I know it was mentioned upthread, and yes I am biased (as a parent of a rising junior), but I think everything you are describing points more towards College of Wooster than to Kenyon or Oberlin.
@Ohiodad51:
Well, CWRU’s 75-25 percentile ACT’s are 33-30 (according to PrepScholar).
Oberlin’s is 32-29.
Kenyon’s is 32-28.
Denison’s is 31-26.
As for alumni achievements, while CRWU trails all three LACs in “American Leaders” produced, CWRU actually bests all 3 LACs in per capita matriculation in to top MBA/med/law programs and trails only Oberlin in per capita PhD’s among grads.
And, yes, @homerdog, MiamiU doesn’t have the student body of an Ivy but evidently does have the physical campus of one as well as the aforementioned highly-regarded undergraduate instruction.
The rise in appeal of gigantic OSU and decrease in OH’s HS population has affected all the non-OSU OH schools. This is a boon for the rest of us as schools that would not be offering merit money if they were in CA or the Northeast do so because they are in OH and some top-quality programs are easier to get in to.
Wooster’s 75-25 percentile ACT’s are 30-25 and PhD production is above Denison.
OSU’s are 31-27, BTW.
So, yeah, I don’t see how anyone can look at the data and say that any 3 LACs are head and shoulders above all other schools in OH.
I need to get back to work but . . . . more random fun facts.
Kenyon does draw less from Ohio than Denison, 12.3% vs. 22% Ohio residents in last year’s entering class.
And I don’t know how old the data from Prep Scholar is, but Denison’s most recent 25-75% ACT range is 28-32 and Kenyon’s edged up to 29-33.
According to Fiske Guide 2017, Kenyon’s ACT 25th-75th is 28-32. Oberlin the same. Denison is 26-31
LOL just realized that’s the same as @PurpleTitan 's numbers. I just glanced at them and they seemed wrong because I looked at the second number and assumed that was 75th percentile. I need more coffee. 
Miami’s claim to public Ivy or Ivy of the Midwest was largely marketing. Not sure anyone outside of Ohio ever really thought that (and many in the state didn’t either). But Miami was a trendy pick for a while. From everything I have seen, Ohio State has passed it up. University of Dayton seems to be a popular pick with a lot of Ohio kids from what I have seen.
Kenyon now offers a major in environmental studies:
http://www.kenyon.edu/middle-path/story/environmental-education/
@saillakeerie they may have grabbed onto the idea for marketing, but they didn’t write the book.
A later book “The Public Ivies: America’s Flagship Public Universities” (2001) by Howard and Matthew Greene of Greenes’ Guides included 30 colleges and universities and Miami is also on that list.
You can write a book on anything you want. Doesn’t make it true though. It was marketing. USNews rankings (and all other college rankings) are marketing as well.
@apple23 great news!! Thank you!
I get that @saillakeerie I’m just saying it wasn’t Miami U’s marketing. Apparently it was the opinion of the author(s).
Where is @MiamiDAP when we need her?
CWRU even 2 decades ago had a reputation of being an engineering/STEM centered school and that’s what most HS classmates who applied/attended gravitated towards.
Those who were interested in non-STEM areas or wished to double-major in STEM/non-STEM opted to apply and attend other colleges.
Not really fair to CWRU as it does have respectable humanities/social science programs. One of my CS Profs did his undergrad there…CS and Philosophy.
^The Case Institute of Technology merged with Western Reserve University in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Lots of CIT engineers regretted the merger then and CWRU has always carried a heftier reputation in STEM (particularly engineering) than in arts & sciences. That is by no means implying that CWRU’s arts and sciences schools stink, it is across the board a great school. But it is kind of like Wharton/UPenn and Oberlin Conservatory/Oberlin College. One area of study kind of brightly outshines the others.
On the test scores, I’m using the stats Denison reported for class of '20 – which presumably hasn’t been reflected in all publications yet. Over the last 5 years – the window of my research – Denison apps and stats have been rising.
“That is by no means implying that CWRU’s arts and sciences schools stink, it is across the board a great school. But it is kind of like Wharton/UPenn and Oberlin Conservatory/Oberlin College. One area of study kind of brightly outshines the others.”
@Ohiodad51
While I understand the point you’re making, I don’t think the CIT/WRU or Wharton/UPenn situation is comparable to that of Oberlin’s Conservatory/College except in degree of difficulty in admission…and that’s based on completely different factors(Con == mostly by audition, college == holistic assessment of HS academic stats/board scores and application).
