I want to actually experience the 4 seasons! CA senior needing help to make college list

College Search & Selection
41

@momrath Wow that’s something that I had never really considered before, I’ll definitely try turning being Asian from a disadvantage to an advantage. You’re making Williams look better and better each post! Do you have some sort of personal connection to Williams? It sounds like you really love the school!

@h0kulani Thank you for those recommendations! I loved Boston when I visited. All the history there, the red brick buildings, the overall community vibe, everything was great in that city and I could definitely see myself going to a school there in the future.

@warblersrule Thanks for introducing me to some more colleges in a new area, my horizons are becoming wider!

42

That list (Reply #35) appears alphabetically in its original form, but seems to have been arranged on this thread so that the LACs are grouped at the top.

College Transitions also offers an analysis with respect to pre-law:

The 20 Schools

Amherst
Brown
Claremont McKenna
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Georgetown
Hamilton
Harvard
Middlebury
Northwestern
Pomona
Stanford
UChicago
UMichigan
UPennsylvania
U of Southern California
Yale
Yeshiva

As with other information, review the analyses for both methodology (available by search) and relevance to your situation.

Regarding biology/pre-med/pre-law, I personally believe you should simply report your most likely intent at the time of your application. Should you be undecided, then you could state that as well.

43

@MyDogsNameIsFat, Yes, my son is a Williams grad, Cornell for graduate school. In the arts, not STEM, though. I would stress, however, that you’ll get a wonderful education at any of the small LACs, mid-sized privates or large publics on your list. It’s just a matter of finding the right fit and putting together a balanced list of reaches/matches/safeties, most importantly that that you can afford.

44

@merc81 Thanks for the clarification and the additional information! I think I’ll try to apply to undergrad schools that have had good track records for sending kids to law and medical schools. That way if I really can’t figure it out now then at least I can get good experience and advice once I’m in college.

@momrath Wow you must be a proud mom, your son is accomplished! I know that there are so many great schools out there, hopefully I’ll end up at the one right for me. Even if it isn’t a perfect fit, it’s about what you make with what you’ve got. My list was definitely not balanced before, which is why I’m going through this whole dilemma now.

45

These key words will lead you to the actual sites:

“Top Feeders – Medical School Programs – College Transitions”

and

“Top Lawyer Producer Schools – Infographic”

46

Of my current list mentioned in my OP and the NESCAC schools, which would be considered safety, match, and reach schools for me?

47

NESCAC (and similar LACs) breakdown for you based on your stats:

–> Four seasons (simplify: DC and points north, St. Louis and north, mountains, and Oregon or Washington – roughly the Mason-Dixon line); LACs; not in CA:

Reach/low reach:
Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore

Low reach/high match:
Middlebury, Bowdoin, Carleton, Haverford, Vassar, Wesleyan (CT), Hamilton, Colby, Colgate

High match/match:
Grinnell, Oberlin, Reed, Bates, Macalester, Kenyon, Colorado College, and more – down to about #50 in the USNews LAC ranking. Trinity and Connecticut College (the last two NESCAC LACs) would be matches.

Lower matches and safeties follow in the ranking. A safety should have at least a 50% admit rate and your GPA and test scores should be at or above the 75th percentile (and fit you and be affordable, like all other schools to which you apply…).

If you are a female, you can add Wellesley, Smith, Barnard, Bryan Mawr and Mt Holyoke to your consideration.

48

As an addition to my previous post, here’s the NSF research expenditure data for the life sciences for the top 80 LACs, averaged over 2006-2015. I excluded the single-sex colleges and the military academies; data was missing for Bard, St. John’s, Thomas Aquinas, Hillsdale, Knox, and Wofford. Due to its outstanding performance, I added Hope.

Bowdoin – $1,420,000
Haverford – $968,600
Amherst – $912,100
Reed – $830,000
Lewis & Clark – $756,800
Pomona – $755,700
Williams – $725,400
Franklin & Marshall – $716,500
Bates – $707,400
Bucknell – $686,800
Hope – $681,200
Swarthmore – $674,500
Middlebury – $673,400
Colgate – $624,100
Occidental – $611,700
Trinity (CT) – $574,500
St. Olaf – $539,600
Connecticut College – $531,00
Kenyon – $486,800
Richmond – $469,300
Skidmore – $443,300
Colby – $413,000
Davidson – $407,300
Willamette – $392,000
Vassar – $371,400
Macalester – $369,100
Grinnell – $361,700
Carleton – $359,100
Claremont McKenna – $354,500
Oberlin – $336,600
Whitman – $326,600
Dickinson – $321,600
Union – $316,900
Harvey Mudd – $291,100
Hendrix – $268,400
Muhlenberg – $259,900
Wooster – $234,600
Puget Sound – $232,700
Furman – $227,800
Sewanee – $190,400
Beloit – $175,000
Earlham – $167,400
Rhodes – $155,000
Washington & Lee – $153,600
Holy Cross – $139,300
Hamilton – $132,900
Lafayette – $127,900
Sarah Lawrence – $106,800
Wheaton (IL) – $103,800
Kalamazoo – $103,900
Berea – $97,000
Denison – $95,000
DePauw – $93,600
Colorado College – $92,400
Centre – $89,200
Lawrence – $83,600
Pitzer – $80,900
Hobart & William Smith – $74,700
St. Lawrence – $74,000
Gettysburg – $72,300
Illinois Wesleyan – $70,400
Allegheny – $62,700
Wheaton (MA) – $37,600

