<p>Pizzamom, I don’t agree. Around here, NY, more name recognition for group 2. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people in NYC say, “you know that college in the midwest that has that funny name, or name like a hotel, or starts with a G or sounds Irish” Over the last 12 years, I’ve heard it a lot because I’ve been in the college parents circles and my DH is in financial services, the type of job the top school kids want. Other than Amherst, Williams, possibly Swarthmore, it doesn’t matter. Not one whit. My own husband can’t keep Carleton and Macalester straight and he can’t remember the name Grinnell, and he hires big time.</p>
<p>A lot would depend on factors specific to your son and family/finances. Good luck as you sort through it all! </p>
<p>I don’t know much about the schools (except for hearing a lot of positive info about Carlton). If you decide to name the schools, others with relevant info can give you more help.</p>
<p>Well, right, but the world is bigger than NY. From my vantage point, there’s no comparison between a group of 3 elite, top liberal arts colleges and 3 local Pennsylvania colleges. and I’m originally from PA, lol.</p>
<p>“I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people in NYC say, “you know that college in the midwest that has that funny name, or name like a hotel, or starts with a G or sounds Irish””</p>
<p>So? This falls under “people who don’t know any better.” Among people who are college connoisseurs, for lack of a better term, Grinnell and Carleton are certainly “up there” -Mac a little less. </p>
<p>Look, I was pushing for my kid to go to Haverford at one point - should I have thought it important that most people out here in the Midwest have never heard of it? Of course not. So why does it matter that Joe Schmoe New Yorker hasn’t heard of Grinnell when it’s an excellent school? </p>
<p>I say go for the higher quality.</p>
<p>I am a big believer in the happiness principal, if finances aren’t a concern.</p>
<h2>“IMHO, there is a big difference between Carleton and the lower group in terms of the sort of student that goes there, the level of intellectual bent, etc.”</h2>
<p>Completely disagree based on the past couple of kids from my son’s high school who have gotten into Carleton. Both athletes, both “regular-smart.” We also had a tour guide like that at Grinnell. Swimmer, apparently not that interested in academics, mostly concerned with the party scene and which end of campus was “cooler” to live in.</p>
<p>I know there are brilliant kids at both those schools, as there are at many lesser-known LACs. What matters most is what your child will make of ANY college experience. cptofthehouse’s post is a good example of that.</p>
<p>Because I am not from your area and am more familiar with engineering and science schools, take this with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>The three things I would focus on are fit with the school, content/academic challenge, and law school prospects. His happiness during college will be tied heavily to fit. His preparedness/LSAT. scores will be tied to the second. His fit fir admissions may be tied to the third.</p>
<p>It is late to visit but visits can determine fit better than brochures and rankings can. He will have more challenge and likely be better prepared at the eaitlist school. Who says he won’t get A’s there? Call the law schools he favors and ask them what they recommend. That would be a 5-10very minute conversation. </p>
<p>I am not a fan of choosing lesser schools so you can be a star. Yet, perhaps that strategy is reasonable when it comes to getting into law school. I wouldn’t promote it. If he was in the bottom 25%, that strategy might be mire understandable. But since he is in the middle and can put in determined effort to keep his grades high, I would go with the better school hands down IF the fit is good.
