<p>Hey, where’s Andover, St. Pauls to that other one starting with Deer (Deerfield?)? My kids went to public, so I am not beating any drums. Just kidding around.</p>
<p>And yay, Williams. Not so bad.</p>
<p>At Barnard wall the “prep” school women were from Hockaday which is in Texas. Strange, right? And Texas oil money.</p>
<p>I guess Kwu thinks Phillips/Exeter are the Uber-preps. But what about Miss Porter’s?Let’s not be sexist here…Thanks Voss, great stats.</p>
<p>Hey, this is fun! Given links to other prep schools’ data, I’ll add them, and other colleges as well that take significant numbers of preppies.</p>
<p>There’s also the wonderful world of Manhattan day schools: Spence, Chapin, Collegiate, Horace Mann ++.</p>
<p>this may be a shortcut … awhile back Mini created “the entitlement index” which looks at the percentage of kids at a college that went to private schools (entitled) or receive pell grants (not entitled) … check out posts #57 and #58.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/11033-rich-kid-schools-4.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/11033-rich-kid-schools-4.html</a></p>
<p>To the OP … my oldest and I visited about 20 high end schools in the Northeast (mostly urban). To us the schools that stood out as not feeling “preppy” were Smith, UofChicago (the one midwest stop), MIT, and Barnard (although the city chic comment seems accurate for Barnard). We did visit Amherst which actually felt a lot like Yale … we liked the school and the students … they were on my daughter’s list … but there was a bit of preppy feel … nothing over the top at all but a bit of a feel. </p>
<p>As many have mentioned this is a very personal thing and virtually all the schools have become more diverse over the last 20-30 years. I think it is hard for any of us to compare schools most of which we only get a glimpse of and a few we know quite well (the schools our kids attend) but for even these schools it’s tough to put our impressions in context. For this reason with our oldest we recommend visits to extremes to hopefully provide context for these discussions … in this particular case I personally believe most folks who visited Amherst, Macalester, Smith, Davidson, and Colgate I think they would say Amherst is far from the most preppy place they visited but there were other places that felt less preppy also.</p>
<p>3togo, those are pretty interesting lists… but, wow, some people must have a lot of time on their hands! :)</p>
<p>I love visiting colleges. I do it the way other tourists visit cathedrals and museums, and I don’t have to take a plane or go to Europe – so it’s the “poor man’s” tour.</p>
<p>It’s even more fun without kids.</p>
<p>Last year’s list including Middlebury, which DS and DD didn’t like (because the info session spent the entire time talking about how VT doesn’t have billboards. They felt that was too too PC environmental.) They refused to look at the school.</p>
<p>When I sent back I loved it!! And DS said he was being silly and should have looked at it and applying, but since he is happy where he is, it really doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>I would love to see Oberlin, Grinnell, Pomona, and Oxy, but those do require plane rides, so we haven’t gotten there yet.</p>
<p>Want to go back to Princeton which I haven’t seen since I was a girl.</p>
<p>3togo: You were right: I don’t think Barnard did feel preppy. It’s pretty gritty. The “urban chicness” of it all came more from the city, and really only expressed itself in girls who were already sensitive to it. DD’s roommate, who was “unentitled,” from rural Georgia, never got into it at all. And DD would have been fashion conscious wherever she went. </p>
<p>She don’t told me that NYC, Broadway from 59th St to 72nd St. is her favorite place in the world. But she felt this way long before college. She went into the city all the time to take classes at Broadway Dance Center from the time she was thirteen.</p>
<p>She is really hoping to go to Fordham Law School next year (if accepted) so she can continue to hang out there, but she said she’ll been happy to go to CUNY law school which is in Queens, not chic, and not Tier I. So my fashionista is not a snob, just an esthete! (I sympathize; I am too but in different areas.)</p>
<p>Oh, yikes, mythmom… my state doesn’t do billboards either. And I quietly express my gratitude whenever I cross the state line.</p>
<p>I haven’t visited Oberlin, Middlebury, or Grinnell (would love to though),but I have visited Pomona (numerous times) and Oxy.</p>
<p>My son was VERY interested in Pomona for quite awhile. We visited twice, he did the on-campus interview (that was a third visit), and he was pretty gung-ho. We had other things that took us to LA so it wasn’t like 3 dedicated pilgrimages to The Holy Claremont, but I got pretty familiar with the campus.</p>
