Anybody have thoughts about Hartwick College’s low graduation rate - 53.4% ? My D and I visited in August. Of all the schools she has seen this is one of her favorites. We got a good feeling from the kids there, campus was pretty, but why such a low graduation rate? Also, would she be challenged academically? She has a 1380 SAT 30 ACT 93.5 GPA. Also, any thoughts on the dorms would be great. Thanks !
I would be concerned about the low graduation rate for sure.
Hartwick was one of my sons safeties, with stats similar to you D’s. He had other safeties he liked better though but applied to Hartwick because they gave auto merit.
Honestly, the caliber of students I know who go/went to Hartwick are nowhere near your D’s.
I also know one girl who went to Hartwick then transferred into SUNY Oneanta after her freshman year. She had been rejected from Oneonta originally. Maybe that is a common at Hartwick.
Graduation rates can be misleading since they do not always count the students who transfer. Also, the freshman retention rate is 78%. At any rate, looking at the profile on collegedata.com, it looks like OP’s daughter is way above the norm at Hartwick in terms of academics. I think you could do better in safety schools.
Pretty campuses can be very misleading. Prospective students and their parents really need to check the academic fit - just as important for a safety as it is for a match. I teach at a pretty campus with an academic profile below that of Hartwick. Our students who are at the top , who are here because of affordability or proximity or some other reason, feel like ducks out of water, and they are already in the toughest majors we have. If you have a choice, and it looks like you do, look for other opportunities.
A good friend graduated from there (30 years ago) and went on to get his master’s at Harvard.
Agree Oneonta is a pretty town, and of course SUNY Oneonta adds a lot of students to it, with all the bars, restaurants, etc that brings.
It doesn’t seem like Hartwick would be an ideal academic fit, based on your daughter’s stats. The 75th percentile SAT CR + M is 1190. Only 15% graduated in the top 10% of their HS class. If she’s looking for a small liberal arts school in upstate NY, would she be interested in Colgate, Hamilton, SUNY Geneseo, Hobart, Bard, Skidmore, or Union College? All of these would have students who are more similar to her academically.
Lots of things can contribute to a school’s graduation rate. At very small schools, the limited number of majors can be a problem. Students arrive undecided, discover an area of interest, and … the school doesn’t have it.
Schools in small or remote areas may do a great job retaining local students, who already understand the area, but has a hard time with students from a distance.
If your daughter wants to go and gets merit too good to pass up, make sure she goes in with her eyes open. There are likely to be other kids like her on campus, but will they stay or move on? Does she want to be the big fish? Will she stand out in ways that benefit her? Or will she feel like she’s not being challenged. She knows herself best. but you can ask the questions so she has something to think about.
She wants to be in the middle. In HS people are always asking her for help, and she hates that. The schools @brantly mentioned, HWS would give merit, so that would be affordable for us. The rest do not give merit aid, from what I know. If anybody knows otherwise, please tell me! We visited HWS, and she did not like it. We just drove around, didn’t see anything. It was Columbus Weekend, no students around, so it was hard to tell what it’s really like. From what I’ve read on CC, it seems to have a lot of preppy kids. She got the impression that it was like a high school. What we can afford to pay does not match her academic talents. It’s really frustrating and I’m worried that she won’t be happy wherever she ends up. We visited Geneseo the same weekend as HWS, had a tour. It was OK. The dorm rooms were pretty tiny, we thought. Hard to tell with nobody around. This is weird, but the cafeteria smelled funny. The classroom too, like mold or something. I’ve never seen anybody mention this about Geneseo on here. The town seemed really blah. Other than those things it’d be a good fit IMO. Thanks for all your replies.
She should look at St. Lawrence. They give good merit aid,
HWS (another school S applied to) is on the preppy side. S was willing to overlook that but in the end it was between SLU ( which doesn’t have a preppy vibe) and Bates.
Union gives merit aid. Look at the Presidential Scholarship.
http://www.union.edu/offices/finaid/type/scholarships/
Looks like Skidmore does for certain majors.
https://www.skidmore.edu/financialaid/merit.php
Is SUNY affordable for you? Buffalo, New Paltz, Stony Brook, Binghamton. Ithaca College gives merit. Any of these would be a better choice than Hartwick academically. What about OOS privates? She would likely get money at Tulane and University of Miami.
