Just an interesting tidbit:
Last week, I was facilitating some professional development for a group of teachers in our public school district. As it is summer, lunch conversation involved sharing our summer plans. When I mentioned touring colleges with my son, one of the young teachers recommended Swarthmore and seemed to know a lot about it. I asked if she had gone there. She replied that she had attended the University of Pennsylvania, but had taken courses at Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr while she was there. From further conversation, this seemed not atypical of her college friends.
I found that interesting… and recalled conversations on College Confidential in which people wondered how the Quaker Consortium worked and if Penn students ever took courses at the other schools, or if it was mostly Bryn Mawr women going to the other schools for courses.
From this sample size of one, at least, it appears that the Quaker Consortium is alive and working!
2 years ago we toured both Swat and Haverford and both places mentioned the consortium and made it clear that people can and do make use of it. So it seems that it is alive and well.
We toured Swat recently. At the info session they noted that more Haverford and Bryn Mawr students come to Swat for classes, then the other way around. They said it was because of some unique offerings at Swat that the other 2 did not have. They made it seem as if Swat kids taking classes elsewhere was small but available
A good friend of mine went to Bryn Mawr. She graduated quite a while ago, so things may have changed, but I would take a careful look and ask some pointed questions before just assuming there’s a lot of cross registration.
She said Bryn Mawr and haverford students taking classes back and forth was very common. The schools are a longish walk or easy bus ride from each other. Their adacemic calendars and daily class schedules are coordinated to make it easy. In fact, she lived at haverford for at least one year. She said taking classes at Swarthmore was far less common. It’s further away and schedules aren’t coordinated, so someone who wanted to take a class at Swat had to build their entire schedule around it, allowing for getting there and back and for the difference in schedules. People from Bryn Mawr and Haverford did take classes at Swat occasionally, but it wasn’t incredibly common. She also noted that there a few people who just liked Swat better and would take several classes there and hang out there and that they often ended up transferring. Penn was even less convenient.
Her daughter, a rising junior, is interested in Haverford, but was also very intrigued by the chance to take classes at Penn. My friend has warned her daughter not to count on it too much.
So, again, things may have changed, but before letting it be a huge factor in a decision, I’d ask about how you get from one school to the other, how well coordinated the calendars are, how many people actually do cross register in the direction you’re interested in each semester, etc, etc. Distinguish the marketing from people’s actual experiences.