<p>There were just a couple things peculiar to his special interests that weren’t quite a <em>perfect</em> match with Pomona, but it was his #1 choice school for some time. Had we not made that fateful 2-day trip to Massachusetts in late Sept. of his senior year, I think it’s not unlikely he’d be at Pomona right now. It’s a very pretty campus, in a very different way than Amherst, Williams, and that general type. It’s suburban, but very tranquil feeling. Also having the other colleges in the consortium be all continguous gives it a feeling of being small, but also big… if you know what I mean. Kind of the best of both. It feels peaceful, but lively.</p>
<p>Oxy is a personal favorite of mine. A wonderful little school in the heart of LA (but you wouldn’t know it when you’re on campus), that has a great vibe. It’s selective, but not <em>that</em> selective. My son also really liked it a lot, but was not so into the urban setting. He kept on his “list” as his favorite of what were sort of his match/safety schools. I’m not sure how we ever could have afforded it, even with whatever aid he’d get, but the school itself is pretty neat.</p>
<p>'rent: They didn’t mind the no billboards. They just didn’t like it as a “selling point” for the school. No billboards is cool. However, as New Yorkers, billboards are like air. Thing of Time Square. There certainly aren’t any billboards where we live. None at all.</p>
<p>Was it a particular program that made Amherst a better fit than Pomona? His major?</p>
<p>I would think the combination of small Pomona and “The Claremont Colleges” would be great.</p>
<p>Your S is a great adventurer. My kids both refused to look at <em>any</em> schools west of the Hudson with the exception of U of Chicago.</p>
<p>I have friends who live in Middlebury, so have been many times. Tour was good, buildings beautiful, pool is awesome, with big windows framing the mountains.The town is funky and fun.
I dragged my 2nd son out to MN, where I did grad school, and he had to confess that the trip was worth it.He liked all 3 schools: MacAlaster, St Olaf and Carleton.
We had a dreadful experience at Bowdoin-the admissions officer and the student tour guide kept talking about Bowdoin’s contribution to the civil war. We felt as if we’d fallen amongst re-enactors or something. They both refused to consider it.
And of course, anyone reading the thread knows we didn’t get a great impression of Amherst…Our tour ran over, the guide was TERRIBLE, and when we got to the admissions office at the end, it was locked-everyone had gone home. The info session was given by a new staffer who also rambled on instead of admitting he didn’t know things, and it was an ordeal.For whatever reason, airplanes flew overhead repeatedly-I am told that isn’t typical, but it was another distraction.</p>
<p>What made Amherst a better fit than Pomona…</p>
<p>Hmm, well… you know sometimes these things, these impressions prospective students can get, are picked up from little things here and there. It’s easy to give them too much weight when you’re looking for clues in a vacuum.</p>
<p>The first thing was that he picked up a student newspaper on one of our tours of Pomona, and then read it from time to time online. He didn’t like the tone of some of the commentary and student columnists. It seemed a bit harsh in its humor, often that clever, cutting type of writing (sort of like baby Maureen Dowds). It wasn’t the content of them, but the tone that he found a bit rude and haughty.</p>
<p>Of course I told him a handful of students writing for the paper does not define a school… but you know, it’s that thing of trying to read the tea leaves.</p>
<p>He had also (like most kids applying to these schools) spent the years beforehand studying across subject areas at a high level, and pretty relentlessly. He got to a point where he just really wanted to press forward in the areas that interested him most, and he wasn’t over-the-moon with Pomona’s “breadth requirements.” Not that he wouldn’t have soldiered through them there or other distribution requirements somewhere else, but there was something about the way they were expressed at Pomona that just left him feeling like he’d jumped through hoops for four years and didn’t have a lot energy left to keep doing it. He wanted college to be more about intellectual freedom, ideally, but he hadn’t really made an open curriculum any kind of a deal breaker (in fact the topic never arose until much later). It really was something about the way they communicated the breadth requirements that put him off just a wee bit.</p>
<p>But like I said, he was overall very high on the school.</p>
<p>When we went to MA things just clicked for him in a different way. We saw 3 colleges in 1.5 days (Amherst, Williams, Tufts) – we couldn’t afford to make the trip in the first place, so we kept it super short. He’s such a homebody by nature that I kept pushing for him to go farther from home to stretch his comfort zone…</p>
<p>One of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for experiences. 
