It would be interesting to see what the cc community’s response would be if a white student had reservations about attending UC Irvine or UC Merced where the percent whites is around 14%.
My guess is that the student would be chided for being “racist” or “white privileged” for noticing and/or caring.
This is the way people think now.
Nah, I don’t get the correlation so why make this into another thread going negatively down the race divide path? Seriously?
@lalalander111: You don’t have to search hard to find people on CC who think that the UCs are too Asian or aren’t white enough even though the percentage of Asian-Americans at the UCs is still less than the percentage of whites at many colleges and the percentage of whites at the UCs is comparable to the percentage of whites who graduate from CA HS’s.
1 Like
From Texas here, the large majority of my kiddos HS top 10% seem stay in-state at the large state flagship because the schools are good and the students are guaranteed admission. You definately will find those kids in the 10-20% range looking a bit closer at the LACs precisely because they are not guaranteed admissions at the flagships and they don’t want to attend schools like Texas State or Sam Houston that draw their students population from the lower ranked students. So maybe you just are not looking down the list far enough to find the students that are wiling to cast their net wider?
Good point by @labegg.
There are certainly some LACs (and other privates) who survive thanks to those kids who aren’t good enough to get in to a good private (or public) but who’s family can afford to be full-pay.
“There are certainly some LACs (and other privates) who survive thanks to those kids who aren’t good enough to get in to a good private (or public) but who’s family can afford to be full-pay.”
Hahaha, @PurpleTitan. You make it sound like these LACs, even the prestigious ones, are on their last legs - “survive”. Don’t forget that many, many of these LACs are very generous with FA. It’s not all full pay students.
You must be the master of the back handed compliment. We get it - you’re not a fan of LACs. 
Well, I am fairly confident it’s not because they aren’t “good enough” to get into a “good” public or private…maybe some just are not prestige hounds.
@doschicos: I can’t stop you from reading what isn’t there, but as I mentioned kids who could not get in to good privates or publics, you must think that even those prestigious LACs that offer good fin aid can’t be considered good (otherwise they’d be in the “good private” category).
And I think you’re remiss for jumping to conclusions. I actually like a lot of LACs and have praised hidden gems like William Jewell’s, NCF, and Sarah Lawrence on CC (among others, like a bunch who have 3-2/3-4 relationships). How else do you explain that I have roughly the same number of LACs at RU’s in my top tiers?
But I don’t see the benefit of ignoring their drawbacks either (which research U’s have plenty of as well) and in general, I’m not a fan of cheerleading (just never been my thing).
@labegg: You’re the one mentioning kids who aren’t guaranteed admission in to top TX publics, so are you saying that they’re not prestige hounds because they’re unlikely to get in to the top TX publics and thus are looking at LACs? Can you explain how that logic works?
@PurpleTitan maybe after you explain why a kid looking at an LAC, any LAC, isn’t “good enough”. Ouch.
A kid with a 4.6 weighted GPA on a 4.0 scale ranked 73 in a class of 628 is definitely “good enough” to get into any number of “good” public and private research universities but because they are not auto admits their search could be more likely to uncover an LAC that fits their needs vs. the top 10% kid who hasn’t really bothered looking beyond their auto admit schools or top #25 USNWR school because they know they are guaranteed admission and the GC or random strangers on CD direct them to those ranked prestige universities simply because they fall into the given stats range.
I am by no means saying that all Texas top 10% students are like this, not even most, but there are certainly some where the college search is limited because there is no need to look further and they just aren’t looking at LACs.
@labegg: I notice that some people seem to have reading comprehension difficulties.
Please explain how you construe “There are certainly some LACs (and other privates) who survive thanks to those kids who aren’t good enough to get in to a good private (or public) but who’s family can afford to be full-pay” to be “an LAC, any LAC”.
Evidently, in whatever language you use, “some” actually means “any/all”?
BTW, what type of weighting scheme and grade inflation is that? Do half the kids in the honors classes in that school get A’s or something? Honors classes get +2.0?
No wonder many colleges rely on class rank and unweighted GPA.
Partly it’s just a numbers game. Far fewer students attend LACs nationally because they’re small colleges with fewer seats to fill. According to U.S. Dept. of Education (NCES) data, 13.1 million undergrads attended public colleges and universities in 2015, compared to 2.8 million who attended private non-profit colleges and universities. So right off the bat, you might expect roughly 5 times as many students to attend publics as privates based on national norms. And among the privates, LAC enrollment is a relatively small fraction of the total because LACs are by definition small. The US News top 10 LACs have a combined enrollment of 20,785—roughly 20% fewer undergrads than NYU alone (25,722). Of course, NYU is at the high end of the spectrum; many top private research universities have undergrad enrollments in the 5,000 to 7,000 range. But neither is NYU a complete outlier. BYU has over 30,000 undergrads. Cornell, USC, Northeastern, Syracuse, Baylor, Drexel, and DePaul are all in the 14,000 to 18,000 range, These numbers, combined with many other smaller and medium-sized private research universities, just dwarf LAC enrollment. It has been that way for a very long time.
