Many years ago our daughter had nearly same choices with similar financial aid differences. Amherst (most $), Haverford (middle $) and Bryn Mawr (least expensive). She was completely free to choose any of the three as we were willing to pay. It was a tough decision as all three are excellent schools, each with somewhat different strengths. She ended up liking the atmosphere of BMC the best and the rest is history. Perhaps it is part of the ethos of womens’ colleges, but at BMC the whole school seemed very actively invested in the success of each of its students. She felt intensively mentored which might be a negative for some students.
(One postscript: later after her PhD she visited Amherst again to give a colloquium. It is a wonderful school and I’m certain it would have been an equally good choice.)
Go to Bryn Mawr and don’t look back. This is not play pretend money to a student from a family with limited resources. It’s not just 40K, interest will be accruing on everything but subsidized direct loans. It’s not like choosing between Amherst and Millersville State.
Cali, exactly what is it that the faculty at Amherst knows that the faculty at BMC doesn’t know? Just because a magazine ranks one a few spots head of another, it doesn’t mean the higher -rated one offers up secrets that the lower one doesn’t know about.
@CaliCash The difference between Harvard, a small university in Boston, and Baylor, a large Christian university in Texas, go way, way beyond just rank. BMC and Amherst are both small liberal arts colleges in suburbs in the North. And it’s pretty obvious that the academic quality between Baylor and Harvard is more substantial than the difference beyond BMC and Amherst. For instance, some ballpark numbers based on stats published on their respective websites:
Difference between average SAT at Harvard and Baylor:
2237-1800 = 437 points
Difference between avg SAT at Amherst and BMC:
2130-1980 = 150 points
BMC is one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. The reason it doesn’t generate more buzz is because it is an all-women’s school, so it’s going to have a much smaller, more self selecting pool of applicants.
I could understand someone thinking BMC is not quite as good. But “nowhere close”? Really?
Look at measurements such as:
S:F ratios and average class sizes (both about the same … but BMC a bit better)
average entering test scores (Amherst definitely stronger, but with some overlap in the median bands)
average faculty salaries (Amherst higher)
Is it my imagination or are we seeing a lot more of these threads this year? I hypothesize that as colleges, particularly ones with need-based FA, focus on underrepresented groups - the working class, rural families, first-gens - there’s a real experience-gap with regard to borrowing money. On the one hand, I’m seeing threads where people are afraid to take out ANY loans to attend a private college. One poster, an engineering student, was willing to continue living at home even after spending two years in community college, just in order to avoid $10,000 in debt.
OTOH, we also see people like the OP who have a very naive idea of how much is too much debt.
IMHO Amherst is a much better school but not worth that extra $$. And FWIW, D applied to more than a dozen small LAC schools on/near the East Coast and BMC never hit our radar…I just learned of it after applications were due. Not sure why, because Barnard and a few other schools down that way came up in our search. Amherst was a given.
I would quibble with the description that Amherst is a much better school, with all due respect for NEPatsgirl – she and her family have explored LACS this year and I have learned a lot from her posts about the experience.
Amherst is much more highly ranked than BMC, absolutely. But that ranking is a factor of number of things, including acceptance rate, which is related to reputation, which circles back to acceptance rate. As an academic family looking at LACs for our current junior, we have culled through the department pages to read about faculty in core departments, their education, their publications, their involvement in conferences etc., to assess if there truly is a difference between no. 3 and no. 30. In many departments, especially the humanities and social sciences, there is not a real difference. The faculty, whether at Amherst, Dickinson or Bryn Mawr College, including recent hires, generally come from top 20 Ph.D. programs, are active in their research profile, and seem to be well-regarded as teachers. The difference in ranking comes not from the quality of education in the classroom but from the perception of the value of that education outside.
If it were me (which it is not yet, not until next year), the difference in loan burden between manageable at BMC and unmanageable at Amherst, for a family of modest means, suggests that BMC is a wonderful choice.
Another vote for BMC or Middlebury (I actually consider them equal, regardless of what the rankings say) especially since your family is resource-constrained and you don’t have the finance industry or tech industry as a goal.
BTW, BMC is right next door to Haverford, so yes, you’ll see boys.
Amherst, Middlebury and Bryn Mawr all all fabulous schools where you will thrive and which will offer you fabulous opportunities. Go to the one that is cheapest and make the most of it. Which is, I think another vote for BM.
These are 3 fantastic options. If money didn’t matter I would say just pick your favorite, but with the potential debt of $40,000 in loans, I would say pick Bryn Mawr and don’t look back.
Bryn Mawr will give you the most comfort now and the most freedom later on. I understand the others are top schools, but honestly, before I started investigating colleges Bryn Mawr was the only one of these three I’d heard of, probably because of Hollywood. You can get anywhere from any of them–the secret ingredient is YOU.
Redpoodles mentions Hollywood…the younger folks probably don’t watch many movies from the 1930’s through 1950’s. When u watch these movies, u will notice dialogue that sets up a female character as one of education.and class…often by mentioning that she went to one of the elite women’s colleges (that were known as the Seven Sisters). Since most elite colleges for undergrads were all-male the time, these were roughly equivalent to the Ivies for women . And Bryn Mawr is/was among that group.
“Amherst is one of the best colleges in the country. BMC is no where close. They are hardly in the same category academically and Amherst does have better name recognition. I would go to Amherst.”
That’s complete nonsense. And let’s be real - no LAC has “broad name recognition” among the general public. Anyone who has heard of Amherst will have heard of Bryn Mawr.
Okay, so the next logical question is, if $40,000 is too much of a premium to pay for an Amherst education (relative to other selective LACs), how much would you be willing to go into debt for it? Thirty? Do I hear, thirty thousand? Going once. Going twice. Going…
There is a 2-layered fallacy at work in this thread, both having to do with ranking colleges. #1 fallacy is thinking you can accurately qualitatively rank things as complex as colleges. So thinking Amherst is the second best LAC and. bmc being the thirtieth best is.already putting a lot more faith in the accuracy of this ranking than it deserves. But let’s say A really is 2 and BMC really is the 30th best…fallacy #2 is believing there is a SIGNIFICANT difference between being #2 & being #30. There might be a significant difference between being the second best mid-sized sedan in the world and being the thirtieth best. But this is more like sayingone person directed the #2 movie if all time and another the thirtieth best movie…even the 30th best movie is really really amazing, and probably not significantly less of an achievement than the second best.
@circuitrider, there’s no pat answer. The answer would depend on goals as well as family circumstances to some extent.
For someone interested in Wall Street/finance, spending/borrowing $40K more likely is fine. For someone who wants to teach or pursue a humanities graduate degree (or any PhD, actually), borrowing $40K more does not make a lot of sense.
Also, someone who’s family already has a high amount of debt really shouldn’t borrow even more; they can help out their family when they start working if they don’t have their own debt. However, a family for whom $40K more wouldn’t hurt retirement certainly should feel free to pay more for Amherst if they want to.