Now we only see him twice a year because he’s so far away and it’s such a long and expensive trip. But he couldn’t be happier and it is a wonderful place for him to be. I’m not a fatalist by any measure, but on a purely poetical level it seems like he is meant to be there.</p>
<p>'rentof2: Smiles. Happy for your DS, and I’m sure you’re right. I can especially see the open curriculum being uber attractive to some kids.</p>
<p>I liked the student at Amherst’s info session stressing how much this meant to her. Some of the parents were real pains, challenging her on this, but bless her, she held her own nicely. I was very impressed with her and the description of the advisement process.</p>
<p>DS less go. I guess it just wasn’t <em>HIS</em> place.</p>
<p>Sunmachine -</p>
<p>My son has enjoyed Bates very much but its history - integration in the 1800s, founded by abolitionists, etc. matters not at all to him. He is probably a good example of the jock/prep hybrid - plays football, enjoys a party, etc. He did not choose Bates for its liberal traditions or current “crunchiness” </p>
<p>As to the liklihood of greater racial diversity - I wouldn’t hold my breath. Lewiston, Maine (in fact, Maine in general) is a tough sell for lots of black kids. Between the weather, the remoteness from all places they are likely to be familiar with, and the “entitled” student body, I think that Bates is not a terribly attractrive choice for many American minorities. I think that some of the increase in AA numbers may be due to foreign students, as well - who, regardless of skin color, are a whole seperate thing.</p>
<p>^International students are never counted in domestic minority numbers. But I agree that Bates is not a terribly attractive choice to most minority students.</p>
<p>First a definition of terms. To me “preppy” in its pejorative sense describes a kid that puts a high value on wealth, looks, clothing and partying. </p>
<p>Analyzing this question by looking at the percentage of kids at a college from Exeter/Andover is worthless because those schools, with their large endowments and commitments to diversity, are far more diverse places today than are public high schools in very affluent communities.</p>
<p>The question is not the percentage of private school kids attending a particular college. Rather, it is whether a particular college’s mainstream social and cultural life is dominated by kids holding those negative preppy attitudes. </p>
<p>You’d have to be a current student to know for sure, but I’ve spent a lot of time around Williams and Amherst in recent years and I don’t think they are particularly preppy, by my definition anyway. Sure the kids wear a lot of fleece (it’s Massachusetts, its cold!). And they do both look like NE boarding schools. </p>
<p>But both colleges are well endowed, enjoy strong demand for admission and believe in diversity as an ideal. They use their financial resources to shape their student bodies to fit their ideals, quite successfully I think. </p>
<p>I’ve been through the college admissions process with 4 kids now, of varying levels of “admissability”, if you will, and I think where you find preppies ruling the roost is at expensive, private colleges that are only moderately difficult to get into. While I believe most of these colleges believe in diversity as an ideal, they typically don’t have the same financial resources and thus have to be more concerned with getting enough full pay students. They also don’t have as deep a pool of highly qualified applicants from which to pick, limiting their ability to shape their classes. What they end up with is a larger percentage of affluent students that are more likely to have those negative preppy attributes. </p>
<p>Finally, a word in defense of preppies. I know lots of affluent kids that went to private school, wear “classic” clothing and are the sweetest, kindest, most moral kids you’d want to meet. Judging people by their appearance, while common, is foolish. It’s what is inside a person that matters.</p>
<p>So true! Or by wealth. Some of the greatest humanitarians have been wealthy folk wanting to return some of their good fortune to others in need.</p>
<p>(My family on college on FA does not fit into this category, but it is true.)</p>
<p>I totally agree with NCRAM65. Great post!</p>
<p>
I don’t. I posted Mini’s entitlement index … I did not say this index is the be all and end all and defines schools because I do not believe it is … but I do think it is useful info. </p>
