Sorry, that was in response to PasadenaDad’s post. Still technologically-challenged. My worst grade at Amherst, by far, was in computer science. Oh the horror.
@wisteria100 @JenJenJenJen I thought of that NYT article that said, in part:
…when I saw this article today in Higher Ed discussing the drop in alumni giving in 2016 to ALL colleges in 2016:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/07/growth-charitable-contributions-colleges-slows-2016
It appears Amherst alumni giving did drop last year but not as much as at most colleges, or to put it another way, 2 pts below the average nationwide drop last year.
and maybe it has nothing to do with protests or alumni who wish things were like they were a generation or two ago, but rather:
@BooWilliams glad to hear your perspective! Maybe because Amherst is so small, there’s not a lot of traffic on CC here, but there are several parents who hang around and are glad to discuss whatever we can with other parents and students 
This thread has been interesting discussion for me as a concerned parent whose child was accepted ED 2021. My D tends to the left politically, did not want a large party school or was interested in a frat/sorority scene, so A appealed to her for these reasons among others. While my D will not know if she made the right choice until she actually goes there, she really did kick the tires and did a lot of comparative shopping: she spent several weeks one summer at A for a writing program, lived in the dorms, and got to know the town and surrounding areas. She also went back several times for visits in the fall. That said, she also looked at a lot of other peer LACs and small Unis. At the end of the day, it came down A and Brown for her but she wasn’t crazy about Providence, although I thought the Brown campus very appealing and parts of Providence very nice, especially the historical part. One of the things that impressed me about Brown was how enthusiastic and happy the students there seemed about being there (not the impression I got at other schools we visited), but my D said the kids at Amherst were even more enthusiastic and friendly. I hope she’s right. Reading comments like on this thread give me a little pause, but then I do not think any college is perfect and if she finds some good friends, makes good connections with her professors, and grows as a thinker and person, it’ll have been a good choice.
Amherst is fantastic for making real connections with professors and will even toss the students some money to bring a faculty member out to a meal. It’s encouraged. This is one of the biggest advantages the College has over larger, but academically competitive colleges. But the students being accepted these days, while very diverse, are also very serious and many stressed. And perhaps for valid reasons – but if you don’t want these kids to break down, they need to be able to find a social outlet that works for them. There needs to be an array of activities so that most will find an appropriate outlet and perhaps even try different social activities that they haven’t experienced before, meaning venturing out of your comfort zone. The answer is not to penalize the students who are comfortable socially throwing larger parties. No one would care about such students throwing larger parties if they weren’t interested in them. But these students should also consider venturing out of their comfort zones into smaller gatherings in which they may not be surrounded by so many of their friends. But from my perspective this needs to be allowed to occur organically. It’s not fair to punish students for a situation which the administration created.
I’m still trying to figure out what the “punishment” is that @Purple&Black is talking about. Trying to better integrate the athletes and non-athletes into one community is not punishment for anyone.
Encouraging integration is great. But in this context forcing it is not. The problem largely developed because the only way to have a rich social life is to join a team. The kids latch onto their teammates like a lifeline, which was never the case when I attended. I wouldn’t be surprised if the advent of seriously recruiting also contributed to the problem. People like to hang out with people with whom they have things in common. To assume that you don’t have something in common because someone is a different color, different socio-economic background, athletic or nerdy is ignorant and socializing gives people the opportunity to find out what they have in common. Wow, we both love Kendrick Lamar, fashion, watching bad movies, dancing, etc. But when the administration has created a situation where the socializing revolves around obtaining party permits, closed parties between various teams and then determines that the athletes and non-athletes aren’t hanging around together and the College’s solution is to come up with more rules – that will impact athletes entering into room draw as well as the composition of athletic teams --there’s a serious problem. And the serious problem is that the administration isn’t taking responsibility for a social situation which it created and its solution is to come up with more and more rules that now are going to potentially limit athletes ability to go into room draw with the people of their choice. In the words, they are happy to legislate the students’ social lives rather than acknowledge the fact that there are significant issues that can’t be addressed through rules. Time will tell. My guess is that well-rounded students who are socially adept and that want to throw parties without a lot of red tape will go somewhere else, which will, of course, only exacerbate the problem on the Amherst College campus.
I know several current students who would strenuously object to this statement.
My take on party rules (the tiers, different permits for serving of alcohol, party size etc) is that they have a lot more to do with the fact that 1/2-3/4 of students can’t legally drink than anything else.
What would you like to see the school do that would be better than what it is trying to do now?
So, I just keep reading, trying to get to the meat of the problem. From what I can tell, this entire thread of outrage rests on a gripe about a minor change to the room draw system.
Welp.
@OHMomof2 I believe there are also a lot of students here that would agree that being on a team hands down offers the best chance for social interaction. Those who would likely disagree with that statement are themselves likely on a team.
I know Amherst tried to do some sort of “social group” thing this year, and I believe the last. I can’t remember what they called it, but the idea easily fell thru. There was no sense of cohesiveness in each group. And not enough people signed up for it, I believe. :-/
It was (is?) called “branches” and my kid did it last year and enjoyed it. But her main social circle is not from that nor is it from sports (she is not a college athlete). I won’t share details that would ID her, Amherst is small, but I can say she has a very full social life that began with kids from her first year dorm that grew with her activities, friends-of-her-friends and in a minor way, kids she met in class.
I won’t dispute that being on a team brings kids together. Of course it does, they are together many hours a week and working towards a common goal and in many cases know each other before they arrive, with specialized athletic boarding schools, national club teams and that fifth year high school thing, whatever it may be. And apparently, they come from a more similar background than the general college population does.
Perhaps my kid is just very outgoing but she’s got more social stuff than time to do it.