I don’t see evidence of “declining interest” in LACs, at least at the top end. Sure, admit rates for even the very best LACs are higher than those for the top research universities, but admit rates at the top LACs have been declining, not increasing, and their entering class stats have been improving, not falling. They’re just not moving the needle as far or as fast as the highest-profile research U’s. But these are just very small colleges we’re talking about… They can’t afford to do the same level of p.r. and outreach that major private research universities do. Nor do they need to, because they have a very limited number of seats to fill, and they’re having no problem filling those seats with highly qualified candidates. They’rev just playing in a smaller niche market of people who are looking for a smaller, more intimate undergraduate experience. But that said, there’s huge variance regionally, by high school type (private v. public), by demographic and socioeconomic factors, and based on the knowledge and preferences of HS counselors, parents, and students themselves in the number and percentages of students who are interested enough in LACs to apply. I don’t think the OP’s school is an outlier, even in her region. But neither would I take it as evidence of a declining interest in LACs nationally.
LACs are not popular at D’s high school. Some are barely larger than D’s graduating class of 1500+, which is not appealing to most of the students. D’s high school is also a sports powerhouse with a lot of school spirit, and the students, including my D, want to duplicate that experience in college. Some of the IB kids seemed to be the ones looking at LACs.
Not sure this is a recent trend as my public STEM-centered magnet HS had students who overwhelmingly leaned towards universities though that was mainly due to a heavy number of aspiring engineering majors who actually followed through.
However, this didn’t mean LACs were regarded as lesser institutions than their university counterparts…especially the elite/respectable ones. In fact, some such as Swat and Reed tended to be grouped with schools like UChicago, Cornell, JHU, etc as schools with unusually high rigor and quantity of workload even for elites and HS classmates who attended/graduated were accorded the requisite respect/awe from the rest of us…including some who attended other elites including HYPS.
The LAC counterpart to HYPSMCC was SWAMP(Swat, Williams, Amherst, Midd, Pomona)…and for female applicants…Wellesley would also be included in that group. Reed was also considered top-shelf elite despite its low USNWR ranking and lower admission stats. Some engineering/CS majors did opt for LACs…such as an older fellow alum who graduated from Swat as a CS/bio double major sometime in the mid-late '80s or a HS classmate who ended up getting an MIT CS education despite being rejected by them by attending Wellesley and taking the vast majority of her CS coursework at MIT thanks to the consortium agreement between the two institutions. .
Re: post #90, my impression is the admit rates for LACs have fallen less noticeably than the steep drops at many top 25 or top 50 USNWR national universities. And the selectivity based on things that one can measure hasn’t been rising as steeply.
Those steep drops may have less to do with changing interests in LACs and more to do with the marketing efforts of the top 25 universities to kids they are not going to accept, the increasing popularity of the Common APP, and the increasing numbers of college applications.
I don’t know…D18 gets a lot of mail from LACs. Kenyon is her most aggressive stalker school these days.
True @ShrimpBurrito . My D was aggressively stalked by Kenyon also and it worked! She applied and got in but ended up choosing another school. I do think they did everything right in making her want to go to Kenyon. But she only became interested because I knew about LACs and how good Kenyon would be for her. I think most people in my area haven’t heard of the vast majority of LACs and those marketing materials go in the trash. But when they get something from Vandy, that’s a different story!
And Kenyom is a school who’s admission rate has dropped dramatically the past several years, reinforcing the correlation between marketing and declining admissions.
FYI, in my neck of the woods, most wouldn’t know Vanderbilt.
@PurpleTitan - For the record, I am Jewish, and have lived and studied at schools with both predominantly Jewish populations and ones in which Jews were in a distinct minority. (i.e., where I never met any).
I grew up in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Lower East Side of Manhattan. I went to neighborhood public schools (and later, Stuyvesant H.S.) which had large percentages of Jews in their gifted/talented classes. I went to a state college in upstate NY for 2 years where I didn’t meet any Jews and graduated from a Jesuit university (Georgetown).
My husband is both latino AND Jewish. Now living in CA, I tried to instill some of the Jewish cultural identity I grew up with in my daughter by joining a temple and, for a while, sending her to a Jewish Day School. I have lived both inside and outside Jewish bubbles within the society at large. I still contend that 10 percent Jewish is hardly insignificant and would not have dreamed of discouraging my kid from Amherst – or any school – because I didn’t think there would be enough Jews there.
The trick with Jewish students at LACs or small universities is that when you are looking at smaller numbers, you can’t make assumptions about the presence of certain things that you might take for granted at a Penn or Michigan
You have to dig deeper (and may not really learn the truth until your child shows up on campus). 50-100 students per class doesn’t tell you much if you don’t know the percent of participation/identification of those students, the quality of the Hillel director or other Jewish leaders on campus, the surrounding community, the Jewish alumni support, etc. I have seen small but great Jewish campus communities in places where you might not expect them, but I’ve also seen some very weak ones where Jewish kids have been very unhappy.