I recently visited Williams and fell (unexpectedly) head-over-heels in love with it. Now I am faced with the fact that Williams is a “lottery” reach school for any candidate and so I am casting the net out for schools similar to Williams in preparation for potential disappointment
Alright here are the aspects of Williams that I loved and schools that seem to be similar in that regard
-Winter/Interterm for internships or pass/fail classes : Colby, Oberlin
-Tutorial-style classes (2 students: 1 professor) : none? … except for… Oxford?
-Oxford exchange program: Dartmouth, Middlebury
-Undergraduate emphasis: most notably Amherst?
-Divisional distribution requirements (between open or core): BU, Colorado, (I am sure there are many others but I have not researched them)
-An unquantifiable thing I liked about the campus was the intensely energetic feel. The students were all walking quickly to their next classes. I sat in on a class in which the professor prowled around the table and extravagantly gesticulated. I’m assuming this is the norm in most urban and top schools (though I know someone at Princeton who says it has a country club feeling to it, so I’m wondering if it varies.)
Any suggestions to add to this list? Any obvious Williams lookalikes that I have missed? Any help would really be appreciated. I am a little heartsore.
For many people, the single most distinctive feature of Williams would be the small size and rural isolation of Williamstown. This is often perceived as a negative, but some people – often athletic and energetic people who like the outdoors – see it as a positive. Such people may also consider schools like Dartmouth, Middlebury, Colby, Colgate, or St. Lawrence. Outside the northeast, schools like Carleton, Grinnell, or Whitman have some similarities.
Williams is often paired with arch-rival Amherst (Amherst was founded by a breakaway group of Williams students and faculty who felt that Williamstown was too remote). Amherst is comparable to Williams in terms of selectivity, but the campus atmospheres are different somehow, which contributes to the mutual dislike.
There are plenty of bucolic, fairly isolated rural schools, some of which @Corbett listed in the previous post.
There are also a number of schools with student-faculty ratios in Williams’ neighborhood.
Great profs are everywhere, smart students are everywhere, and quality LACs dot the landscape like dog hairs on a carpet after a lackadaisical vacuuming using your grandma’s decrepit machine from the '70s.
What really sets Williams apart, in my opinion, are the tutorials.
You could go to Dartmouth or Midd – also outstanding schools – and try to spend some exchange time at Oxford taking one or two tutorial classes… or you could spend four years with that intimate setting at Williams.
Now maybe there are times, or in some ways generally, that a class of 10 is better than a class of two. But if you want the most personal attention possible outside of visiting hours, tutorials are the way to go.
As for the vibe and setting combo, I imagine it’s quite similar at Middlebury, Dartmouth (though there are grad students, Dartmouth is quite undergrad-oriented), Colgate, Colby, Hamilton, probably a few more rural LACs with a balanced student body that likes to have fun and loves its school… Grinnell, Oberlin and Kenyon in the Midwest are pretty rural too, and have similar weather, though I hear they’re less preppy and sporty than Williams/Midd/Colgate et al mentioned above. Carleton, Bowdoin and Swat/BMC/Haverford, maybe, but they aren’t as rural.
@kingofcats, For general ambiance (location, culture, environment, personality) I would look at Hamilton, Middlebury, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, Kenyon, Colorado College. If you are female, Mt. Holyoke.
I would agree wholeheartedly that the “intensely energetic feel” that you picked up on is a feature of Williams.
Winter term: Quite a few schools offer this
Tutorials: As far as I know, only Williams, though a lot of LACs have small seminars
Oxford: Many schools offer study abroad at Oxford (and Cambridge) even if they don’t sponsor the program
Undergraduate emphasis: Very common at LACs (and some medium sized schools like Princeton)
Distribution requirements: Quite common
This is true, but it sets Williams so far apart that it’s hard to identify any similar schools (outside of Oxbridge), which is what the OP is looking for.
The honors college at Ohio University (not to be confused with Ohio State University) features tutorials. I think that St. John’s and New College of Florida have them too. I don’t think that these schools have a lot of applicant overlap with Williams though.
On the tutorials…the Williams web site says “With 60 to 70 tutorials offered each year across the curriculum, more than half of all Williams students take at least one during their time here.”
The way it’s presented in the OP it sounds like every class is a tutorial, or at least one per every semester. It seems that’s not so. Nearly half never take one at all. Why? Are they hard to get into? Not of interest to most?
Oxford is available to study abroad from any school if you are accepted to the program, though again, when abroad, do you get into tutorials?
Just things to look into.
And OU does indeed have a tutorial college. The university is likely a safety but I don’t think the tutorial honors college would be. Still, take a look: https://www.ohio.edu/honors/
Tutorials-- check out Sarah Lawrence. They have biweekly 1:1 conferences with the professor and related individual research. Its culture seems different from that of Williams in other ways, however-- much more liberal/ edgy, more toward independence on the independence-community continuum, and in an affluent suburb very near NYC.
I’m not offering suggestions but looking for similar. I haven’t visited, but my impression is that there is a strong athlete culture at Williams, which is something that really appeals to my son. He wants top level academics, but thinks it would be cool to go somewhere where lots of his classmates are varisty athletes. Any suggestions? Part of the struggle is that he is a wrestler, so Wesleyan and Trinity are the only other NESCAC schools with wrestling programs.
Some possible D3 options: Washington & Lee, St. Olaf, Gettysburg, Muhlenberg
Some possible D1 options: Bucknell, Davidson, Franklin & Marshall
F&M is kind of an oddball. They are D3 for other sports, but have an unusual NCAA exemption to compete in wrestling at the D1 level, only without athletic scholarships.
The even more odd thing about F&M is that they would be a decent D3 team, but they are not competitive in D1.
I believe that list pretty much sums up the highly ranked LAC’s with wrestling programs. What he is seeking is not that common. Fortunately if he stays on the same trajectory he should be in the ballpark to wrestle and compete academically at any of those schools.
Do any of them have a strong athlete culture like at Williams?
Not a huge point, but I wanted to point out that while many programs offer study aboard “at Oxford,” (with facilities located in the town and even with classes contracted with Oxford academics), Williams students are actual matriculants of University of Oxford/ Exeter College (one of the constituent colleges of Oxford). Accordingly, Williams at Oxford students are deeply enmeshed in the academic/ social/ athletic life to an unusual degree as compared to other Oxford programs. This made a huge difference to be “at Oxford” and not just “in Oxford.” (Oxford colleges have gotten very clever at monetizing their down times (e.g., summers) to offer opportunities via third party companies to stay in the dorms/ take classes which are not actually “Oxford” per se.)
Undergraduate emphasis: Very common. All LACs and many universities like Dartmouth, for example.
Divisional distribution requirements (between open or core): Also not uncommon. You’ll find plenty
Have you visited other LACs or was Williams your first? What are your areas of academic interest? I would suggest starting your focus on looking at LACs which are strong in your areas of interest, preference for rural vs urban, geographical area (if a factor), and then find some schools which fit within a range of selectivity.