I’ll add she has a good friend on a varsity team who wanted to go into housing with a group of friends (she was part of it, a coed group) but was pressured by his team to go with them…I don’t know what he decided to do in the end since their group got such a low number they had to break up into pairs, but I thought that was interesting.
Is Amherst really different from other schools? Athletes hanging out with teammates, theater kids hanging out with the like, gaming kids…etc.
For the most part, kids gravitate towards kids with the same interests, true. But at Amherst, the small size of the school almost forces them to interact with others, whether it be dormmates, doing a group project in class, or the dining hall.
I agree @CottonTales
I believe that teammates will naturally hang together as will others who share similar interests/clubs. The beauty of the school is that you have a good chance of meeting people from different backgrounds, hearing new perspectives and getting to know these colleagues on an intimate level. The size and diversity contribute immensely to this opportunity.
I also agree that the athletes seem to have more parties. I don’t know if they really have more opportunity to organize parties or whether they are just more motivated. I’m not sure how many clubs plan formals off campus. Do non-athletes care? If so, I imagine they would organize parties in back rooms of restaurants too.
In regard to the new housing rules, I guess time will tell. I don’t think it will change the dynamic drastically, and it may increase the diversity of friendship circles. I don’t see how this is a bad thing.
Hanging out together is one thing. Maintaining five or six dorms that are 85% male is another. I think the situation was tolerable so long as the social dorms were relatively run-down and not very popular. But, now that they’ve been bulldozed the question becomes what to do with all of those guys once the Greenway dorms open? There’s no way the newest dorms on campus are going to be 85% male.
My purpose by posting was to give high school students thinking of applying and/or matriculating some feedback. I It’s just one perspective, not necessarily right and not necessarily wrong. There are tons of colleges out there and what is a good fit for one kid isn’t necessarily a good fit for another.
In my opinion, and based upon my experience and what I observed of my children’s experience, you really don’t have much time to “do your homework” unless you are willing to sacrifice class time and potentially risk poor grades junior or first semester senior year. Ideally, you want to visit a college and spend a night when they are in session, which isn’t that easy, especially if you want to do this with more than one or two. Once your acceptances roll in (or wait lists), you don’t have that much time to “do your homework.” For those kids that just intuitively know it is the perfect fit and it works out, couldn’t be happier for them.
The idea of transferring isn’t that realistic in my opinion. From September until December of a student’s first year at college probably isn’t a long enough time for the average first year student to commit to transferring and get applications in to transfer as well – unless they don’t give the college they are attending a decent chance. Transferring after sophomore year would likely be difficult socially in terms of finding friends at the school into which a student is transferring because social groups may be fairly solidified at that point? The option of doing junior year abroad may make transferring even less appealing at that point. But it’s up to the student.
I have no interest to get into an argument about whether my perspective about Amherst College is right or wrong. I also don’t think that’s beneficial for the parents and students reading this thread. The main point is that they have to weigh all the opinions, input, etc., and make the best decision that they can under the circumstances.
Again, the academics are top notch. The accessibility of the faculty is generally unsurpassed.
Over and out.
@Purple&black deserves our thanks. Previous threads on this forum have revolved almost exclusively around the options available to the non-partier, or to the non-athlete. I’m assuming, if DD is presently a junior, that the bulk of her frosh and sophomore years were spent while the so-called, “social dorms” (five dorms built expressly to compete with fraternities back in the mid-1960s) were being decommissioned. They represented a fifth of the available beds at Amherst and, if @purple&black is to be believed, more than half the entertainment space available for parties on campus.
I think there’s probably a cautionary tale here having to do with the hazards of building and constructing one’s way out of every situation and the consequences for the social fabric of the school. I hope that when the time comes to retire Wesleyan’s equivalent social dorms (built between 1956-1962) that the trustees will consider renovating them over time rather than replacing them altogether.
The Greenway dorms were built to focus on large, common social spaces, not living areas within suites. The common suite living areas are small - too small for much pf a party beyond the residents and a few friends.
When socializing not within a dorm suite behavior has to be different. In particular illegal behavior - underage drinking, drug use, sex - whatever. I think this is the social engineering being objected to - kids can’t just let off steam any way they want in those open-to-all common spaces and that is both good and bad.
I’ve really appreciated the discussion and issues raised in this thread so thanks @purple&black .
I started writing a note here about all sorts of data contained in the ‘Place of Athletics at Amherst’ report that’s not been mentioned in this thread, but my note got too long and boring. But I’d urge anyone who’s not read the full report to do so. There’s some really interesting stuff in there, and one can extrapolate some of the numbers to yield some interesting info about the demographics of the student body that goes beyond athletics.
But while I was pondering that I realized that it’s possible that a lot of folks interested in Amherst haven’t seen this report, which I think has a lot of interesting numbers, not just about the current freshman class, but also about the distribution of majors in the class that just graduated.
https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/Amherst%2520College%2520SSR%2520Class%2520of%25202020.pdf
Completely agree, and I would like to add that my closest friends from Amherst are the kids I met on my freshman hall. I played a varsity sport for 4 years and my immediate roomate, when we lived in a double frosh year, was a teammate, but the other 8 guys who became my best friends were not. It was (is) an incredibly diverse mix of people, including a theater major. He designed lighting for the shows and, as a group, we saw as many of those shows as possible to support him. I am still actively involved in my sport’s alumni group, but my very best and closest friends - the people I regularly call and email and fly around the country to see - are the eclectic group of kids from my freshman dorm. The quality of people I met at Amherst and the relationships we formed over 4 fun years, most of which were not driven by sports participation, make me forever grateful I had the opportunity to attend Amherst. I hope your kids, and my D, love it as much as I did.