@dadmonster
Wesleyan and Colgate are pretty much “universities in name only” - in fact, Wesleyan went 130 years as a “university” without offering a single graduate program. Dartmouth College is the reverse of this - a “college in name only.”
Amherst has an open curriculum, like Brown. Not a ton of schools do.
You find Tufts often stacked against a whole range of schools—Brown, WashU, JHU, Cornell, Amherst, Haverford, Wesleyan, U Chicago, Colgate, Wellesley, U Penn, Carleton, CMU, Georgetown, etc…
Maybe the (appealingly) indefinable nature of Tufts comes from its being an anomaly. Smaller, more personal than the larger U’s it’s clumped with; larger, more research-y than comparably-sized LACs. Among the top 20 schools as far as average test scores of admitted students. A student body so mixed you hear it defined as “edgy” as often as you do “preppy”.
These are very very broad strokes you guys are painting with. I have kids at Williams ('18) and Bowdoin ('19) who love their colleges and they both hated Dartmouth. Not after one visit but after a fair amount of time on campus with an older cousin who loved her years at Dartmouth and was hoping to recruit her cousins. Neither of them was very fond of Middlebury either after a summer visit and a fall fly-in. Yale was the only Ivy either of them was interested in; if anyone had told them Williams or Bowdoin was a Dartmouth analogue they might never have visited.
This is a fun exercise to do and I’m sure we’ve played the same game here, but I would caution HS students to visit campuses and not try to pigeonhole schools too much. My kids also loved Haverford and rejected Swarthmore on paper, but after a visit neither liked Haverford and one had Swarthmore tied at the top of her list. The Bowdoin D struggled for weeks choosing between Bowdoin and Swarthmore– these are not colleges that most attempts to summarize schools would find similar. Every student is unique and will interact with aspects of education and culture differently. Not to discredit your efforts – I’m all about steering kids toward LACs– just want to make sure no HS students take this chart too seriously.
How is it possible that anyone wouldn’t be fond of Middlebury? Oh, I see they chose Williams and Bowdoin, they simply have bad taste
Honeybee, I promise you, when I typed that I was sure to include a winking face with my tongue sticking out 
, but it didn’t make it into my post. I wasn’t being a jerk, just very open about my preferences and rivalries.
You guys have to be joking. Williams, the supposed top liberal arts college, has a 18.6% acceptance, way higher than any of the Ivies including even Cornell (14%), stanford, mit, Duke, Uchicago, northwestern, Vanderbilt, Caltech. Heck it’s higher than even tufts. Unless you wanna go humanities grad schools, most liberal arts colleges (esp the old NE ones) are terrible.
@urbanslaughter No offense at all. I thought Middlebury was awesome– no accounting for taste!
@theanaconda are you kidding? Do you really think acceptance rate is the only signifier of how good a school is?
Just so you know, by that logic, Alice Lloyd College and College of the Ozarks are better schools than Northwestern, Cornell, and Wash U.
Anaconda You win! This comment gets the prize for most obtuse comment on CC…for now.
@theanaconda here’s a link to some Class of 2019 admission rates: https://college-kickstart.com/blog/item/class-of-2019-admission-results. Note that several LAC’s have very low admission rates, including Pomona (10%), CMC(10%), Swarthmore (12%), Harvey Mudd (13%), Pitzer (13%) and Bowdoin (15%).
Looking forward to an update on your “Predict Me” thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1741178-predict-my-results-will-chance-back.html#latest
Amherst 12% this year. I wonder how these numbers break down for ED/RD. I’m guessiong RD is lower than that.
Right @OHMomof2 , I had Amherst on my list but somehow forgot to type it in. Pomona/HMC/Pitzer/Scripps released their ED stats. http://tsl.pomona.edu/articles/2015/2/21/news/6011-5cs-release-early-decision-results Not sure about the other schools but there is a lot of info on Xiggi’s thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1713547-college-admissions-statistics-class-of-2019-early-and-regular-decisions-p1.html.
People may not recognize Claremont colleges much as LAC colleges in the East Coast but they are great schools. I know test score is not everything but when you look at list of students test scores Pomona and Harvey Mudd are listed pretty good. http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2014/08/04/top-100-sat-scores-ranking-which-colleges-have-the-brightest-kids/
All of the 5Cs are great schools. I just visited them and it was one of the most intellectual environments I’ve ever seen, and I’m from the Northeast! Most of them do have low acceptance rates, but acceptance rate doesn’t mean squat.
Actually, 4 of the 5 Claremont schools are on the list (post #33).
Pitzer is the only one missing and that may be because they are a “test optional” school.
I think the slightly higher acceptance rates for top LACs might have more to do with self-selection than with their overall academic chops. Some, like Williams or Amherst, probably aren’t first choices for Engineering, but they also aren’t household words overseas or among first-generation college applicants, where the “Ivy” brand mystique is so compelling. Just seeing the obsession with acceptance rates and rankings within this comment thread proves as much. Decades ago, I think the smaller colleges actually had lower acceptance rates than Harvard or Stanford. Their applicant pools haven’t expanded quite as much.
Neither one offers an engineering major at all, that may be why 