Second St. Lawrence. Also, consider expanding the search to the near-midwest - Ohio has several great schools like Denison (I know two current students who turned down HYP to attend with large merit - your D would not be out of her element here at all), College of Wooster (similar), and to a lesser degree in terms of merit, Kenyon and Oberlin.
Is the 1380 SAT just CR + M? What does your D want to study? Is she looking for small LAC? In addition to expanding search to Ohio, you might also look at schools like Gettysburg, Dickinson and Muhlenberg in PA - she would most likely get merit $$ at all three. We, too, didn’t love Geneseo - although I was really hoping D would. Good luck.
She’s not interested in Ohio, though I’ve tried to persuade her to apply to Denison and Wooster. She wants to major in Geology. 1380 is CR & M 1950 with the writing section. Not necessarily looking for a small LAC. Big is ok, but not too big.
Does she know what kind of work she’d like with the geology major? She might be better off doing geological engineering.
She wants to pursue hydrogeology.
My D1 and a friend both applied to Hartwick for nursing. They both visited and had official sleep overs on the same night. We laugh and call it the “bad karma school visit” because Hartwick had lost most of my D’s paperwork, didn’t offer her meal coupons, and roomed her with someone who was transferring. She left with a bad feeling for the school and didn’t attend. That being said, she hadn’t wanted to go to school anywhere in that area so that played a part too.
I would have your daughter visit again and perhaps stay over. Look closely at the dorms and at the particular program she’s interested in (I don’t know anything about hydrogeology but it seems that big land grant schools might have more to offer in that area), find out if she’s required to live in the dorms for all 4 years - that fact can be buried in fine print. Find out how easy or hard it is to take classes at nearby SUNY Oneonta. They may just have a slightly different calendar, they may have a very difficult bureaucracy.
Geology? Colgate is a natural choice for your D for so many reasons.
- They have an excellent geology dept. http://www.colgate.edu/academics/departments-and-programs/geology
- It's a small LAC in upstate NY (like Hartwick, but very different from Hartwick academically)
- Her grades and scores are in the range.
- They give excellent financial aid.
- ED deadline is November 15, so there's still time! They highly value ED candidates because many Ivy-wannabees use Colgate as a safety application. They also have ED2. One interesting thing about the Colgate application process is that if you apply RD, you have until March 1 (at least that was the date last year) declare that you want to change your application to ED2. In other words, they give you until AFTER the normal ED2 deadline to change your mind.
Lafayette could be worth a look - they have a good geology program and would be a match stats wise
I also bet that the attraction of a school like Hartwick is that it is a small liberal arts school. Small liberal arts schools tend to be nicer, kinder places where faculty often nurture the intellectual potential of their students. Naturally not all do, but the better ones certainly. Relationships with students and teaching ability usually serves as the basis for hiring retaining and promoting professors whereas in sone large universities faculty members may often be discouraged from spending “too much time” with students since it is presumed that the time with college students detracts from the primary priority of some medium sized or large schools which are focused on research productivity and grantsmanship.
Another benefit of small liberal arts schools is that the college students often have relationships with faculty and are given opportunities that are more similar to those of graduate schools in some medium sized or large universities.
By the way, don’t be fooled into thinking a faculty student ratio of 1:10 at a college and a ratio of 1:10 at a university means the same thing. Remember that a professor at a LAC is devoting available time to college students whereas a professor at a medium or large university may rarely interact with a college student except perhaps during office hours where many of the 300 students in a given “seminar” (joke) may be lined up to ask questions. Also, college students at a good LAC may have much better access research opportunities and will be more likely to have meaningful assignments compared to college students at a medium or large university where the college students may be supervised only by graduate students and may rarely see a professor out of class. Naturally the types of different kinds of research may be more limited in a LAC but in that large university, if your research experience is limited to passing out questionnaire to college students, what difference does the type of research really make?
So while Hartwick may not be the ideal school, you may want to look at other small LACs.
I’d second taking a look at Colgate, Hamilton, and Skidmore,