Checking back in. We just finished a quick trip to Atlanta to look at Emory and Agnes Scott.
Kiddo liked Emory, which would be a big financial reach and require a good (probably unachiavable) amount of merit aid. I suspect the high school focus on school ranking is influencing her opinion more than the actual fit of Emory. The campus was gorgeous, but I didn’t see any kids there that reminded me of our particular kid. It made me wonder if she might be better off on a much bigger campus where there is more diversity than at the mid-sized schools. LACs still seem like the best fit to both of us, but since we are searching for good merit, we want to have a lot of options.
Emory is a long shot in any case, so I am not going to lose sleep over her application there. We absolutely loved Atlanta and found that very reassuring given our concerns coming from a very liberal city in the Midwest.
We didn’t do an official tour of the Emory Oxford campus, but we had some extra time so we drove out to take a quick look. Oof, the location made that a hard sell, even though the campus itself was very pretty. She would have to really want to graduate from Emory to apply and spend two years out there.
Agnes Scott was beautiful and nearly perfect in some ways. Kiddo loves womens’ colleges in general and Agnes Scott hit all those buttons. An added plus was that it is incredibly diverse and that diversity felt much more natural and comfortable than it had at some women’s colleges and LACs. Buildings were lovely, dorms were amazing and large.
Downsides: It was a little small and they don’t put much focus on the consortium/course option at other nearby schools, which is a big draw at some of the other LAC/women’s colleges she likes. The thing that probably sunk it was that it didn’t sound rigorous enough to her and they don’t have a track record of getting a significant number of students into T14 law schools. We don’t know that she definitely is set on that route yet, but she wants it to be an option available to her. I don’t know if she will apply, but I suspect she won’t. For a less academic kid that wanted the same kind of school fit, it would be such a lovely option.
Schools we are considering visiting over spring break or sometime soon: Oberlin, Sarah Lawrence, Allegheny, Case Western Reserve, Washington University. We will also visit Smith, even though she knows it will break her heart if she gets in and we can’t afford to send her there. We also need to select a few full-ride NMSF schools for her to look at more closely.
If anyone has any more suggestions that can be rolled into a trip to Western Mass or around NYC when we visit those on the list above, I would love to squeeze as much into those trips as possible. We are from Ohio, so we are familiar with most schools here.