49

^Conspicuously absent from @warblersrule’s list is Wesleyan which by my calculation would dwarf the other LACs on the list at $27,000,000 in NSF (and other agency) expenditures during the same period:
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=view&fice=1424

50

I excluded Wesleyan due to its PhD programs in the sciences. It’s an apples to oranges comparison with every other LAC except Bryn Mawr.

51

@warblersrule wrote:

That’s silly. Why not exclude Amherst, Middlebury and Swarthmore because they’re named after towns?

52

@circuitrider, that doesn’t make any sense. I agree that the OP should consider Wesleyan but @warblersrule makes a good point. Wesleyan’s expenditures data includes funds going toward graduate research. It would be like comparing Wesleyan to UConn which had over 10X Wes’s NIH funding and around 50X Wes’s HHS funding.

Warblersrule’s list is clearly specifically for undergraduate institution research and the NSF listings don’t break out funding that way.

53

@Sue22 , you’re compounding the silliness by comparing Wesleyan, which does not have a separate graduate school, to UConn which is a Class I research university as defined by the Carnegie institute. All Wesleyan faculty teach undergraduates; all Wesleyan students benefit from having research labs of such quality available to them. If other LACs don’t want PhD students helping run their labs - that’s their decision.

54

You could play with these lists, which include larger and smaller colleges together:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-smartest-colleges-in-america-2016-10

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-610-smartest-colleges-in-america-2015-9

Very generally, the first about two dozen schools may be reaches for you, followed by high matches, matches, etc, until a few safeties may appear somewhere after 70 or thereabouts. That said, I hope you will actually select your college mostly independently of factors that relate to admissions only.

55

@warblersrule @Sue22 @circuitrider Thanks for all of your guys’ input, you each have really good points. I’m looking into every one of the colleges that has been mentioned in this thread so I’ll be taking everything that you guys say into consideration!

56

@circuitrider, I was just pointing out the silliness of comparing disparate types of institutions. Of course undergraduates benefit from larger labs, just as they do at UConn, but there is also the downside to having doctoral students sharing resources, a downside not shared by Wes’s purely undergraduate peers.

As @warblersrule said, you’re comparing apples to oranges. You can recommend Wesleyan as a top-notch LAC with strong science facilities without creating a false funding comparison to its peer LACs. I have no doubt Wesleyan would land high on the list in #47 but without accurate numbers for $$ not going to graduate students it doesn’t make sense to include it any more than it would to include a research university on the list.

57

@warblersrule, not certain where you are gaining your ranking system from - see attached https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=herd

Also, I don’t believe a 9-year period average accurately reflects each school’s ability to either experience a material increase or decrease in recent funding. As an example, Middlebury’s funding from 2013-2105 was $5.2mm while Hamilton’s was $8.1mm with 25% fewer students - there are many other similar examples.

58

@MyDogsNameIsFat, don’t let this pedantic spat between me and @circuitrider scare you off. If I were you I would definitely look at Wesleyan, as well as many of the other NESCAC schools.

In terms of a match school, Bates has strong med school placement and has a research hospital a few blocks from campus. Many students do internships there.

If you decide you’re more interested in law, Bates also has an amazing debate program. In 2017 they reached the round of four in the World Universities Debating Championship in The Hague, in a competition that included teams representing 375 colleges and universities from around the world, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford and Princeton universities. Most recently the Bates women’s team won the 2017 North American Women’s Debating Championship, besting the teams from Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Toronto among others. The best part is that the Debating Society at Bates is open to all students. There are no try-outs required to join and participate.

Other NESCAC schools may be equally suitable, I just know Bates best! You’ll find that NESCACs like most LACs don’t really have impacted majors, although most have at least one really hard course (often organic chemistry) which causes lot of kids to reconsider med school.

59

@Sue22 wrote:

The money isn’t awarded to graduate students. The money is awarded to the principal investigator which in most cases is the professor. So, as far as LACs are concerned, it’s more apples to apples than you might think. At most, @warblersrule might have mentioned Wesleyan’s doctoral programs as an aside, since they are rather remarkable. But, excluding Wesleyan entirely wasn’t doing the OP any favors…

60

If you look at a school’s individual data page then scroll down you can access links to the data tables. How this data should be parsed from there can be debated.

Here’s are a couple of data table for Hamilton, showing fluctuating funding/expenditures in the life sciences.
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&fice=2728&id=h3
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&fice=2728&id=h3