Last year we didn’t let my daughter make an official college decision until she had received her financial package from St. Olaf. We loved the school and knew it would be an amazing opportunity to attend school there, but price was a factor. We knew that at St. Olaf her stats were considered really good, but nothing really special. They gave her their second highest merit award. She was very excited about another LAC (Concordia Moorhead) that really recruited her and gave her a package that was similar to what Luther is offering your son. Over the course of four years, it would cost us close to $60K more to attend St. Olaf. It would have involved my daughter having to take out student loans and work a lot to pay the difference. It was a no-brainer that she’d go to Concordia. They also have a high four year grad rate. She’ll leave school with no debt. The end of her freshman year is fast approaching. She loves her school and is doing well. We know it’s not as selective as St. Olaf and we really don’t care. We feel like we’re getting a lot of bang for our buck. When we tell someone our daughter goes to Concordia they usually reply that it is a really good school. We feel like we’re lucky that we can send our kid there and not have it be a huge financial burden. Honestly, even if the prices would have been closer together my daughter wouldn’t have chosen St. Olaf. She liked the more relaxed feel of Concordia and the idea of living in an area with a bigger population.
Luther has a very good reputation and a lot of people would have to cross it off their kids list because it would be too expensive. St. Olaf says on their website that they don’t negotiate financial packages. I give this viewpoint as someone who loved St. Olaf, but felt really good about sending my own kid someplace else when I was in similar shoes.
The Princeton Review ratings (post #13) seem to be significantly outdated. A comparison of the Class of 2019 profiles for each of the three colleges (from their websites) indicates the following:
St.Olaf #12
Sewanee #56
Luther >70 (I got lazy and stopped counting)
Ranking of PhD (total) 2010-2014:
St. Olaf: #9
Sewanee: #68
Luther: #56
But more importantly, the Princeton Review is a survey based approach taken by students, it’s not an objective “ranking” based on admissions or ACT scores:
"Our 62 annual college rankings lists are entirely based on what students attending the schools in our Best Colleges book tell us about their colleges and their experiences at them via our student survey for this project. Each ranking list reports the top 20 colleges (of the 380 in the book) in a specific category.
We tallied the rankings lists in the current edition, The Best 380 Colleges (published August 2015), based on the data from our surveys of 136,000 students at the 380 schools in the book.
Our student survey has 80 questions in four sections. We ask students about: 1) their school’s academics/administration, 2) life at their college, 3) their fellow students and 4) themselves. Students answer by selecting one of five answer choices that range across a grid or scale. The answer choice headers might range from “Excellent” to “Awful” or “Extremely” to “Not at All”: some are percentages with ranges from “0–20%” to “81–100%.” This answer choice five-point scale—which is called a Likert scale—is the most commonly used measurement for this type of survey research: a consensus-based assessment.
We give each college a score for its students’ answers to each survey question. Similar to a GPA, it is a metric that provides us with a numerical base to compare student opinions from college to college—apples to apples, as it were. Using these scores (which we compute out to several percentage points), we are able to tally our ranked lists. Schools that make it onto any of our 62 top 20 lists are those at which the surveyed students (as a group) indicated a very high consensus of opinion about that topic."
St. Olaf is definitely off the table at this point due to $. We are still considering driving down to Sewanee next weekend for admitted student days, but a few things are holding us back: S LOVES winter and there won’t be much of that in Sewanee, it would be about $38,000 more than Luther over four years, and the distance from home is much greater. We’d like to visit him several times a year, and it would be logistically much more difficult going to Sewanee. Also, if we knew S was totally committed to forestry or geology, Sewanee would be a better place (more course offerings in these areas), but he is still undecided about what he wants to study. Luther does have great environmental sciences and biology for him to start exploring those areas. And then there is the music culture which he loves.
Thank you all for your input. I realize these three choices are probably often not compared together! As far as the Rhodes and Fulbright Scholars numbers and PhDs–these are not a big deciding factor at this point. S. needs more than anything to explore the wide variety of fields out there and needs an encouraging place to do that. He currently is not very focused on a specialty or career but has lots of interests. And while we realize that Luther’s acceptance rate is high, most students have over a 3.75 GPA in high school, showing that they are good students. We are confident the learning atmosphere will be positive.
Ummm, I think for most kids a couple of times might be okay. But in my experience, once they are at college they make their own friends and they don’t especially look forward to parents hanging around. 8-|
Two of my sibs went to Luther, as well a number of cousins, friends, kids of friends, friends of kids, etc. I’ve spent plenty of time on that campus at various extended-family-friendly events. As far as I can tell, things haven’t changed. Families (and alums) do show up for athletic events, concerts, and theater performances. Some make multiple trips each year. So if that is what your family would like to do, don’t worry about it.
