That statement would definitely not sit well with most liberal arts students I’ve met over the years. It’s a straw argument; no one said it was inherently wrong to take Amherst’s publicists at their word. It’s just that we (including Amherst students) are taught to exercise a little skepticism. 
1 Like
I would think that Amherst and UMass complement one another pretty well:
- Amherst kids can take some of the more exotic and/or pre-professional courses at UMass, which simply are not offered at Amherst.
- UMass kids can have the small classroom experience/LAC experience by taking a class here and there at Amherst, enriching their overall experience.
1 Like
I don’t want to be pedantic here, but in case your son does wind up focusing on LACs, you’ll find that this is not the case. Large universities are where you find a robust club sports scene. LACs tend to have only, or mostly, varsity teams - not even JV, much less club.
Agreed. I’m just saying that there will be more options, especially those falling into the pre-professional category.
As wonderful and top-shelf as Amherst is, this is a competitive business, and A, just like any other school, is going to put their best foot forward. With that said, I would venture a bet that 100% of current Amherst students would have enthusiastically accepted their offer to attend even if Amherst were smack dab in the middle of nowhere and not near an R1. I honestly don’t think it’s a big driver.
4 Likes
Sure, that’s the marketing pitch. But who goes to Amherst College thinking that way? I just don’t think it’s a driver for the typical Amherst student. Whether the ability to take a class at Amherst is a big deal for UMass kids, I wouldn’t hazard a guess.
Sure, on the margin, it’s an added point of optionality. That’s just a fact. But I go back to what I said in another post: raze Middlebury College and move Amherst out there in its place, and I don’t think anything changes for Amherst or the students it attracts.
3 Likes
Are UMass and Amherst students typically aware of the cross-reg opportunities in the 5 Colleges before applying?
If not, obviously you are right – they would not be applying to Amherst (or Umass…) due to the opportunities provided by the consortium.
But if they are aware of it… maybe some of them see it as icing on an already nice cake.
1 Like
Well, “icing on the cake” is probably a fair way of describing it. It would probably behoove the OP (because that’s the role he seems to have assumed) to reserve further judgment until he’s visited more colleges Amherst’s size.
3 Likes
So I was referring to the claim:
Gunning for a school like Amherst, which is hard enough, with the idea that you may need a plan B in case Amherst doesn’t have your field of interest seems like the wrong approach.
Amherst wants us to “gun” for them on this basis, so to me it is a little odd to claim that is a “wrong” approach.
Of course it is fine to say that is something they would not personally value. But to me, to say it is a “wrong approach” for someone else to place value on such an option is an interesting perspective, given what Amherst is saying on the subject itself.
Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
Well, all I can say is we talked to our tour guide at Amherst about the clubs he was on, and that many LACs are represented in the club sports my S24 might be interested in.
In our case that is not a big issue because my S24 is not currently remotely interested in pre-professional classes. But I agree universities in general are going to tend to stray farther out of the boundaries of the “liberal arts and sciences” and into, among other things, pre-professional fields.
Maybe we will make it only 99.95%!
But generally, are we really the only ones who might not apply to various otherwise highly desirable LACs because they are not located in the settings that my S24 would prefer? It seems to me like there are still plenty of LACs for a more than ample application list even with such a filter, particularly if we are willing to look outside just New England.
This is a sincere question. Is this like a regional thing? Like, typically are all the people applying to any NESCAC school only going to apply to LACs in New England, and therefore won’t consider the Philly schools, Midwestern schools, California schools, and so on? Or is it a sheer numbers thing, like people are applying to so many highly competitive LACs that logically their list includes all of the peers of any of their NESCAC schools?
Because to me, it makes perfect sense to, say, apply to only 2-3 “reach” LACs, and maybe 2-3 “target” LACs, and maybe one “likely” LAC. And it would further make sense to me that you would then maybe not have more than 1-2 “reach” LACs in New England specifically. And it would further make sense to me to pick those 1-2 LACs based on whatever nuanced criteria made sense to you individually, as there are way more than 1-2 “reach” LACs in New England.
But I am also the sort of person who thinks you can apply to just one, say, of “HYPS”, whichever is your favorite based on your personal criteria. I just don’t think you necessarily need to try to apply to a lot of schools generally, and therefore don’t necessarily need to cover all the peer schools in a given region.
1 Like
Amherst views itself (rightly IMO) competing for the same pool of applicants who are shooting for the Ivies, Stanford, Duke, etc…, and one of its comparative disadvantages is student size/diversity and course offerings. I think they are trying to forestall the “it’s too small” veto by pointing to the consortium. It has no difficulty attracting the students who want an intimate undergrad focused LAC experience. It’s the converse of Harvard and Yale’s pitches on their Houses and Residential Colleges – your social/living experience will be like attending a small college, but you will have all the benefits of attending an extremely well-resourced R1 university. I agree with @cquin85 that the Five Colleges are not what attracts students to apply to Amherst but it may be a reason not to not apply (where for instance they may pass on a Williams).