One thing I noticed about the former two is that the CIT engineers and to some extent…some STEM majors at CWRU and Whartonites at UPenn are viewed with respect/admiration as the top students on their respective campuses.
From my own experiences as an Oberlin undergrad and from chatting with classmates from both the college and the con…that is so not as much the case at Oberlin unless it is restricted solely to Double-Degree students.
One good illustration of this was the voluminous amount of old jokes going back years…possibly decades made by students from the college about the con students’ being geniuses of their musical instrument/specialty…but not being able to hack it academically in college classes outside of the con, being mindlessly conformist/rule followers to a fault, snobs(Con students on average are more likely to come from the higher SES than college students when I attended), or sometimes having street smarts outside the hallowed halls of the conservatory. And let’s not get started about the subset of such jokes targeting voice majors…
To be fair, the con students more than returned the favor by regarding us college students as a bunch of uncouth neo-hippies who can’t be bothered to dress properly, “be polite”, and sometimes even bathe/shower properly*.
- This mainly applied to one house notorious for residents who don’t shower for such long periods due to their notions of maintaining their perceptions of neo-hippie cred the stench could sometimes be noticed a block or few away back when I was an undergrad. Many students…college or con who aren’t residents made it a point to make a detour to avoid it…including yours truly. Incidentally, that dorm also happens to have students from the wealthiest families even among the full-pay group when I attended.
They’ve since cleaned up their act according to younger alums after 2003 so this is no longer an issue.
I attended a high school ages ago that was about 2-3 hours from all these schools. At that time, Oberlin was known to be a good school, but the conservatory there overshadowed everything else about its reputation. Truly counter-cultural types went to Antioch. In my post-college years, I met more people from Oberlin in NYC than I did in my home town, and over the years, it has become more aggressively PC than the others. Kenyon was known to be a good, solid LAC, especially for writers and swimmers (although the best swimmers wanted to go to D1 schools where they’d have scholarships). The kids that went there were pretty interchangeable with the Denison ones but they tended, on the whole, to be somewhat better students. Denison was known to be a decent school with a very active social scene and was favored by the country club set. PEople who went there loved it, btw. When we looked at these schools decades later with our kid, Denison was the real surprise. While there are still kids there who “represent” the affluent midwestern suburbs, it is not the “party school” it once was, and there are plenty of serious students there. Really, everyone in our family was pretty wowed by this school. There is no doubt in my mind that Denison’s star is rising. They are using their endowment to really improve the students and the student experience.
As for the comments about Ohio schools, it is so true that these LACs – so well known beyond Ohio – have lots of competition in state. There are LACs, such as Muskingum and Ashland, that have religious affiliations and are solid schools and appeal to some, as well as a good public system as noted above. Plenty of kids start in the OSU branch campuses, which make living at home a viable (cost-effective) option, and then move to the main campus as upperclassmen. OSU alums are a loyal bunch and much of Ohio is a “Friday Night Lights” kind of place, so my guess is that many kids have had their sights set on going there for as long as they can remember. (I know more than a few!)
We’re all looking forward to your trip report!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but here are the Class of 2020 middle 50% ACT scores (based on 2016-17 Common Data Sets except Denison which doesn’t appear to publish one, but does post current entering class stats on its website):
CWRU 30-34
Oberlin 29-33
Kenyon 29-33
Denison 28-32
OSU 27-31
And SAT CR+M:
CWRU 1280-1490
Oberlin 1250-1450
Kenyon 1230-1430
Denison 1190-1380
OSU 1160-1410
These are close, but Case Western edges out Oberlin and Kenyon for best entering class stats, with Denison just a notch lower (more evident in SAT scores than in ACT). The top-end ACT score differences aren’t especially noteworthy: 33 and 34 are both in the 99th percentile of test-takers nationally, while 32 is 98th percentile and 31 is 97th percentile. The differences may be more significant at the lower end of the class. CWRU’s 30 is 95th percentile nationally, while OSU’s 27 is at the 87th percentile. All good students at that level, to be sure, but CWRU would have a definite edge over OSU in the standardized test stats of the lower end of the class, with the three LACs somewhere in between (ACT 29 = 93rd percentile, ACT 28 = 90th percentile).
You could compare admit rates too @bclintonk
Kenyon - 24%
Oberlin - 29%
Case Western - 36%
Denison 38%