As fir stereotypes</p>
<p>As for stereotypes of school types over large regions, stereotypes of specific schools can be misleading. If you apply a stereotype to an entire class of schools over a large region, you can easily go awry. Further, college is a discovery process. Exploring how your son specifically might fit into a particular school and department might yield surprising results. </p>
<p>The perceptions my son and I had about specific schools were challenged by visits, and he chose a clschool he said he wouldn’t seriously consider. </p>
<p>You may want to ask your son to get included quickly in the accepted student private Facebook groups for the two schools so be can pose these questions to existing students. There will likely be upperclassmen participating. Waitlist students can get blunt feedback about school fit this way. And, not everyone will blindly cheerleader their school.</p>
<p>OP-
What was the reason your s chose to stay on the WL? Does he sincerely prefer the wl school to the accepted school, or was he more curious to see what he would get if he got in? I agree with those who say at this point its a matter of “which does he really want to attend”. Rank is really, IMO, irrelevant. Congrats on the acceptances and on being able to affort to have choices.</p>
<p>Unless your son has fallen in love with the Pennsylvania schools, I would encourage him to spread his wings at the wait list school. I agree with pizzagirl that this isn’t just a difference in ranking, but a true difference in student body. I would not be so concerned with perception.</p>
<p>I son called me his first night at school. He and his entry mates were watching a silly sitcom. His exact words: “Mom, everyone laughed at the Schrodinger’s Cat joke. I know I have found my people.”</p>
<p>Had your son not been accepted off the wait list, I’m sure he would have received a good education. The second three schools are known for providing great educations.</p>
<p>As for worries about where the student falls in the pool, as a college teacher I know that most students rise to what’s asked of them. And if more is asked of them, they are going to produce and learn more.</p>
<p>I am with mathmom that sometimes I wished my son had attended his safety. He took the wrong major for his skill set (Classics) and his GPA took a bit hit from very advanced Latin and Ancient Greek classes. (He didn’t even need the Greek to graduate but was badly advised. And apparently it was all Greek to him.)</p>
<p>He ended up in Classics because the music department told him he couldn’t make it through their theory sequence. </p>
<p>It was dark days, and I wished he’d attended a school not so competitive and demanding.</p>
<p>However, he fell in love with another discipline at the very end of his tenure at is LAC, and when he came home he began taking a few under graduate courses in the new discipline at our local state u (Stony Brook, a fairly respected place.) He more than aced every course based on the preparation he got at his rigorous LAC. That, plus the name recognition of his LAC had the Stony Brook faculty begging him to get out of the UG classes and into the Masters. He was answering too many questions. He is going to TA as a masters student and then stay at Stony Brook or transfer to a different program for a doctorate.</p>
<p>Long winded way of saying that being completely challenged did turn him into a stronger thinker in a better field for himself than the ones he initially picked. He found a field where he could be at the top of his PROFESSION, but only from seeing where he wasn’t at the top. I have no doubt that at his safety he would have slid through in the two previous fields. I have no words for the satisfaction he feels right now.</p>
<p>It was strong medicine, but it worked.</p>
<p>Oh, I should add that he loved his LAC, everything about it. And he did get many A-'s there (one A – many graduate without even one) and had a fabulous four years even considering the scholastic difficulties.</p>
<p>My guess is that none of these negative things will happen to your son. My son has ADD and was derailed by a girl who talked him into discussing none of this with me so I couldn’t help him strategize. But my point is, that even with these problems, the quality of the education he received is something that has shaped him beyond what I could have imagined. It is a top five LAC, if anyone cares.</p>
<p>Cancel the above is your S is really in love with the school he deposited at and would feel bereft if he didn’t go. That would be silly.</p>
<p>mathmom, here we know all about Carnegie Mellon and Tufts, so your boys seem mighty well placed. My friend’s son teaches CS at Carnegie Mellon after getting a Masters at Cambridge and then a PhD, and says incredibly wonderful things about the program. A cousin teaches at Tufts and is very enthusiastic. Harvard is well, Harvard and wonderful and has the BEST bragging rights, but you have those already. You’re a good mommy for being happy with his choice of CM. And it sounds like your younger son is getting a lot out of Tufts even if it has its bumpy times, if I’m reading correctly between the lines.</p>
<p>I agree totally with Pizzagirl. And there is not only a difference in the overall caliber of the students, but in campus culture between the two groups. </p>
<p>Most (perhaps not all) students who go to Carleton, Grinnell and Mac aren’t there for the prestige. In fact, Grinnellians pride themselves on the fact that they’ve discovered this little school that no one knows about. (and some are unhappy that the school is working to increase its visibility!)</p>
<p>A best seller t-shirt there is: “Where the hell is Grinnell?” and the winner of a recent student-design contest is “Grinnell: The Greatest Place You’ve Never Heard of”</p>
<p>The “go with the school that wants you more” reasoning is silly. To everyone outside the admissions office, a off-the-waitlist student is just another student, and the only way the degree of being “wanted” matters is if it results in money.</p>
