<p>I am not username…but I think the students at Oberlin are very politically and environmentally aware.</p>
<p>I am not username…but I think the students at Oberlin are very politically and environmentally aware.</p>
<p>Emilybee, I’m wondering what other schools your so lilked since he also liked Bates?</p>
<p>I could be wrong, but I think most LACs are lopsided in their F/M ratio, which is why guys get an admissions advantage. Your D has many, many great options, but she can’t necessarily call the shots about student body size, M/F ratio, etc. You all might need to broaden your vision. I also thought of Gettysburg.</p>
<p>What are the primary differences between Gettysburg, Dickinson and Lafayette? Based on the info that I looked up, Dickinson looks like it has the least greek life. What is the vibe like at Dickenson? Also, I’m wondering … my daughter wants to go onto grad school (in psychology) and she would like to get into the best grad school she can. Won’t it make a difference whether she goes to a school like Bowdoin, Bates, Vassar, Williams, etc., versus a school like Dickinson or Trinity? I am very interested in the answer to this question.</p>
<p>I know a number of kids in top PHD programs and what they all have in common is they got great grades in their ug courses. One is at a very top program right now from Dickinson. With good recs, showing extra interest in the filed by taking advanced courses in it and finding outside venues, and the GREs, it won’t make a difference whether the student came from Trinity or Vassar. </p>
<p>Moving off the East coast to the midwest or south will give your daughter some strong options. In addition to those mentioned, consider Wooster, Kenyon, Lawrence, Earlham, and Guilford.</p>
<p>It’s too bad she won’t consider a women’s college. Mt. Holyoke and Smith are part of a consortium with Amherst, Hampshire and UMass Amherst. Scripps is part of the Claremont Consortium. And Bryn Mawr is in a consortium with
Haverford, Penn and Swarthmore. And she would likely get merit at any of them.</p>
<p>My D is in a similar situation of being a recruited athlete but hesitating to apply ED for a number of reasons, one of them being so she can compare merit offers at the end. If the team is less competitive and she is strong, it’s likely she could run even if she doesn’t commit early. NESCAC schools, a number of which are on her list, tend to be quite competitive athletically.</p>
<p>As far as Dickinson goes, I know a NMF who was also a legacy who got a really lousy merit package from them. YMMV. I have never seen Dickinson, so I can’t tell you much more about it. Gettysburg is heavily Greek, my D won’t look at it. Lafayette is very small and personal and the dorms are beautiful. It’s heavy engineering and I believe it’s actually got more boys than girls. </p>
1 Like
<p>walsh101, you haven’t said where you were from but when I was searching for merit-offering LACs with my son we were surprised by the Greek-ness of the PA schools.</p>
<p>I pulled this from another thread. This is from the National Science Foundation’s ranking of undergraduate origins of PhDs. Note how many of the merit-granting schools named above appear on this list above others you might be more familiar with.</p>
<hr>
<p>Percentage of graduates getting a PhD
Academic field: ALL</p>
<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees: ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database
Number of Undergraduates: ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database </p>
<p>Note: Does not include colleges with less than 1000 graduates over the ten year period.
Note: Includes all NSF doctoral degrees inc. PhD, Divinity, etc., but not M.D. or Law.</p>
<p>1 35.8% California Institute of Technology<br>
2 24.7% Harvey Mudd College
3 21.1% Swarthmore College<br>
4 19.9% Reed College<br>
5 18.3% Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br>
6 16.8% Carleton College<br>
7 15.8% Bryn Mawr College<br>
8 15.7% Oberlin College
9 15.3% University of Chicago<br>
10 14.5% Yale University
11 14.3% Princeton University<br>
12 14.3% Harvard University<br>
13 14.1% Grinnell College<br>
14 13.8% Haverford College<br>
15 13.8% Pomona College<br>
16 13.1% Rice University
17 12.7% Williams College<br>
18 12.4% Amherst College
19 11.4% Stanford University
20 11.3% Kalamazoo College<br>
21 11.0% Wesleyan University
22 10.6% St John’s College (both campus)
23 10.6% Brown University<br>
24 10.4% Wellesley College<br>
25 10.0% Earlham College
26 9.6% Beloit College<br>
27 9.5% Lawrence University
28 9.3% Macalester College<br>
29 9.0% Cornell University, All Campuses<br>
30 9.0% Bowdoin College
31 8.9% Mount Holyoke College<br>
32 8.9% Smith College<br>
33 8.8% Vassar College<br>
34 8.7% Case Western Reserve University
35 8.7% Johns Hopkins University<br>
36 8.7% St Olaf College
37 8.7% Hendrix College
38 8.6% Hampshire College<br>
39 8.5% Trinity University<br>
40 8.5% Knox College<br>
41 8.5% Duke University
42 8.4% Occidental College<br>
43 8.3% University of Rochester
44 8.3% College of Wooster<br>
45 8.3% Barnard College
46 8.2% Bennington College<br>
47 8.1% Columbia University in the City of New York
48 8.0% Whitman College
49 7.9% University of California-Berkeley<br>
50 7.9% College of William and Mary
51 7.8% Carnegie Mellon University<br>
52 7.8% New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology<br>
53 7.7% Brandeis University
54 7.6% Dartmouth College<br>
55 7.5% Wabash College<br>
56 7.5% Bates College<br>
57 7.5% Davidson College<br>
58 7.2% Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute<br>