Decorah is a charming town to visit, and your kid would be guaranteed a winter there for sure!
Don’t expect to be able to “visit with your child” more than once a semester - and keep in mind that you may only see him for dinner. He’ll be VERY busy running around doing many things. You CAN go see recitals and games/races, but don’t expect to be able to hang out with him.
MidwestDad3 and happymomof1–I don’t know which way S will go–whether he’ll want us around visiting or not! He’s become more sentimental about leaving home lately whereas he didn’t care at all last fall.
happymomof1–how happy were your friends and relatives with Luther? Do they have fond memories? Did they find work/attend graduate school/have meaningful lives?
Even if he wants you to visit, he’ll quickly find he can’t accomodate your visit without tweaking and cutting a lot of things, so he’ll be under a lot of pressure (from study group mates he left hanging, people who’d planned something he cancelled on, from missing office hours, from taking too long at lunch when he was due a the lab) and it won’t be pleasurable. If you go, see him perform/play, invite him for dinner afterwards = that works. But “visiting with” parents is unlikely to be stress-fee and fun.
So we shouldn’t necessarily pick a college based on how easy it is to visit, I’m sensing. I do remember my parents visiting me and sometimes it was hard to let them know I couldn’t spend the entire day with them because there was so much I had to do. It’s coming back now. . .
My two cents. D and I toured Sewanee a couple of years ago when she was deciding which LAC to attend. Sewanee is a special place. Much as I think Sewanee is a superb LAC, I can’t see paying $36,000 more it over Luther. Especially true since your S likes Luther.
They all seem to have liked it at Luther (except for some beefing about the winter weather from those who had grown up in more southerly parts of Iowa). They all stay in touch with college pals, and head back to campus for reunions and other special events. The ones who wanted grad school, got into decent grad schools for their goals. The ones who wanted jobs right out of college, landed decent jobs for the time period in which they graduated. All-in-all they seem to be doing fine in life.
But I suspect it is much like that for any college. Most of what a student gets out of the experience is up to them.
fwiw, having more Rhodes, Fulbright’s, etc is not a good proxy for a better school, nor is the lack of Marshalls/Rhodes/etc a proxy for a less-good school. For reasonably selective LACs, more students in named scholarships is as much a sign of an emphasis at a school as anything.
Rhodes scholars are the kind of achievers who will shine in most places (the success rate is under 4%), but schools that are focused on getting named awards will identify strong candidates early and help them prepare so that they are ready to compete by the end of third year. Rhodes are clearly important at Sewanee, and they do this kind of prepping: one of their winners is quoted on their website as saying that it is “harder for students from non-Rhodes colleges to get advice and get a sense of what they needed to do to prepare for that competition. So, in practical terms, it’s good to have people around here who know how to prepare”.
This is not to take away from Sewanee’s succes- just saying that many LACs do not put an emphasis on named scholarships (overall, I think Williams is the top LAC for this kind of named award), and so it is not a good proxy for how good (or not good) an LAC is.
whoops- and what I came here first to comment on: at some point all of the rational decision points leave you with 2 or 3 good options, and trying to parse the differences is no longer meaningful. This one has better music, that one better hiking trails. And at some point at admitted student days it stops being about how nice this or that person was, how engaged the professors seemed to you as the parent, how good the food was. Ideally, it suddenly becomes about how kid responds to the place. This is the alchemy piece.
We did back-to-back admitted student days at the final 2 colleges:
Day 1: by any objective measure it was substantially better than Day 2: the campus, the housing, the weather, the visit to the major department, the info sessions, the food, the organization, the handouts, the organization- everything. Not to mention the nice named merit scholarship on the table. We had a lovely day, and kid had only positive things to say at the end of it.
Day 2: within 30 minutes of getting there she told me that I could go talk to the other parents if I would like to (aka, “I’ve got this, mom”). Another 15 minutes later she came skittering up to me to say 'I’m going on this special tour- I’ll meet you at the next thing". I knew right then that she had made her choice (though she didn’t work that out until late that night): she hadn’t left me once the day before, here she was dumping me within an hour of being there. This introverted kid felt at home and had found her people. So all those other ‘objective’ criteria became secondary.
So all the %s that you are worrying over: none of these are bad choices! Being realistic about money is important, but after that- where your kid feels at home is what matters most- b/c he is the one that is going to live there for 4 years. How you relate to the profs is supremely irrelevant