<p>I also agree with what consolation said:
</p>
<p>Which school would he have chosen if he had been accepted to both? Answer that, and you are done.</p>
<p>You can also search for diversity at each of these schools. The Common Data set will give you ethnic and racial diversity. </p>
<p>Finding geographic diversity can be harder. You can’t go just by the number of states students represent, because some schools will list a large number of states but in reality only a few from each and the great preponderance from the neighboring region. Some schools will break it down by percentages from geographic regions, which is more telling.</p>
<p>My D1 is graduating from Dickinson in a few weeks as Political Science major. She, too, was in the top 25% coming in, and got nice merit aid. She will be near the top of her class, and has excellent prospects for graduate or law school admissions. She was able to double major in another related field as well.</p>
<p>She has gotten a ton of attention from faculty, some great opportunities on campus (regular invitations to dinners with visiting speakers, for example), and terrific internship opportunities (State Department, a US senator, and Army War College). They also supported her desire to study abroad in an unusual country, and accepted credits from direct enrollment in a university in that country for a semester. She just finished successfully defending a 60 page senior honors thesis that stretched her a lot academically this semester. She has a job with benefits lined up in DC post-graduation, too. As a parent, I could not ask for a better experience for her.</p>
<p>We are from the Midwest, and she visited or applied to all three of the schools in the pool you say the waitlist acceptance is from. Careleton is the only one of those she might have picked over Dickinson at the time, and she now says that she would rather be at the top of her class at Dickinson than a solid B/B+ student at Carleton (which likely would have been the case looking at the SAT ranges and knowing the kids from her high school who go there).</p>
<p>Although you said you can afford both schools, there is a LOT to be said for having that extra $60,000 - $80,000 (guessing at your merit aid) in your family’s pocket at the end of the college years.</p>
<p>
Yup, and am hoping they don’t infiltrate this thread 
This</p>
<p>D went to the school that was more affordable over the one that was “more prestigious” however, she took advantage of a lot of amazing extra-curricular programs at the school she went to and that combined with her high GPA makes her resume look great for grad school. She is graduating with no debt and even had time for a part time job in her intended career. If you want to go to grad school the MCAT, LSAT, GRE, GMAT scores are very important and people from all kinds of schools get great scores.</p>
<p>Actually, GRE scores aren’t very important. Law school and med school are not undergraduate department sensitive, as the above posters have noted, but graduate school is a bit. This is not to say that an outstanding student from a less known department won’t be accepted on that basis, but a prestigious department is a leg up for academics.</p>
<p>I don’t think GRE’s are considered at all, except to see that the candidate passed a basic bench mark.</p>
<p>MCAT’s and LSAT’s are an entirely different story and are very much part of the admission process for law school and med school.</p>
<p>I am sure there are wonderful outcomes from all sorts of schools, and whatever decision an individual student made, it is always the commitment of the student that is the most important part of any equation. i got an Ivy admittance from a lackluster department.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I can categorically say that my S got an utterly amazing education from Williams College, far beyond what I got from a State U. My daughter’s very supervised process of writing a thesis at Barnard (a requirement for graduation) left her with a 60 page document that was a tremendous aid in grad school admissions and taught her how to do publishable historical research. She spent most of her days at the New York Historical Society. </p>
<p>This is not a condemnation of other choices or other programs. I would still say that Carleton and Grinnell have amazing things to offer.</p>
<p>However, a friend’s daughter just got a Fulbright from Gettysburg and another is graduating from Dickinson, and they obviously had wonderful experiences.</p>
<p>Look at the admit list for any top law school. The vast majority went to top colleges. A better ranked college very much helps in law school admission.</p>
<h2>“Grinnellians pride themselves on the fact that they’ve discovered this little school that no one knows about. (and some are unhappy that the school is working to increase its visibility!)”</h2>
<p>Not anymore. Between the growing awareness of the school’s ridiculously high endowment and an increase in marketing spending, the word is COMPLETELY out. Grinnell had a 52% increase in applications last year.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/grinnell-college/1279929-looks-like-grinnell-admissions-going-whole-lot-tougher.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/grinnell-college/1279929-looks-like-grinnell-admissions-going-whole-lot-tougher.html</a></p>
<h2>“There are people on CC who seem bound and determined to steer everyone towards the least prestigious school in all such dilemmas”</h2>
<p>I don’t think many people are actually doing that. There are far more steering others toward particular colleges based on perceived status (with “prestige” being measured by factors that may not reflect an actual, measurable difference in education quality) than on more important things, like opportunities for undergraduates, outcomes after graduation, cultural fit, and so on.</p>