I think from your earlier statement you have decided (correctly IMO) on St. Olaf’s. But just to say, if you have a great GPA and nail the MCATs, you will get into a fine US med school. The overall med school admission stats say so, regardless of school, and yet St. Olaf’s is a fine and highly respected school. And then you will be OMG jumping all over the room happy that you saved that kind of money and are heading into med school debt free.
59 was referring to 56…
And auto-correct turned my IS into isn’t… The issue IS cost differential.
In terms of test scores and HS class rank profiles, St. Olaf is similar to Connecticut College, Trinity, Bard, or Holy Cross. Would someone who was admitted to Williams or Middlebury be very unlikely also to have applied to Trinity, Connecticut College, Bard, or Holy Cross? Would someone who was admitted to Carleton or Grinnell be so unlikely also to have applied to St. Olaf?
Very few students are shoo-ins for Williams, Middlebury, or Carleton. If those schools are not wildly out-of-reach, and if you like LACs, then a college in the USNWR 40-60 range of National LACs could be an appropriate lower match or safety choice (cost considerations aside). In the NE these include Trinity, Bard, or Conn College. In the West they include Whitman and Occidental. In the Midwest, they include Lawrence University, Earlham, … and St. Olaf.
We could talk about other metrics besides admission stats or PhD production (see above). Consider instructional spending. According to IPEDS data for 2014, St. Olaf (at $52M) was behind Middlebury (at $82M) but not too far behind Carleton ($54M). St. O was ahead of Kenyon ($42M), Macalester ($39M), Conn College ($39M), and Bates ($38M). Yes, St. O is a relatively large LAC, so adjust accordingly.
Consider student:faculty ratios. According to IPEDS numbers, St. O’s ratio is 1:11. That is slightly higher than Middlebury’s 1:9 or Bates’ 1:10.
How about the number of physical books in the college library systems? St. O has 729K. That’s slightly fewer than Middlebury’s 764K, but more than at Bates (508K), Kenyon (614K), or Conn College (694K).
St. Olaf does not seem to be too different from the kinds of LACs a student in the Northeast might consider good “match” alternatives to Middlebury or Williams (e.g. the less selective NESCAC schools). To me, St. Olaf does not look like a wildly different kind of college from Middlebury.
@MYOS1634 I don’t understand your comment about St Olaf being more service oriented than Middlebury using Peace Corps as your example. Middlebury ranks 6th in the nation regarding Peace Corps volunteers, and I don’t see St Olaf on that list? http://files.peacecorps.gov/images/news/releases/schools2016.pdf
^ok, outdated then. For a long time, StO was ranked for the Peace Corps.
(Not surprised Midd is well-represented in the Peace Corps though due to Foreign Service aspirations).
StO does have an ethos of service due to its religious affiliation but it could have been diluted in the past few years.
Midd has long been and still is very big in high-income professions though. Ask any headhunter in NYC. 
High salaries are par for the course and tilt/skew the scale.
And New England/Northeast cost of living are higher than the Midwest.
st olaf --2 thumbs up
I did look it up at Naviance, so you’ll have to check yourself if you have access to that application. It gives an overlap analysis and no where is there any overlap between St Olaf and Middlebury or the other top LACs.
These are the overlap schools:
34% U of Minnesota Twin Cities, MN
23% Gustavus Adolphus Coll, MN
19% Carleton Coll, MN
17% Univ of St Thomas, MN
16% Macalester Coll, MN
For a public source, take a look the US News profile for St. Olaf. It says the application overlap schools for St. Olaf are Carleton, Gustavus Adolphus (?), Luther, Macalester, UMN-Twin Cities. I’ve honestly never even heard of a couple of those schools before.
I am not sure what the point is about the overlap schools. A lot of St. Olaf’s applicants are from the Midwest – they aren’t going to have a lot of overlap with schools on the east coast. My kids’ HS is kind of a feeder to St. Olaf. Probably 10 kids apply to St. Olaf for every one to Middlebury (maybe even less). Midd probably has the same (maybe 10 kids apply there for every one in their pool that applies to St. Olaf). Middlebury is slightly higher ranked, and would be the preferable school (cost aside) for some kind of job in the humanities side – international relations, law school, something using languages. But I honestly don’t think it is significantly stronger in the sciences, and for $120K more the OP should go to St. Olaf if they think they can be happy there.
The data calls attention to the validity of the premise. I don’t see why it would be “bad” that St. Olaf doesn’t overlap applicants with Middlebury, just as it wouldn’t seem “bad” that Middlebury doesn’t overlap applicants with St. Olaf.
Isn’t Naviance data school specific? If so it would just mean there is no overlap at THAT school (out of the 35,000 in the country).
No, I believe the match app uses all Naviance population data.
This:
“I was excited get my acceptance to Midd, but unfortunately my family received no financial aid. While my parents say we could make it work if I really want to go there, I would probably end up with more that $40,000 in debt and even that would still strain my parents finances.”
Full pay at Middlebury for 2015-16 is 61.5K, 2016-17 is not yet available on website, let’s assume 64K
St. O for 2016-17 is 54K - 24K scholarship = 30K
Over four years, the cost differential is likely to be around 140K, 40K which would be debt according to the OP, not to mention significant financial hardship for the parents.