8 Likes
Apparently users are assuming compliance with my advice, which was really just highlighting the rules, is optional. It’s not. So rather than handing out a bunch of warnings, I’m giving you the opportunity to have a breather by temporarily shutting the thread down.
This topic was automatically opened after 13 hours.
It’s a little of both. Traditionally, NESCAC was a strictly east coast thing. A favorite among kids with a keen interest in winter sports, the conference demographics get preppier and wealthier the further into the alpine villages of New England you go. And I agree with @cquin that for many of these families, it could matter less what the world outside looks like so long as they are in striking distance of a good ski slope. No pun intended, but this seems to have a cascading effect on which schools outside of the region are considered “overlaps”. For example, I think there’s more of a natural affinity between Amherst and Carleton than between Amherst and Swarthmore, IMO. And perhaps between Williams and Pomona than Williams and Barnard, to take another example. But you’re right; deregulation of the airline industry, starting in 1978, scrambled everything, making all of these schools accessible to a restive, anxious and increasingly “national” constituency who regard attending college as an essential means to passing on generational wealth. “Any port in a storm.”, as the old seafarer said.
That being said, it would be silly not to say the quiet part out loud: that what distinguishes NESCAC today are the more than passing number of comps between it and the Ivy League: their pre-Civil War pasts; their historic architecture; the remaining sheen of their preppy legacies; and it certainly hasn’t hurt that they’ve been able to position themselves through “friendly”, round-robin, athletic play over many decades to make the comparison stick.
2 Likes
While I have been critical of some of the students who shotgun the Ivies/T20s, the highly rejective schools have such miniscule acceptance rates for unhooked applicants it usually makes sense to apply to more than one.
Your student can certainly choose which school they think fits them the best, but the schools are the final arbiters of fit. It’s impossible to handicap an unhooked student’s chances at any of these schools, and difficult to guess what factors/criteria might show well in the applications in any given year.
Regarding the NESCACs specifically (as well as some of the other highly rejective LACs), there tend to be more similarities than differences among the schools. Certainly there can be differences in overall vibe though.
Lastly, as for club sports, it’s great it sounds like Amherst has the club sport your kid is looking for, but if one wants a typical selection of club sports (not intramurals), NESCACs and other D3s aren’t the place to look.
3 Likes
Just as a reference tool, US News has an interactive “pin” map which has both their Top 50 National Universities and Top 50 National Liberal Arts Colleges:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/where-to-find-the-us-news-best-colleges
Obviously people should treat their rankings with appropriate skepticism, including that an individual’s “top” 50 need not be their “top” 50. But I think the map at least helps identify different patterns and clusters. And I find it interesting, albeit expected, the clusters and patterns for the universities and LAC have some commonality, but are definitely not identical.
Incidentally, I note sometimes you have to zoom in to really get a sense of what is happening. Like, shocker, Boston is a big mass of blue national university pins, which can only be easily seen as individual pins with a little zooming in.
The Claremont Colleges are even more like that, meaning you have to zoom in quite far before they become separated individual pins.
Anyway, one high level observation is their “top” LAC list is more concentrated in the Northeast (which I believe includes down through PA, but not Maryland, which is confusing because I thought Maryland was in their North region for other purpose) than their “top” university list–25 out of 50 for LACs, 17 out of 50 for unis.
It is the opposite for the South–15 out of 50 unis, only 6 out of 50 LACs, and at least 5 of those are in what some call the “Upland South” (potentially all 6, depending on how you categorize the corner of South Carolina where Furman is located). Air conditioning as a factor in US history once again . . . .
I’d say the West (9 unis, 11 LACs) and Midwest (9 unis, and 8 LACs), are fairly close to the same, but the pattern of locations within those (big) regions is not quite the same.
Anyway, all this supports the idea that if it feels like what we might call the NESCAC region (so not just the NESCAC schools themselves, but all the LACs within their collective map) is disproportionately dense in the “top” LACs–that is totally true.
On the other hand, take out the 6 in PA, Barnard, and West Point (I will leave in Vassar, although I actually don’t know if NESCAC people consider Vassar to be in the NESCAC region), and you are back down to 17 out of 50 again. Still disproportionate, of course, but that means at least around 2/3rds of the “top” LACs (according to US News) are not in the NESCAC region.
A final more personal observation–looking at that map it occurs to me that we live in a bit of a “top” LAC desert region. Probably helps explains why we are pretty neutral about in which region a LAC might be found, although again my S24 is not currently interested in looking West.
Still, take out the 11 “top” LACs in the West, that leaves up to 39 out of the 50 “top” LACs to consider. Which is way too many, so aggressive cuts will eventually be required.
