From OP’s multiple posts here it seems like UMich and Wes were the most prestigious of their acceptances.
I may be wrong about that OP, but assuming I’m not, I will put it bluntly: prestige is not a good reason to be coming to a school like Wes.
What you mean–that Wesleyan lacks prestige or that one’s reasons should be more to do with substance and fit? And to answer your question publicly, I transferred from Bowdoin to Wesleyan. Among my fellow transfers were students from Middlebury, Dartmouth, University of Chicago, Cornell, and Carleton.
Bowdoin was actually my safety, but when decision time came around the idea of living on the coast of Maine proved very enticing. I grew up by the ocean and couldn’t imagine being more than a few miles from it.
@wesleyan97 Interesting, curious as to why you transfered? If you don’t mind sharing that is.
Your idea of what’s interesting is quaint 
Bowdoin felt like a continuation of prep school. The homogeneity of its atmosphere was stifling. Kind people and good food though.
Where did you go to school, @notigering, or are you still in high school?
How would I love to still be in high school… Interested parent of 17 yo… I went to UConn school of engineering many, many years ago which is sort of why I am interested in this thread. I am sort of international so back in the day I wasn’t aware that LACs even existed until for different reasons I spent some time around Wesleyan and Trinity (I know, similar but very different…). As you surely know (from the other way around perspective…) the vibe/culture/etc… couldn’t be any different with UConn being sort of a mini-Michigan. Of course, neighbor’s grass is always greener but ever since I’ve been envious of haven’t attended a place like Wes. And no, it is not about prestige, quite honestly I don’t really care for Yale where I also spent some time around.
And Lol! about quaint…
The latter. The prestige- and rankings-obsessed world of research universities is exactly what LACs have traditionally offered an alternative to. LACs are literally all about fit; they’re not like large universities which offer a constellation of social groups where practically anyone can find friends. If OP doesn’t fit the social atmosphere of an LAC then I would strongly urge them to not go, even if the LAC is much more prestigious.
It seems like OP is already looking at grad school, considering undergrad as simply a stepping stone. UMich’s pre-professional bent will serve them better from a social and networking perspective.
@MeltsIntoAir wrote: “The latter. The prestige- and rankings-obsessed world of research universities is exactly what LACs have traditionally offered an alternative to…”
As much I would like it to be the case, me being prestige-averse that is, I don’t think that’s completely accurate. Top LACs are every bit as “prestigious” as Ivies in certain groups, even more so perhaps, some say it is “those that count” but I don’t like that explanation either. I agree that they provide “an alternative to…” in that most people are completely unaware of them so they provide a shield from the college admissions maihem.
I think it’s applicable when you compare a top LAC with a top research university. If you have kids who both got accepted into Penn and Amherst, then you can generally assume that a large proportion of those who choose the former are prestige-orientated and those who choose the latter are experience-orientated or have some particular affinity for Amherst’s culture. that is not to say elite LACs are not prestigious.
I might not have transferred from Bowdoin (then ranked #4) to Wesleyan (then #7, now #21) if those had been the numbers back then. Even at the time, going down three rungs gave me pause. That would have been a great loss, as Wesleyan proved the perfect school for me, and this reflects how toxic a spell the rankings cast on prospective students, especially those with a competitive streak like mine. I’ve been back to both schools since graduating in 1997. For the first time in 19 years (God I’m Old.) I visited Wes last winter, staying a week in early November and a week in early December. I returned with a dual purpose–to spend time with two former professors and to revisit a place that meant so much to me. My class actually just had its 20th reunion this spring, but over the years I haven’t gone to any of the reunions. I don’t want to be shepherded around in an atmosphere of contrived nostalgia. When I went classes were in full swing, and for whatever reason (I’m somewhat epidermally blessed), many students thought I was either one of them or a young professor. I probably won’t be able to get away with that kind of stealth presence much longer, but it allowed me to get a feel for any changes from “my day.” It surprised me that there were none, at least in the type of people I met. They had the same characteristic warmth and brilliance I remembered (and the absence of which, the warmth at least, I