My daughter wants a Liberal Arts Education. She has the choice a generous academic scholarship at a Puget Sound with a total cost of about $15K for room and board or Wellesley with a price tag of $55K for our family after aid. If we had to we could manage the $55K but the degrees seem so similar and she will need to go to graduate school. Any advice would be welcome.
Yes, there are differences.
My advice is to save the money for graduate school.
Of course they share some educational philosophy (along with hundreds of other institutions), but really they are in very different corners of the LAC universe. Wellesley is all women, for one; Puget Sound actually has a football team. East Coast vs. West Coast. (They are both national institutions with students from all over – one of the kids next door to me in Philadelphia went to UPS – but it really doesn’t get any more East Coast than Wellesley.) A tony suburb of Boston vs. a nice enclave in Tacoma. Some of the most beautiful faux-Gothic collegiate architecture in America vs. a lot of fairly attractive recent construction with wide roads and huge parking lots.
The other obvious major difference is the kind of student who goes there. Wellesley has a long reputation as being the most intellectual and the most academically demanding of the elite women’s colleges. (Also perhaps the snootiest, and proudest of itself.) It’s very much an institution of the traditional Establishment, and in the halls of the Establishment it has the same sort of cachet as any Ivy League university. Its 25-75 ACT range is 30-34; its math SAT figure is 660-780. It has a 20% admission rate, and almost half of those admitted enroll. It attracts hard-charging, high-performing women with a taste for elitism and tradition.
That just isn’t UPS. Its 25-75 ACT range is 25-30. (It is test-optional, but includes the test scores of applicants who did not submit them in its figures.) It admits over 80% of the people who apply in order to fill its class. It doesn’t offer – nor as far as I can tell does it aspire to offer – the same kind of intellectual boot camp on which Wellesley prides itself, and you are not going to find hundreds of women there with 800 math SATs. It’s much more low-key. It’s a nice college where kids learn stuff, grow up, and get a degree, not a classic brand.
What you pay more for at Wellesley is a lot of prestige, the certainty that the classes are filled with intellectual woman who will challenge each other constantly, and the special oomph that comes from being an elite institution of and for women. If you care about those things, it may be worth paying that much for them. If not, then absolutely not.
$55,000 - $15,000 = $40,000 x 4 = $160,000.
Besides the very obvious cost difference in this case for you, other differences that may be highlighted at LACs and other small colleges:
- For broad subjects like history and biology, smaller departments may not cover a wide range of subareas, so that two different small colleges may have very different subarea emphases in those subjects.
- The social scene may be less likely to have "something for everyone" like at a larger college if the college tends to attract a particular type of student with respect to social preferences.
I would be interested in finding out how many students who thought they would be going to graduate school their senior year of high school actually attend. We all know that most students who start in pre-med do not attend med school. Graduate school students are more likely to get aid of some sort including fellowships, research positions that overlap with their own research, and positions as teaching assistants. Many students attend graduate school after a few years in the workforce.
If it were me, I wouldn’t base your decision on the possibility that your daughter might decide to attend graduate school. The schools are so different that I expect that your daughter has a preference.
Too late for you, OP but a high quality liberal arts education can be had at state flagship U’s that also cover engineering et al. Many STEM majors ARE liberal arts- it isn’t just hunaities and social sciences majors. Too often people equate LACs with being best for a liberal arts education when they probably mean a small college where the majors are limited.
Different schools have different student populations and campuses- physically and culturally. No one “needs” to go to graduate school. Even the gifted.
Finances trump all- it is not worth debt to go to a college with a prestigious name. The top student will shine and go on to a grad work based on their own merits, not the school attended. It can be easier to become the student a grad school program is looking for at some schools compared to others, but at a less elite school a student can still interact (large or small school) with professors in the major and create a resume worthy of a desired grad school.
So- assuming finances are not an issue- go for the school that is the best fit. An above post lists some of the differences. Students tend to learn the most when they are happy with their environment. Time for the student to sit down and make lists of the two schools’ pros and cons.