Could anybody make some suggestions for some average students? I know many people going to college are concerned who don’t have the straight A’s, and this would be very helpful. There are quite a few brilliant B,B+ students that I know, whom are having a hard time trying to figure out where to apply for college in the coming year. Any help would be very much appreciated, and I think other members on CC might as well. This could be both public or private.
Do you mean colleges where the student can study liberal arts subjects (which is a very large set of colleges), or what are called “liberal arts colleges” (LACs, a small subset of the previous set)?
Both sets of colleges include both private and public colleges, although most people around here seem to only write about private LACs and ignore the public LACs (see http://www.coplac.org/members/ ).
DePauw, St. Lawrence, Beloit, Kalamazoo, Sarah Lawrence, Hobart, Muhlenberg, Wheaton (MA), Earlham, Allegheny, St. Mary’s College of MD, Ohio Wesleyan, Goucher
Lawrence University in Wisconsin
Oh, New College of FL, as well.
A list of them is frankly too numerous to name. Such a list would spawn from St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY to the University of Oklahoma to University of Minnesota - Morris to St. Mary’s College of California. All of them are extremely different, and yet all welcome B students.
Just go on the US News and eliminate the top 50 schools for national universities and LACs. After that almost all of the schools, even most of the top regional colleges, will welcome B students. Even some of the top 50 LACs will gladly accept a B student.
I agree that they are too numerous to name, though USNWR comes close to already having done so with its category “A-Plus Schools for B Students.”
That said, of the colleges included, the one I find myself most frequently recommending for either B or A students is St. Lawrence. The college has a lot in common with the deservedly popular Colby or Middlebury, and personally I would prefer SLU’s border-line (figuratively and literally, with Canada) exotic location and less uniform architecture.
This is a small school, but Albion College in Michigan. It’s a beautiful private liberal arts college where everyone is so close and friendly. My brother was an average student (21 ACT, about 3.0 GPA) and got in to the honors business program–absolutely loved it!
I think you are asking people here to do too much work on your behalf with too little information about what exactly you are looking for. Start off by doing some research on your own behalf…use the super match to the left, go to a library or order some college guide books (I like Fiske and Princeton Review but there are many others, look the Colleges that Change Lives website, look at that USNWR list of A schools for B students etc. Then isolate some choices that would be academic/financial/social/geographic fits. Once you come up with some ideas of what works for you people here may be able to add to the list.