ED results threads, and so far, I’ve found only one school where all the results made “sense” (all the extremely high stats kids got in and the lower stats kids needed major hooks like URM/special talent/major achievement).
Granted, stuff like essays and recs are hard to judge (because nearly everyone says their essays were terrific and their teachers thought they were the best ever), but I’ve encountered head-scratchers, where Applicant A and Applicant B are the same race and gender, Applicant A has low stats and says his essay was “meh” but gets in while Applicant B has great everything and even has a pretty significant achievement and gets rejected.</p>
<p>We looked at ED at Williams long and hard for our S. He would have been in roughly the 60% range of those scores. Their “British-style” tutorial program looked terrific (One Prof with two students for a semester). At the end of the day, the quarter of a million dollar cost caused us to pass, but if I hit the Lotto or a rich unknown aunt had passed and granted an inheritance, we would have given it a shot.</p>
<p>Very sorry to hear that @threegoodapps was not admitted. Good luck on the rest of your applications.</p>
<p>HarvestMoon, the idea of sending your kid to boarding school in the first place is very regional. To borrow Hanna’s phrase, in the grand scheme of things, a small fraction of the relevant population has any interest in boarding school in the first place. Surely you know the bs population is extremely self selected and their choices are not in the least representative of the country as a whole. </p>
<p>Threegoodapps, sorry for your disappointment and best wishes. </p>
<p>@katliamom: Actually, people whose opinion matters don’t judge others based on their lack of knowledge of niche corners of the American higher education system.</p>
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<p>@Ctesiphon: Chin up. You seem like a level-headed kid who will have some great choices at the end of the process – and maybe your mom can then explain to the whole town why Grinnell or Carleton or wherever is such a great choice. Heck, years ago, I somehow managed to get accepted to Harvard Law, and my grandmother had to have my uncle pull out a road atlas to explain where I’d be moving. And trust me when I say that her opinion mattered more to me than perhaps anyone else I’ve ever known. </p>
<p>Sometimes statements on CC that look questionable are just compressed versions of more accurate statements. If you read “People whose opinion matters have heard of Williams” as dismissive of the ideas of those who have not heard of Williams (a lot of people), then it’s obviously an incorrect statement. If you read it as the longer statement “When it comes to identifying well-regarded LACs, considering colleges across the entire US, people whose opinion matters (about which colleges that are in that set) have heard of Williams” then I think it’s generally true. For example, if someone from Minnesota said that Carleton was the top LAC in the country, I’d say “maybe, and maybe not.” Ditto+ for someone from Ohio saying that Kenyon was the top LAC in the country.</p>
<p>I didn’t make the original statement about whose opinion matters, but I think it’s perfectly defensible–just a shortened version of a valid statement. </p>
<p>I don’t agree that well-regarded LACs occupy one of the “niche corners of the American higher education system.” They are expensive in general, and they don’t offer as much aid to people outside the top 5-10% of the family income distribution as Harvard does (in general), but they are a long-established component of the American higher education system, and they are an excellent choice for some students. </p>
<p>I went to a large, public research university, and I work at one. I preferred the larger environment. </p>
<p>I love LACs. Just can’t afford the top ones that have no merit awards as they are out of our price range without some scholarships, hefty ones. For some students, the smaller environment is a very good thing. My one who went to a LAC loved every bit of his time there and he had opportunities that I doubt he would have gotten at a larger school. The profs took personal interest and directed him to a number of things that he just would not have found on his own. But I agree that for some, it’s too small of an environment and a larger school suits them more. </p>
<p>And, sometimes, people overthink things by a mile. The original statement came off as arrogant because it was. </p>
<p>I’ll also stand by the niche characterization. Your description just highlighted that it’s a niche with a long tradition and, mostly, a particular set of SES demographics. Bear in mind that, more or less by definition, the top ten LACs in the country (however defined) enroll about 20,000 students – which would make them, collectively, less than half the size of Ohio State. It’s a niche. </p>