noticed visiting friends at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Duke, Swarthmore, UVA, and UNC back in the day). Wesleyan students have a lovely quality of wonder and even vulnerability that I never observed at other schools. I had two friends at Bowdoin with that kind of temperament, and they both transferred as well. During my visits I had hours-long conversations with a number of students, two of whom remain friends. I actually returned to Bowdoin as well, a couple years earlier, and the same, I don’t know–stiffness–evident. Both schools had almost exactly the same character as I remembered from all those years ago. Also, both had built large, charmless student centers that incorporated old field houses into their structure. Both mar their respective campuses, IMO, though Bowdoin will always have the food edge on every school. Then and now, unaccountably, Bowdoin serves restaurant-quality meals. That was the only thing I missed at Wesleyan, though back then Summerfields was a health-food dining hall, which made up for it. Why they changed it to the generic sandwich-serving place it is now baffles me. The biggest change at Bowdoin, though it didn’t seem to change the type of student there, was the banishment of frats–a big part of the social life (though not mine) at the college—around the time I would have graduated. Wesleyan’s Greek life, such as it was in my time (insignificant except for the opportunity to breathe the stale air of a vestigial system of affiliation and a pretty wild party on Halloween night at Eclectic). That the death throes of frats at Wesleyan have had such a dramatic character compared to what happened at Bowdoin owes perhaps to those houses serving as refuges for students who were either out of place at Wesleyan (the two meathead warehouses, Beta and ?), the pre-professional “pretty boy” frat where many soccer players and rowers lived (Psi U), milquetoasty Alpha Delt (anodyne kids who did theater), and the one frat (ahem, “literary society”) regarded as quintessentially Wesleyan, where self-congratulatory rebels-in-their-own-mind enacted behavior that read more performance. When Gawker named Wesleyan as the most annoying LAC, they indulged in human metonymy, substituting Eclectic kids for all the students. Only a tiny percentage of students belonged to the frats when I was there, whereas at Bowdoin I think maybe half the students did. This coed frat nonsense at Wes has merely prolonged the inevitable, and perhaps that’s what the administration wants. Maybe they fear a few big frat-affiliated alumni approaching the end of their lives will not leave big legacy donations if the school makes a clean sweep in the way that Bowdoin, Amherst, and so many other LACs did. Perhaps the process was more straightforward at Bowdoin because the students there are far more athletic. With such a tiny number of students and the necessity of fielding a full complement of teams, Bowdoin ironically (there were exceptions; two lived on my dorm hall–identical-twin puckheads) didn’t have many guys like the ones at Wesleyan’s Beta. The athletes–Greek-affiliated or not–didn’t seem to self-segregate (that would have meant half the school self-segregating) and were among the kindest and most thoughtful students I met. Likewise for the non-frat athletes at Wes. Ultimately Wesleyan will own those houses, which is great because they’re lovely old mansions that would make great housing. Well, that was a long digression from both the thread and the question MeltsIntoAir asked me about transferring–a double digression. Is this the Michigan or Wes thread lol? If so, and I remember the tone of the OP’s post correctly, I can only say that there were students like you at Wesleyan and while it ultimately served their goals in gaining admission to top grad programs, they were just kind of there, emotionally pallid and going through the motions at a school that offers so much more. It’s a place where depth of feeling, thought, and action converge around kindness and authentic concern about others and the world at large. I graduated among the handful of top students in my class and in my way was a bit of a grind and gunner (the latter more a med school term), occasionally embarrassing myself with overt glee about getting the only A+ in orgo, etc… That’s how my insecurities showed. I’m thinking now of a friend who was much more typical of my classmates, a dance major friend who did a post-bacc after graduation and went on to Johns Hopkins for medical school. It’s not that Wesleyan didn’t adequately prepare her for medicine but the place (I hesitate to write “the school,” because I never felt the administration had nearly as much to do with what made the place special as the students; administrators tend to be pretty officious no matter where you do, and maybe they have to be) somehow encourages people to follow their own lights, even if they ultimately do something completely unrelated.
