<p>Lots of love for Grinnell! Definitely worth looking into. Pizzagirl, you are correct; we do have the state flagship and also state direction U that has D3 basketball as safeties. There is no way I could afford an OOS public, which is why we are mainly trying to focus out of area on schools that are need blind or give great merit aid. We have private schools in the PNW and Cali that are closer that we will also look at, but we both like the Midwest alot. Luckily, S has crossed the entire Northeast off the list, which makes this college search a tad bit easier.</p>
<p>Please come to Chicago :). We need some more talent on our men’s team :(</p>
<p>Also, if you are going to look at large prestigious schools in the Midwest, I am surprised that U of Notre Dame hasn’t been mentioned.</p>
<p>wrldtravlr, </p>
<p>You have a lot of great suggestions! </p>
<p>If Grinnell had been closer to our PA home, we would have looked there. It’s a great school.</p>
<p>An earlier post mentioned the Ohio LACs. We visited all of them and I was very impressed. Most of the schools we looked at were ones I learned about in Colleges that Changed lives. If you are not familiar with the book/s, they pioneered the idea that small, liberal arts colleges have a lot to offer undergraduates in contrast to the known advantages (and cons,too) of the larger, often more prestigious research universities). CTCL (which has its own website) convinced me that my first child would really benefit from a smaller school–and he has. An uninspired HS student, he has really benefited from the small faculty-student ratio, the concentration on writing and communication skills and the nurturing environment at the smaller school he choose. Your S does not need the same jumpstart, but may benefit from those same advantages, plus smaller schools will compete for top students, with merit aid. </p>
<p>So we visited all of the Ohio LACs and found many of them to be strong academically, with beautiful campuses, too. Unfortunately, many of them are in cornfields and that didn’t go over well with my kids. However, we did find that the schools were very generous with their financial aid, especially merit aid (which is the only kind of aid our kids are eligible for, beside student loans). Denison, in particular, if often included on list of schools with the most generous merit aid, and Wooster, which might be the best school academically, offered my daughter half tuition aid!. I loved the Ohio schools but there are others in the midwest that are mentionned on CTCL–Lawrence has already been suggested to you, but there is also Knox and Earlham. </p>
<p>One last story: while on tour at Wooster this past summer, I was talking to a dad also on tour with his son. It was his second tour of Wooster, which was the first school he took both of his boys to when they began their college search. When I asked where he was from, I realized he lived right near Kenyon College! It turns out he taught there, but said none of his kids would ever go to a school where he taught. He had gone to Kenyon from the University of Notre Dame after teaching there for many years, because he felt ND had become more of a research university and had less of a focus on undergraduate education. When I asked him where his first son had ended up, he told me he went to Grinnell and loved it.</p>