I disagree that they are vastly different: both of mine applied to Duke and Wake. Wake is a similar size of undergrads, also big on sports especially basketball, more laid back students than Duke but still serious students and expectations of lots of class discussions, and both focus on small classes/liberal-arts based education. More sorority/frat campus presence at Wake but also that isn’t dramatically different. Even my Engineering D23 applied to Wake(they are now ABET accredited as of this fall retroactive to 2021 and 2022 grads)–the two schools are definitely much further apart in what they offer for the Engineering kid, but Wake still made the list easily. Both attract a lot of PreMed and preLaw kids. Both have a lot of performing arts on campus. Many schools in that size range, even “top” ones, do not have as much arts open to all undergrads. Duke has a higher concentration of super-high-stat brainy kids, but there are plenty of high-stat smarties at Wake to make it have an intellectual vibe for those who want that. The schools get a lot of overlap in applications from our private school: the ones with a real shot at Duke often are a match or better for Wake, and the kids see the similarities, especially if they do not want one of the big flagships.
Duke and Wake are the similar two in this trio–UNC is an outlier(great school just very different campus feel than the other two)
Thanks, my wife got her Masters at UNC so our son is OOS legacy. He prefers smaller schools, but we are going to look at UNC, since it offers EA and it is a highly sought after public.
My kids liked Chapel Hill and Wake better than Duke. In their minds, Duke gave off a very intense vibe. All three great schools and increasingly difficult admits.
I found when my daughter was looking at schools that the schools on her list were very different from one another. In fact, her final two choices were a very large public midwestern university that was all about the sports and school spirit and then a smallish private southern school without the big time sports atmosphere. They both were excellent academically for her major but she knew they would give her very different experiences. Neither was perfect but she appreciated the opportunities at both. I don’t think it’s uncommon that students like schools that are different from one another.
That’s what I was getting at. The type of student that seems to prefer Duke is much more intense. There also is a much more international flair to Duke than Wake.
A student can like both school A and B with some different characteristics if those characteristics aren’t important to the student.
That, and also: A student can also like both school A and B with some different characteristics if the student likes all of the different characteristics.
I mean, some students like SLACs and Big State Flagships.
It may not be ideal, but the Amtrak station in Meriden (CT) is maybe 20 minutes away (compared to the 10 minutes between Vassar and its train station in Poughkeepsie.) There’s one direct link to NYC/Boston daily; the rest are commuter trains to New Haven and Hartford that seem to run hourly. You can get anywhere you want from New Haven.
Happy I seemed to spark some rare PNW reviews!
Whitman would be high on D’s list if it was a drive for us. But that drive, combined with fairly complicated transportation to get the rest of the way home, seems like she would be living the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles a few times a year.
Travel from Whitman isn’t as hard as you’d think. They run shuttles to Seattle and Portland at breaks. My oldest has no trouble making it back and forth from Alaska.
There are also airports with Alaska/Delta Flights from Walla Walla and Tri-Cities daily.
I’m sure it is workable. But I already have 2 kids who have to travel an hour to get to airports without direct flights home. This is 3 hours worse, and they are close enough Uber to the airport is pricey but possible. This isn’t. If we were in the PNW it would be high on her list though. Great school we both loved!
I do love that it is a place that people immediately come to the defense of. Says a lot that it garners that kind of loyalty. If anyone else has comments probably best to PM me so we don’t get this thread further off track.
I get it. This is why we will not encourage D24 to apply to schools in Maine, although she has expressed interest. Just too hard to get there from here. I’ve heard flying into WW or Pasco is not too bad, at least from points in the west.
I think D25 will at least look in Maine. And I think they would be good schools for her. But I have similar issues there.
It’s pretty much a forgone conclusion that she will be flying somewhere. But L&C being 30 minutes from PDX, and UPS being 30 minutes from SEA are HUGE plusses in my book. And they are big enough airports that even if there aren’t direct flights there are at least options. I am so sick of trying to figure out which bad travel option to set up for my kids.
Same. My DS and husband visited three schools in Maine that they really liked. But the travel from Southern CA to Maine is so difficult/expensive. Further, they just felt really remote to a SoCal kid.
Whitman is hard to get to. If you love the school then it makes those connector flights more tolerable, but there is no doubt that it is more involved. And, by car, it is WAY out there. 4.5 hour drive from Seattle. I don’t know if the Maine college kids fly out of Bangor, or if they lug it down to Logan, but all the Maine schools are closer to Logan than Whitman is to SeaTac.
With that said, Whitman is the premiere LAC in the PNW, and that point is pretty well settled even though in some years L&C’s admit numbers appear to be pretty close. UPS, Willamette, PLU, Linfield, Whitworth and George Fox are not at Whitman’s level IMHO. With that said, there are a lot of kids who can get into Whitman who choose one of the others, and I attribute that in large measure to LACs being a bit of a mystery to the average person in the PNW. The differences in pedigree among small private colleges is lost on a lot of people around here.
Edit: I should say Whitman is the top LAC in the PNW along with Reed. I always forget Reed and I don’t know why. Reed may in fact be the tippy top LAC in the PNW, but it’s just not everybody’s cup of tea and I think Whitman appeals to more people and has comparably bright students.
Yes, agree on all counts. Lots of state school pride in WA (and I assume OR). LACs are outliers. Not uncommon for kids from private HS to go to elite LACs back east or in Midwest, but much less common for kids from public HS to make choice of LAC of any tier in any region. UW, WSU and Western seem where most set their sights, maybe throw in Gonzaga too. D24 not one iota interested in any of these.
ETA Reed only has a small percentage of kids from PNW
This is so true. My kids are at a well respected Catholic high school in the Portland area and I have never even heard of kids applying to Reed. Whitman occasionally. U of P occasionally and Lewis and Clark almost never.
Mostly it’s USC, Notre Dame, Stanford, MIT,or Ivies for the tippy top kids, Gonzaga, Santa Clara, Pepperdine, USD, Baylor, TCU, SMU, UW, for the next group, and WSU or WW or another WUE school for everybody else.
My D23 is looking mostly at smaller liberal arts schools in the Midwest and Texas and no one has heard of most them.
Baylor, SMU and TCU the surprise schools on that list. Rest make sense.