(continued)
You’d be hard pressed to find other schools that draw out people’s authenticity like Wes does. Perhaps there should be a stronger emphasis on writing across the curriculum such as one finds at Hamilton (they advertise it) and Amherst (they just do it); really, all schools should have that. I’d also like to see more music survey courses in music for non-majors. The best course I took at Bowdoin was on French music from 1830 to 1950. Though steeped in classical music since childhood, I emerged from that course a changed person; the professor, now retired and probably irreplaceable (at least in the estimation of Bowdoin music people I’ve talked to since; sort of like Paoletti at Wes), had a genius for teaching us “close listening” (a term I’m making up), something analogous to how Helen Vendler teaches poetry. Of course what Wesleyan uniquely has among LACs is its ethnomusicology program, which attracted me to the school in in the first place. It’s impossible to describe how magical it feels to trudge through snow (if you walk off the paths) in the Center for the Arts courtyards during winter, hearing all at once from various directions Javanese Gamelan, African drumming, Carnatic ragas, steel drums, and experimental jazz. I don’t know quite what to make of Wesleyan’s recent athletic successes. If it means that more of those Beta types have come to populate the school (not what I observed during my visit, but I have always had a keen eye for kindred spirits and gravitate toward them), that would be concerning. Wesleyan’s comparatively large student body (versus Bowdoin and Swarthmore and Amherst and certainly Haverford), a result of doubling its enrollment with the admission of women, means that, within NESCAC constraints, it can admit more stereotypical jocks versus Bowdoin, where nearly everyone seems to play a sport. While I appreciated the larger number of students at Wes, there is the potential of diluting what makes it so special. Some (most?) of the other top LACs stayed to same size, partially accounting for what happened to the endowment. CircuitRider has an almost disturbingly encyclopedic knowledge of Wesleyan’s institutional history and has given lengthy disquisitions about the school’s fiscal vicissitudes. My great hope is that someday Wesleyan’s wealthiest alums will show their appreciation in a way that brings the school back to parity with what are typically called “peer institutions” but, given how much more conventional those schools are in ethos, I would prefer some other term or maybe just “schools that are as hard to get into.” In this incoherent ramble I hope at least to have gotten across a bit of what makes Wesleyan distinct. As for the OP, I don’t think you will appreciate what Wesleyan has to offer. If you have the goods, you’ll get into YLS (and probably become a “big law” drone). That Michigan even registers as an alternative makes me think you will be one of students who attend only because, as @MeltsIntoAir supposes, Wesleyan was the only other “name” school that accepted you and that you’ll quietly resent not having made the “WASP” (lol) cut. If you end up at Wesleyan, I do hope you’ll explore your growth edges, not just for your own sake but to do your part in contributing to the school’s less-advertised mission as a place to seek, wake up, and become richer in your humanity. And if you happen to make a billion dollars, please become one of those donors I hope for!
^^I like that article “grading the grades”. Very interesting. Wondering if a more current study is out on this ranking.
If you’re referring to the Boalt grade-inflation-index thing, I don’t think it’s been done again anywhere.
@wesleyan yes that’s the one to which I was referring. I checked out the site gradeinflation.com and it had interesting data on the trend of grades being influenced by two eras: the Vietnam war and the “student is the consumer” era. At the very bottom of the data one can click on a school and see their grading trends up until 2006
@wesleyan97 I loved how you waxed poetic about Wesleyan. I myself am a product of large public institutions, but fortunately back in my day I did get to experience many wonderful small classes taught by professors. One memory I have is a class that was held one night at the professor’s home. We watched some artsy film and had lively discussion about it. Anyway, your CC soliloquy is reminiscent of Ted Mosby from HIMYM, one of my favorite shows.
@CALSmom, very sweet of you. I shouldn’t have gone on at such length, but my motivation to avoid some important work kept me typing Craig and Carter played in a band with two of my closest friends. I still remember when they got their first gig writing on Letterman after graduation. I’ve actually not seen their show. From the few brief glimpses I took, it seemed to involve quite a bit of schtick, something to which I’m averse (my limitation, I know!!). The only sitcoms I’ve seen since boarding school are Ab Fab (the original three seasons were genius), Arrested Development (not the Netflix season), Coupling (UK), Curb Your Enthusiasm (essentially one joke extrapolated into a multiple-season series; some brilliant moments), and Peep Show (UK), all of which I recommend without reservation–except what I put in parentheses! I shouldn’t be so picky, but vita brevis est.
Really? What are the odds? I’m probably one of very few people who loved the finale of HIMYM! Social media was a buzz with hate towards them lol! You should give it another chance
@CALSmom Oy vey, I just re-read my two-part post and found so many typos. Just out of school, as a sideline, I edited (read: rewrote) books for a publisher known for the literary merit of its catalog. Although responsibility for correcting minor mistakes technically devolved to proofreaders–my role was “developmental” editing–I left them very little work. It’s been years since then but I’m annoyed with myself for not being more attentive here, in a totally informal online forum! Trying to channel Annie Hall insouciance–la di da, la di da, la la.
You’re forgiven I felt compelled to comment on your post because of the spirit in which it was written. Are you sure Craig and Carter didn’t base Ted on some version of you? I admit I love the show because it filled the gap when the show Friends ended. And I noticed a lot of plot similarities between the two. It sure brought Wesleyan into the spotlight too. Never really heard of it or thought much of it until I started watching HIMYM. Then my oldest son decides he wants to go east for college and thus began the world of what college to choose??