59 7.2% Franklin and Marshall College<br>
60 7.1% Fisk University
61 7.1% Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL)<br>
62 6.8% University of California-San Francisco<br>
63 6.8% Allegheny College<br>
64 6.6% Furman University<br>
65 6.5% University of Pennsylvania<br>
66 6.5% Washington University<br>
67 6.5% Bard College<br>
68 6.4% Northwestern Univ<br>
69 6.4% Rhodes College<br>
70 6.3% Agnes Scott College
71 6.3% Spelman College
72 6.2% Antioch University, All Campuses<br>
73 6.2% Kenyon College<br>
74 6.2% University of Dallas<br>
75 6.1% Ripon College<br>
76 6.1% Colorado College<br>
77 6.1% Bethel College (North Newton, KS)<br>
78 6.0% Hamilton College<br>
79 6.0% Goshen College<br>
80 6.0% Middlebury College<br>
81 6.0% Erskine College
82 5.9% University of the South
83 5.8% University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
84 5.8% Drew University
85 5.8% Wake Forest University<br>
86 5.8% Tougaloo College<br>
87 5.8% Goucher College
88 5.7% Chatham College
89 5.7% Cooper Union<br>
90 5.7% Alfred University, Main Campus<br>
91 5.7% Tufts University<br>
92 5.6% University of California-Santa Cruz
93 5.6% Colgate University<br>
94 5.5% Colby College<br>
95 5.4% Bucknell University
96 5.4% Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
97 5.4% Concordia Teachers College<br>
98 5.4% University of Virginia, Main Campus
99 5.3% Sarah Lawrence College<br>
100 5.3% Southwestern University</p>
<p>No, it will not make a difference where your D does her undergrad. There are so many good schools. She just needs to do good work and she can go basically anywhere for grad school. By that I mean, she will also have great grad school options if she works hard and impresses her profs in undergrad.</p>
<p>St Olaf! Fantastic school. Totally underrated with great reat merit aid. Also, Oberlin, Gettysburg, Beloit, Union. U of Rochester.</p>
<p>Have you checked out The College of NJ? I was really blown away by it. </p>
<p>St. Olaf is a great school, but I would not say great merit aid.</p>
<p>For Midwest schools, Grinnell, Lawrence, Beloit, Denison and Wooster would all <em>likely</em> be more generous. But St. Olaf also has a slightly lower starting sticker price.</p>
<p>If she enjoys music, St. Olaf, Lawrence and Oberlin are all great for that, with the latter two having conservatories too.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am unclear about your question. Is your daughter afraid that Oberlin is TOO politically/environmentally aware for her liking? Based on the schools you have mentioned here and elsewhere (well, maybe not Vassar) she seems a bit more middle of the road.</p>
<p>Lafayette and Denison are both schools of the type the OP was describing. I am not sure about the Greek life at Denison, Lafayette has some but it is supposedly on the decline.
A very good State school with an LAC feel is Geneseo within the SUNY system. It is larger at between 4000 to 4500 students, the expense of attending would be considerably less costly.
Perhaps look at LAC’s in area’s geographically that are under represented with students from your area of the country and that are ranked in the mid to high 30’s and above. The University of Richmond just came to mind also, they are more highly ranked but they can be fairly generous with merit aid. I hate saying things like this but another point or two on your daughters ACT may make a big difference in her ability to secure potential merit awards.
Best of luck! Our family was in a very similar position not that long ago.</p>
<p>The LACs tend to have more females than males. Because people like your daughter tend to prefer schools with that 50/50 split in gender, and the schools know it, when the applications are heavily of one gender, it’s more selective for the other. So, it will be an issue that she is a female. </p>
<p>Wow, Oberlin has changed from a school that gave NO merit money and was stauchly against it on the principle that the school resources should go toward financial aid. One of the school officials made a widely circulated announcement about this some years ago, when Oberlin decided to start giving out merit money. A whopping third of all students not getting any financial aid got merit money that averaged $13k according to the common data sets. That is more generous than the 13% who got merit money without financial aid with an average of $10K at Dickenson. However the upper 25% mark with ACTs is a score of 30 at Dickenson, and 32 at Oberline. </p>
<p>Really, with how quickly things can change year to year, I would call Admissions directly and ask right out how many $20K+ merit awards are given out each year. If the answer is a very low number…well, the chances of a student not up there in stats without some hook getting one is miniscule. Yes, it can happen, but you are fishing in a pond where the fish are small and very few big 'uns. Why do that when there are better prospects out there? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I wasn’t going to say this either, but since you did…a number of automatic scholarships/scholarship competitions start at a minimum ACT score of 32.</p>
<p>And again…look for colleges with in your price point of $45,000 to $50,000 a year. There are many fine choices within that price range.</p>
<p>Though, yes, it could, but the LACs aren’t calibrated as much that way. The bigger schools, yes. But OP is looking at LACs.</p>
<p>I apologize if this has already been mentioned, but you might want to check out the COPLAC (Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges) schools. </p>