<p>There are 3000 schools my kids could consider to attend for school … realistically it’s probably more like 200-250 that could possibly be a candidate for each. Our first step is to seek some info that might help us understand what the school is like. For me is you tell me a school has a ton of private school kids and fewer on financial aid than other schools it will give me a reason to pause and wonder how it influences the campus culture (which could be considered a pro or a con depending on the student) … it is not 100% accurate indicator but it is not a bad indicator that it might give hints of things that be worth checking out. </p>
<p>One school the index “fails” IMO is Yale … which is way up on the entitlement index …but to me did not seem “entitled” when we visited … I thought there as a touch of a feel of peppy when I was there but nothing particularly bad (and as mentioned very similar to the feel at Amherst). We liked the kids and the school … Yale stayed on my oldest’s list (Amherst was not urban or big enough). That said if someone asked me I do not think Yale or Amherst campus’ feel very similar to Smith or MIT’s campuses which are almost anti-preppy (and appear low on the Entitlement Index) … and I also do not think Yale or Amherst felt much like Georgetown either which did feel quite preppy and is #1 on the entitlement index. Just some data that helps me develop my questions about each school.</p>
<p>I also do not associate “preppy” as bad (or good) … for some a preppy feel on campus would be a good thing for others not so much. For my kids I am especially wary of small schools that have a dominant culture and is that culture a good fit for my kid.</p>
<p>To me this is not much different that having a column in our spreadsheet for size of school and putting a number in the column … two schools could have 2000 undergrads and feel very different sizes … in a similar manner two schools could have the same “entitlement index” and feel quie different on campus … however I think both piece of data are useful dat to know and to clarify if they raise questions for the student.</p>
<p>Well, the above post mixes the subjective factors the post it disagrees with uses with objective factors. That’s okay. Everyone can use her/his own tools to reach decisions.</p>
<p>An example of another divergence from an objective reading to a subjective reading would be Smith for our family.</p>
<p>I loved the feel of Smith, but DD did not.</p>
<p>She did the tours and info sessions, I did not, because I am allergic to anything bureaucratic and prefer to explore things my own way. (Read go to bookstore, sit in student center, read in library.) Her dad and bro did those things were her and they did with him.</p>
<p>She felt Smith was the “snootiest” school she visited. (My apologies to TheDad and Mini and jnsq and all the other wonderful friends who had/have very, very happy daughters at Smith with satisfied mamas and papas. This isn’t me talking but a very opinionated sixteen year old.)</p>
<p>According to her, the staff was domineering and the women she met cultist. She actually felt the “cult” feeling at Yale too, like the school was a process of indoctrination.</p>
<p>So, the women at Smith might not come in “entitled” or “preppy” according to a financial index, but she felt they became so once they got there, feeling superior for being Smithies or Yalies.</p>
<p>Now I know that isn’t exactly what “preppy” means, but if we are going to equate preppy with a feeling of entitlement it becomes a valid observation, for her anyway.</p>
<p>That’s why a subjective evaluation is best in my opinion.</p>
<p>My S is at Williams which stirs controversy. Some find it preppy, athletic and drunk. </p>
<p>He did not. He found the kids self-effacing, humorous and engaged.</p>
<p>Since he is attending, for him, his subjective evaluation is all that really matters. And since he has never been binge drunk or had the drinking interfere with his ease in finding friends or finding something to do on a Saturday night, it’s all that matters to me.</p>
<p>I was turned off to Wake Forest because a friend who has a son who attends told me, “It’s such a great school. And all the kids are blond, athletic and attractive, just like Michael.” Can you guess who Michael is? Not only did we not go to see Wake Forest (probably weren’t going to anyway) she got demoted to acquaintance. I just don’t see being blond and attractive a big bonus for classmates. For my very unathletic son athletic wouldn’t be either, but it’s not as bad a category as blond or attractive.</p>
<p>I don’t need a scale to say that Wake Forest lacks diversity.</p>