^ Well, heck, 10 is enough for fellowship, but some folks prefer to be among more of their own kind.
@Hanna, I take it that you have never been part of a minority anywhere?
@SC Anteater, you are forgetting Harvey Midd and Swarthmore which are highly selective LAC’s that have great engineering programs.
@PurpleTitan - there are 471 students in the freshman class of 2020. If there are 50 Jews, hat’s over 10 percent. Given that Jews constitute 2% percent of the population, that’s not insignificant. Not sure about the rest of the consortium, but I’ve gotta think that the Jewish population is well represented. Frankly, Jews are in the minority everywhere, except perhaps at Yeshiva University and Brandeis.
Now, if you want to talk about being part of a minority as a Jew, I’d say that it might be harder to come up with a minyan at Sewanee than at Amherst.
@LoveTheBard: Do you have any experience being a minority?
Yes, 10% is overrepresentation relative to the population, but 10% still leaves you as a small minority of the population. Also, if you have never been a minority, you may not realize it, but there is a big difference between being 10% of a population or 1 of 50 of your people and being 20-30% of a population or among hundreds/thousands of your people. Not saying one is better or worse than the other (though I certainly feel anyone should be justified to feel comfortable in the settings that they desire), but I do find it strange when people who have always been in the majority try to tell minorities that they shouldn’t have a problem with being part of a tiny minority in a population.
Well, I was a Jewish student at an LAC, so that would be relevant to this issue.
@Hanna: Then surely you’d be able to understand why some Jewish students from a predominantly Jewish HS may not want to go somewhere where they would be a small minority, no?
How many white kids do you see choosing a HBCU?
Well, for one, you’re not hanging out with just your own class but the student body as a whole. Like I said, I could easily name schools where 20-30% of the student body is Jewish and have an active Hillel. That percentage is 300-500 students at said schools. Not a majority, no, but not insignificant.
I wonder if this trend 1) is really a trend (seems it is) 2) is contributed to by the USNews split rankings. Because the “most famous” Universities are on the “University” list, and the lesser known, but very high quality LACs are on the LAC list, students and parents naturally tend to unconsiously (or consciously) associate the big U’s with more quality.
The rise in international lists probably adds to this. Williams and Amherst and Mudd are not making the Times or Shanghai lists. Only a few places: Forbes and WSJ I think, lump LAC and U’s together.
Really there should be a list that ranks by specific college within the U. That would be most helpful. USC Cinema Arts is not Dornsife, Penn SEAS is not SAS, etc.
But I’d guess the rise in list-mania has subtly hurt the LACs (assuming they really have “lost” anything.)
Hillel has a list of schools online by percentage of Jewish students, as well as of schools that are “small but mighty,” meaning they have a small percentage of Jews but an active Hillel branch. Look up “Top 60 schools Jews choose” and you will find the lists. Some LACs do very well on the list, including Oberlin (which is a bit ironic because they had that crazy anti-Semitic professor) and Muhlenberg (which is also ironic since they have a Lutheran affiliation). Vassar, Skidmore, and Middlebury, among others, appear on the top 60 list as well.
If you desire the largest Jewish population percentage at a secular liberal arts college, Brandeis is considered a national university but is almost as small as many small liberal art colleges. 48%.
Its about raw numbers not percentages. My kids went to HS with 250+ other Jewish students per class year. Many kids from our school who don’t date outside of their religion feel a small LAC with 50-100 per class just isn’t of interest. They want a bigger pool not a smaller one. You should understand that these same people would never dream of living somewhere where there family was in that 2 percent or less minority. They weren’t raised that way and don’t plan to raise their kids that way. It limits one but those of us who have made that choice feel comfortable with it.
Not forgetting, just not in the realm of possibility for my kid. I also feel he can get just as good a civ.eng. degree for much, much less money than Mudd or Swarthmore.
Our high school is a competitive public high school in AZ. In my older D’s high school class of 2015 there were about 600 students. The vast majority stay in state and go to CC or the instate universities. Some go to CA, mostly USC and Chapman, some to UColo Boulder, Loyola Marymount, a few to San Diego State or Cal Poly SLO. Within the top 5% some go every year to HYPSM and top 20 Universities.
It seems that the ones who end up at LAC’s are either recruited athletes or, like my D, have some pre-existing awareness of LAC’s due to family experience at them. In her year, she went to Pomona and I know of a Carleton and an Oberlin. Did not hear of any women’s colleges or CTCL’s that year, although the prior year one went to Wellesley. A few in the top 5% will throw in an app to Williams or Amherst but more from a vague awareness of prestige than from a genuine knowledge or desire to go there. The midwestern LAC’s seem completely unknown to the vast majority of our students. A few LAC’s do make on campus visits. I didn’t get the impression that the GC’s were pushing the LAC’s. But the local charter schools and privates do push the LAC’s and quite successfully from the results I’ve heard. In fact, when D was looking at Mount Holyoke I checked their admissions website and they were visiting charters and privates in our area and not local public HS’s. (D was able to meet up with the MHC admissions rep independently.)
@Corinthian: Targeting private HS’s actually is a pretty neat way to be both need-blind and meet full-pay and still make the finances work.
Living in the midwest, near a LAC, many of our HS kids apply to and attend them. In some cases it’s because their parents work at the local college (as professors, most often) so they get a deal there and at others in its tuition exchange group and their professor parents are advocates for the LAC model of education.
But I think most everyone knows people who go there or work there, many kids went to a camp there or have used the gym or library, and of course our GCs know it (and others within a 3 hour radius) and recommend them appropriately to the kids.
Of a class of 200, I count thirteen different LACs on the “going to” list from the class of 2016 (don’t have access to how many going to each, just the ones at least one is attending - assume the count of students attending LACs is higher). Most are in Ohio but a few are in the northeast or out west or upper midwest.
We still send far more to state schools than private Us OR private LACs.
@OHMomof2 Ohio is the land of LACs in the Midwest! We are heading to the Ohio Six Tour this summer to see Kenyon, Oberlin, and Denison! 
Might want to pick your brain about these if S19 likes them!
My kids go to a high school where the campus is 16% white. Nearly every LAC they visit feels too white to them. It was hard to get them past that feeling.
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@VickiSoCal, Swarthmore is very diverse - 40% Caucasian and several others are in the 60% range, but none as diverse as the UC’s.
Here’s a link that may help - http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/most-diverse-colleges/
My daughter, who is Chinese, wanted a school where race wasn’t an issue. She didn’t care if it was 85% white or 40% or 10%, she just didn’t want race to matter. I know it seems impossible, but she seems to have found just such a school. It has about 35% international, so that may help, and even the international students are a wide mix of races and ethnicities.
At the LACs we looked at, racial diversity was just one of the issues. The campus may have had a nice mix of race and ethnic diversity, but the communities didn’t.
Pomona College and the 5Cs are very diverse and value diversity. Los Angeles at large is also very diverse.
“Many kids from our school who don’t date outside of their religion feel a small LAC with 50-100 per class just isn’t of interest.”
Thank you for confirming my guess that romantic prospects are a big part of the picture here. That’s a different issue than social/spiritual support, which may be just fine at schools with low absolute numbers. If I were the guidance counselor, I would gently push back on a student’s assumptions about the latter, while deferring to the student’s needs on the former.
I worked with a Mormon student last year who was concerned about this issue. We did look at some secular schools (like Westminster College) that have larger LDS populations, but she just finished her freshman year at BYU.