^ excellent point on requirements. D isn’t taking anything she doesn’t want to take (except that writing intensive course and she knows she needs it - and as it turns out it’s very interesting!)
My D1 admitted that she was bored at her first semester of LAC (maybe 5-6 weeks into the year) – only 4 classes and didn’t yet have the abundance of outside activities that marked her high school years. 
She filled the time very well by second semester, though, joining a bunch of clubs and activities. D2 (at a more intense school) was never bored, though…
It depends on the typical number of credits per course at the latter. If the typical course is 3 credits, a student will generally have to take 5 courses for a full credit course load. But if the typical course is 4 credits, a student will generally have to take 4 courses for a full credit course load.
@The GFG as your D schedules the unofficial visits make sure she has the opportunity to attend classes. We had some overlap with your schools and at one that shall not be named publicly, my D thought the two classes she attended were way too easy. A friend’s son had a similar experience at the same school. I recall my D attended classes at four schools as a HS junior while on unofficial visits. As we looked at sports, we also considered the percentage on each team that made the league’s academic honor roll.
My best friend’s daughter attends an Ivy and is miserable right now, taking five classes and up until 2 or 3 a.m. every day doing homework. I think this situation was totally predictable based on the school’s reputation and the young woman’s habits and personality. It’s unfortunate.
When she makes the rounds for athletic recruitment, she should get time to visit with the potential teammates. She ought to be able to ask them how their grades are (well in a polite way), how much time they spend on classes/sports/other ECs, how supportive the coach is of academic pursuits.
You’ll also want to scope out resources made available to athletes for academic support. She may not need any but if she is likely to have a demanding practice schedule, she may not be able to get to the writing center during its normal hours for example.
Another thing to think about - some sports are simply not very compatible with some majors without extraordinary dedication. It might be useful for your daughter to talk to athletes on teams of similar intensity as hers to see if any major in the fields your daughter is interested in.
Another useful resource - many colleges have a “student-run” or “underground” course guide. Often the students give the “real-scoop” about what professors, courses, and majors are easy / hard. I’d also just look at the average GPA for the entire college. This can give you an idea of how hard the grading is … in the modern era a 0.2 difference is actually very large and makes a noticeable difference in the workload … people often don’t understand this. Just remember to adjust for obvious things like the presence/absence of a big engineering school when comparing two colleges. If the colleges have a Greek system then e.g. the PHA will be a source of GPA / grading information too.
You are going to have to look very hard (and carefully) to find a low intensity varsity athletic experience. 20 hr/wk of team related activities (not counting travel) are not uncommon in season even for d3 teams.
With the possible exception of the few colleges notorious for high intensive academic workloads such as Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Reed, UChicago, Swat…the rest is very YMMV depending on the individual student, his/her level of K-12 preparation/experiences, and major.
And HS stats…especially HS GPA may not necessarily correlate to having a harder/easier time in college.
If it did, I by rights should have flunked out within the first semester and be overwhelmed instead of enjoying undergrad classes and doing swimmingly well.
Despite graduating closer to the bottom of my HS graduating class, I found my undergrad experience to be easier and more manageable in terms of quantity and rigor of the coursework as well as time management. Instead of the feeling I had to furiously tread water just to keep my head barely above the waves as in HS, college was more like a swim at a nice laid back relaxing beach/pool.
The feeling I must have been “doing college wrong” by the lesser intensity was one of the reasons why I made it a point to skip some intro classes in my major and some other courses so I can have a bit more challenge. Made it more interesting…but still far less intense than my public magnet HS.
However, some other college classmates…including some older ones who graduated near the top of their respective suburban public or private/boarding schools and Ivy/elite college admission offers struggled through the very same courses I didn’t feel were that big of a deal. Some of them even ended up on academic suspension.
While it’s possible your D may end up finding the need to step up her work ethic/study skills in undergrad, it is also just as/more likely she may find undergrad to be a welcome reprieve from her superintensive HS environment and that her HS environment “overprepared” her for college…even at respectable/elite colleges like Bryn Mayr.
I must have been lucky to attend a high school where the college prep courses (including honors and the few AP courses) were decent preparation for college, but were not “extra work for extra work sake” or otherwise excessively high pressure like sometimes described on these forums. This was a high school that, at the time, sent about a third of its graduates to four year colleges (of varying selectivity levels), but many more to the local community college. College was harder than high school, but not so much harder as to be overwhelming.