2 Likes
I think this is all over the map. Some students/families are very geographically oriented. Some are very prestige/rank oriented. We looked at W. Coast and E. Coast LACs, and not just New England ones. Our strategy though was in line with your thought process of limiting total apps to the best fits. We had the benefit of our kids getting in a very fine state flagship early so their lists were all reaches.
1 Like
I agree, but our very experienced college counselors typically recommend that 2 or 3 in a given selectivity range is sufficient. Apparently there is observably enough of what I would call “conditional probability dependence” such that if, say, you apply to 2 schools in a given selectivity range and do not get into either, your conditional probability of getting into a 3rd given that information becomes extremely low. Even more so if you do not get into 3 and then are looking at a 4th.
Conversely, the conditional probability of getting into at least one of your #1 or #2 if you get into #3 (assuming #3 is as or more selective than both #1 and #2) is apparently very high. And extremely high if you get into your #4 and the question is the conditional probability of getting into one of your #1 through #3 (this is all assuming no hooks, and again that #4 is as or more selective than all of #1 through #3).
OK, so suppose your two favorite “Ivy” schools are Yale and Brown (this logic isn’t dependent on this choice). How much would also applying to Princeton increase your odds of getting into at least one of these schools? Apparently not much–if you don’t get into either of Yale or Brown, apparently your conditional probability of getting into Princeton is very, very low (like, way lower than if you didn’t know that information). Conversely, if you do get into Princeton unhooked, apparently the odds you will also get into at least one of Yale or Brown has become very high. So it turns out an unhooked application to Princeton as your #3 school is very unlikely to do anything–either you won’t get into Princeton, or you will get into one of your top two choices, and the scenario in which you only get into Princeton is (apparently) very unlikely.
Expand this to three schools you prefer over Princeton, and then apparently it is extremely unlikely you will get into Princeton and not one of the three schools you prefer (although getting into none as an unhooked applicant is also a large possibility).
Now, of course if your personal preference rankings strictly track the US News rankings, you would have Princeton over Brown, and therefore you should apply to Yale and Princeton, not Yale and Brown. Or, maybe you put Brown into a lower category, but you would still want both Yale and Princeton. But that is a different hypothetical.
Anyway, applied to LACs, the same logic says if you, say, prefer Amherst and Carleton to Williams, you don’t necessarily need to apply to all three. Because apparently the specific scenario in which you get into Williams but also get into neither of Amherst and Carelton, is very low probability. Add a third LAC you would prefer, and it gets extremely low that you only get into Williams. But of course if you instead have Williams as one of your top 2-3 LAC choices (and it is a viable “reach” for you), then you should go ahead and apply to Williams.
Of course this is all a bit of a tangent. But it does help explain why the wider your regional scope, the less you are likely to need to apply to any one “top” LAC. Like, maybe if you are only looking at NESCAC schools, very few people would prefer three to Williams (although I actually don’t know that to be true). But to me, at least, if you are looking outside of NESCAC, it becomes a lot more likely you will end up preferring three to Williams.
And once that is the case . . . there may actually be very little purpose served by applying to Williams (or any given most selective LAC) that would not make your top 2-3.
At least that is what our college counselors think, and they have placed a lot of our kids at these schools over the years.
1 Like
What proportion of the students who have gone to these schools from your kid’s school were hooked…recruited athletes, legacies, URMs, etc?
As for the rest of the paragraphs (assuming that it’s your interpretation of what your kid’s school’s GCs say), it’s all speculation without data…and would only apply to unhooked applicants. I do agree that highly rejective school admissions are not fully independent events.
Again a bit of a momentary tangent, but this is also something our college counselors emphasize. Their view is if you do the work of trying to identify which highly-selective “reach” colleges are the best fit for you, that will typically maximize the quality of your applications and therefore maximize the chances of our admission to one of those reaches. And they won’t tell kids they strictly cannot apply to, say, 4 or 5 reaches instead of 2 or 3, but their point is the more you apply to, the more that sort of tradeoff might start working against you.
I think this is again relevant to this regional issue because which schools you identify as fitting you best obviously depends on what role region plays in your perceptions of fit. So to me, it is pretty easy to understand why some kids would see schools B, D, and F fitting them best, and others schools B, C, and E. B might overlap for both, but then unshared regional preferences (or of course any unshared dimensions of preference) could lead to different preferences over the next two schools.
Of course you have to buy into the idea that if you prefer all of B, D, and F to C and E, and C and E are as or more selective than all of B, D, and F, then it is OK not to apply to C and E.
And I know in my school, a lot of families hear what our counselors say about this, and decide to apply to more reach schools anyway. Which hopefully isn’t actually harming them, although I suspect it is true that if you are talking not just like 4 to 5 reach schools, but like 12 to 15, maybe at that point you are at significant risk of not doing the best possible applications.