<p>Hello all, </p>
<p>I was recently accepted to Sarah Lawrence, and after all my excitement settled, I may have started over-thinking... what exactly does it mean to be a Sarah Lawrence graduate?
I am making a generalization: I have noticed most people who attend Sarah Lawrence are students of the arts, which is wonderful! I am just wondering if this just because Sarah Lawrence has a lot to offer them, or is it also because SLC doesn't have much to offer students who are not planning to pursue the arts. I LOVE SLC. I love the classrooms, the environment, the proximity to NYC, but I am worried about my post-undergrad life. </p>
<p>Will grad schools like me if I have a liberal arts degree?
WIll SLC prepare me for a competitive grad school environment at, say UPenn?
Why is SLC so easy to get into now? Has it lost its credibility? </p>
<p>I know I am asking some ridiculous questions..I am just worried. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help me ease some anx. </p>
<p>Thank you</p>
<p>What are you interested in? SLC is rather small; therefore, it will have limited resources in some areas. If you are looking for Engineering or Chemistry or some such, you should look elsewhere. But there are some very good programs that will prepare you well for graduate school: psychology, creative writing, history, literature, along with the obvious theater and arts. Notice, too, they have several five year MA programs:
<a href=“http://www.slc.edu/undergraduate/five-year-programs.html”>http://www.slc.edu/undergraduate/five-year-programs.html</a></p>
<p>I feel exactly the same way. My mother’s friend who is an alum assures me that it is very prestigious, but I everything else I am hearing/reading indicate its decline in reputation since my mother’s time. It’s acceptance rate isn’t crazy high, but it’s not really competitive. From what I’ve heard from more recent students it is not the education that is lacking, but the reputation. Maybe it IS the excess of arts kids?
I second the question - Will grad schools respect a liberal arts degree from SLC?</p>
<p>You make your own reputation, and that will depend on the kind of work you do, wherever you go. One good thing about SLC is that you will have the opportunity, through conference papers and projects, to dig deeply into specific topics. That sort of independent work can be excellent preparation for graduate work. There are no guarantees. But grad school admissions committees are going to look at your work and your writing and your preparation before they look at the name of the school you are coming from, If you feel SLC is insufficiently “prestigious” they you should go elsewhere. Institutional prestige, however, is no ticket to graduate school. </p>
<p>In general, liberal arts degrees are excellent preparation for grad school, particularly med, law and business schools. Many SLC grads in the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences earn advanced degrees in those fields. Some technical fields, like engineering, obviously require and undergraduate degree in that area. You will find that smaller departments at SLC offer a more limited class selection, but there is plenty of opportunity to get the “breadth and depth” of a liberal arts education. When I visited SLC with my daughter, I remember meeting a student that had just been accepted to med school, one who was working closely with a physics professor on some novel research, and an alum who was in the finance field. </p>
<p>The admissions department says that applicants to SLC are somewhat self selecting. That is, its distinct style of instruction attracts those who are most likely to benefit from it. This smaller pool of applicants is more likely to have the credentials that SLC is looking for, and leads to a higher acceptance rate. As one data point, 44% of the entering class in the most recent common data set had a high school GPA of 3.75 or higher. I think this is an indication of the quality of the students.</p>
<p>You are asking great questions. Good luck with your decision.</p>
<p>I tend to agree with flexflyer’s many comments. My daughter who was just accepted, has excellent stats, including Ivy League ACT scores, which she submitted even though SLC does no longer requires them. Just because you’re an “art student” does not mean you have a mediocre academic profile. Point of fact, the art students have to submit a full portfolio in addition to the essays and academic paper, so they have MORE requirements for admission than the general LAC applicant. She’s also in a high school ranked among the top 1% in the country. I’d suggest you have some pretty prestigious students being accepted at a pretty prestigious institution. </p>
<p>Currently several schools are gaming their selectivity rates through outreach to not-so-qualified candieates. University of Chicago has been doing this recently. Before U of C started this marketing, the admit rate was near 33%-40%. Currently its 8%. Chicago (and other schools) send out flier after flier, email after email, to students many of whom don’t have the grades or scores to get in–simply to increase the pool of applicants. That drives down the acceptance rate.</p>
<p>They also bring in $60-70 per application from students that have no hope of getting in. Many students simply do not have that kind of money. I personally think this is reprehensible and refuse to even look at U of Chicago</p>
<p>In this article, you can see that UChic has garnered both “scorn and awe” for pumping up its applicant pool (caption of photo) <a href=“Application Inflation”>http://chronicle.com/article/Application-Inflation/125277/</a></p>
<p>Sarah Lawrence, which publicly eschews rankings issues, refuses to report SAT scores, etc. to USN&WR. Perhaps as retaliation, USN&WR decided to assign SL the median SAT score–that automatically lowers its rankings in that overly influential magazine. </p>
<p>Here is where you can see that SL refuses to report SAT scores and so USNWR has made up numbers
<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/12/usnews#sthash.irEvtS8W.dpbs”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/03/12/usnews#sthash.irEvtS8W.dpbs</a></p>
<p>IMHO, SL is hoping to attract students who, like SL as an institution, can see beyond one magazine’s ranking numbers and choose SL for the great education it offers.</p>
<p>I need to agree also with laplatinum that art students often have excellent academic profiles. See for instance the students at LaGuardia HS in NYC. That school accepts 7% of the applicants–they must be amazing artists and have excellent grades and scores to attend that high school. Every one of those students needs to find a college someplace! And they do–many at Ivy’s or Ivy equivalents, like Sarah Lawrence.</p>