Isn’t that what it should be like? I.e. both high school and college should be places where one learns, and where there is not such an overwhelming amount of work and stress that it gets in the way of learning or other aspects of one’s life.
You can parse it how you want, but at my D’s course unit school (Wes), classes were no longer per week than her brother’s classes at a credit school. So she attended class less time per week, every semester. And I don’t think the workloads per class were significantly different, though I could be wrong.
OTOH, S was ultimately able to graduate with just a concentration, not a full major, so that was cool, but not germaine to this poster’s issues.
Wesleyan requires 32 courses to graduate, so each course would be equivalent to a 4 credit course at a semester system school using the credit-hour system (and requiring 120-128 credits to graduate). Were most of his courses at the other school 3 (or fewer) credit courses, or was he in a major that required significantly more than 120-128 credits to graduate?
What I’m saying is that the 4 courses are only on paper equivalent to 4 credits each. In actual use, they are no different from the the 3 credit classes at the other school. An English class at one school would be equal to an English class at the other, no matter how you label them. So, one was generally taking 5 courses (mostly 3 credit but occasionally 4), and the other was always taking only 4 classes.
For someone like the OP’s daughter, never having to take 5 classes might be a good thing. At the school I teach at, most of the first semester freshmen have 5 classes plus a one credit first-year seminar–that’s a lot to keep track of.
Skimmed the posts and saw few explanations covering definitions comprehensively. Here’s my version.
Credit hours refer to the number of classroom hours (50 minutes usually) per week for most classes. Labs add in more time per credit. The general rule of thumb has been to add 2 hours of study per credit. Therefore 15 credits would be 15 classroom hours and probably 30 hours of homework/study time. Some students need more/less time based on abilities and prior knowledge in a subject.
Full time is generally at least 12 credits, 15-16 is typical and 18 a heavy load. To graduate in 4 years with 120 credits an average of 15 credits per semester is needed. Notice the math- 15 credits could be five 3 credit courses or three 5 credit classes. 15-16 credits could be a mix of 2, 3, 4 and 5 credit classes. It can be tougher to have many instead of only a few classes making up the same number of credits.
Confused yet? Consider writing versus problem solving courses. Some find it much easier to write papers than do math type problems while for others the converse is true. In general it is good to have a mix at least the first year- taking courses for one’s major and those that meet breadth requirements. Then there is the version of a course chosen. Some subjects have three different general/introductory courses available at some schools. Interest, ability, future goals and background knowledge help one decide which one is best.
That is why there is no simple answer. Each school will have different students. She will be most comfortable and therefore do her best with a compatible peer group. This means students who function at her academic level so she can relate to others. Perhaps her high level HS means she will be comfortable with top performers from most HS’s instead of needing to be with those in the middle of the pack of college bound students from the majority of HS’s.
I don’t think she should worry about any schools on her list. None are the very tippy top schools with that top 1% of students. She should visit and see which campuses feel comfortable. Many colleges offer sports activities without needing to be on THE team.
It depends on the school, actually. The whole idea that anyone knows what a credit hour (or course unit, or Carnegie unit, or…) means without knowing what school it’s from doesn’t really hold.
I went to a school where each class was 1 credit. Period. Whether it actually met for 3 or 4 hours (or had a TA section) was completely irrelevant. It was a class. You simply needed x number of credits to graduate.
All this 3 vs 4 credit hours stuff seems so pointless to me! What is the possible rationale? Keep it simple, stupid.
^Basically, yes. My point was the course unit school (1 for each class) generally asks for 4 a semester, while the other types often involve more. So a student not wanting to get bogged down could look for a school where 4 classes per semester was the norm. That’s all I’m trying to say.
If you are a STEM major at schools which count all courses the same, you could end up with a 6 hour lab attached to your class of 3 hours lecture and 1 hour discussion, but it still counts the same as any other class. The credit hour system would account for this. But i agree that it’s silly to worry about this too much because everyone knows that some classes are 10 times as much work as others, no matter how the official crediting system works.
I think the choice of major is going to be more pertinent to the workload than whatever differences may exist between good colleges.
Having different amounts of credit for different courses means that the school can offer courses of different “size” (workload). A student taking “small” courses could take more of them for the same amount of work compared to a student taking “large” courses.