Given the parents’ financial constraints, I don’t think the Middlebury name is worth that extra cost, but JMO. Clearly the perceived value of prestige varies as the disparate responses to this thread demonstrate. At the price point, I think St O is an excellent value.
@spayurpets BTW, the religious affiliation is not merely historic - students must take at least two courses in some aspect of Christianity as part of their distribution requirements. While atheists can be happy there, the campus’s Lutheran identity is important to the school’s identity. Theoretically, it’s a dry campus.
47% are in state and neighboring states (IL, WI, IN) provide a meaningful number as well. So the characterization as a regional LAC is somewhat apt. It’s also a CTCL school but if it’s admissions % continues to decline, it may move out of that status before long.
Let me repeat: I also agreed that the OP should take the St Olaf money, so no one needs to convince me. I was just saying that if everyone thinks this is such a slam dunk, I wonder why more students don’t also take advantage of this merit money because anyone who can get into Middlebury, Williams, Amherst et al. would also get the same offer as the OP from St. Olaf…
Strong students from very affluent families in the NE won’t all be enticed away from the Ivies or NESCAC colleges by merit offers from other schools . That doesn’t mean that for upper middle income (“donut hole”) families in the Midwest, a school like St O or Lawrence isn’t a pretty clear, rational choice over a Middlebury or a Williams at double the cost.
There is a body of research findings on the benefits of attending a more selective/prestigious/expensive college. I think it’s reasonable to conclude from them that, if you choose to attend a more selective/prestigious/expensive college over a less selective/prestigious/expensive (but one that is still, say, in the top ~75 of the rankings), you usually cannot count on a very good financial ROI. Any apparent earnings advantage to choosing the more s/p/e school generally is attributable to selection effects, not treatment effects. So a student who is admitted to Williams/Middlebury but chooses St. O/Lawrence instead is likely to wind up with about the same lifetime earnings, regardless. http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/117/4/1491.short
There may still be other (non-financial) attractions to attending the more selective/prestigious/expensive school.You might decide Middlebury (/Williams) is a better Meet Market than St. Olaf (/Lawrence). If you can easily afford the higher priced ticket, o.k. Most families can’t.
I’m going to give you a radical answer here, but one that I still think is important to give. If you haven’t been keeping up with technology trends, you may not realize that the value of a traditional college education is waning as new “alternative” schools and ways of learning develop. As such, I wouldn’t recommend going out of pocket for a name and a piece of paper. Take the money, and in your spare time take advantage of the myriad resources available for free online to buttress your education and take your skills to the next level. Ultimately, it’s those skills that will determine your success, not a diploma from Middleburg or St. Olaf or anywhere else.
This has been your daily dose of practical wisdom.
More people from the East Coast don’t apply to St. O’s because there are schools like it here. Lafayette and Gettysburg come to mind but there are others, Scranton for example where even bigger merit is possible.
I always marvel at how much Middlebury spends per pupil. They must have some very well paid administrators.
@tk21769 's “meet market” argument is probably the strongest one I have to offer for paying a premium for a pricey college education - and, even then, it often falls on deaf ears. About a year ago, I engaged in a similar colloquy on the Wesleyan CC board with a young woman from an obviously middle-class family in a mid-Atlantic state. IIRC, she had received an extraordinarily generous aid package which would have brought Wesleyan’s COA to within $10,000 of the in-state tuition and fees at her highly regarded flagship. Spread out over four years, she probably would have had to take out about $20,000 in loans. In the end, nothing Wesleyan had to offer - smaller classes, an ideal boutique approach to her area of concentration - could persuade her she wasn’t being taken for a ride for that extra $10,000 a year. What was particularly galling was that her state university - which she eventually chose - didn’t even perform particularly well as an engine of social mobility: it ranked dead last in percentage of Pell grant recipients among the top fifty, four-year institutions (both public and private), in the country.
IMO, places like Williams, Wesleyan, and Amherst cobble together some of the most engaging and sophisticated student bodies on the face of the planet and at great expense. But, for many middle-class families you might as well be talking about rock climbing walls.
To MOST people in the US, 120,000.00 is A LOT of money…is the amount we are debating 30,000.00 or actually 120,000.00 over 4 years? And then the likelihood of financing med school after that comes into play? St Olaf is a very good school. They don’t have grade deflation, also great for pre med. And if your stats were good enough to get you into a great school like Middlebury, you could REALLY shine at a place like St Olaf. Network with professors, look for shadowing or internship opportunities, make the most of your time there and hit the ground running…There is no debate that the ivies and NESCAC schools are great…but, WHERE you go will never have an impact more than WHAT you do when you get there. My best friends sister got a full tuition scholarship from App State, as well as smaller offers from higher ranked schools. She went to APP State, worked hard, and is finishing med school at Vandy now. Easy? probably not, but very doable.
Slightly (although not very) OT - St Olaf has been heavily advertising on NPR where I live (Bay Area, CA). I don’t know if this is a national buy or a local one. Wondering if it’s having any affect on their application numbers. Our family is Lutheran and I know a couple of St Olaf grads who were very happy there and are currently successful in their careers.