“Re SAT scores and Smith: Smith is test-optional, so it is fair to assume that the scores of the enrolled students are somewhat lower than the published figures. FWIW.”
Correct.
Re test optional Smith and reported scores: @Consolation, we were told at the information session that the reported scores are the actual scores of the women who enroll, not the reported scores of the women who apply. So it is unclear what that means with respect to applying with given scores. (I was surprised to hear that and questioned the AO pretty closely since my D had not submitted her scores and had been wait listed.) I don’t know how many other schools report that way.
Degree of academic challenge/pacing.
One college classmate who transferred out of my LAC(Oberlin) as a politics major said before transferring out, she was struggling to maintain a high 2.x GPA and felt her academic workload was overwhelming at times. Once she transferred to and finished in the same major at UT-Austin, her GPA at her new school was somewhere in the 3.7-3.9 range while she found she had much more free time for ECs, parties/socializing, etc.
Another college classmate was a near straight-A student at a top 30 uni before transferring in and finding himself so overwhelmed with the rigor at our LAC he ended up on academic suspension for a year. Interestingly enough, the top 30 uni was one of the colleges which I received and turned down an acceptance offer because the coverage in my academic areas of interest wasn’t as deep at the time and they offered far less FA/scholarship money.
Another case is one of my older cousins who changed his mind about a military officer career after a year at an FSA as a STEM major(Engineering/Physics). Ended up transferring to and finishing near the top of his class in his STEM field at a school of the MIT/Caltech/CMU variety. His assessment was that while both environments may appear to be equally exceedingly rigorous/overwhelming…it was for different reasons.
The FSA was because the respectable academics was coupled with a 24/7 rigorous military training/physical fitness/living environment whereas the university he graduated from was exceedingly rigorous and greater than that at his FSA because of the high academic level/workload/pacing the Profs there assumed and expected from ALL undergrads.
My wife and I have friends who were married, a week after we were, on a boat on Lake George in Upstate NY.
Because our honeymoon was in the northeast anyway (Boston/Bar Harbor), we spent the last couple days of it on Lake George celebrating with our friends (and theirs).
The night before their wedding, we went to a concert in Saratoga Springs – Train, The Fray, and a couple other acts. Nice town; fun concert.
@PNWedwonk, I have no doubt that they are the submitted scores of the students who actually enroll, as opposed to those who apply. That is normal for all schools.
But that would still not include the scores of those who didn’t submit them, and it would be fair to assume that they are lower in general.
The question is, do they actual require that enrolled students reveal their unsubmitted scores, and average them in? I strongly doubt it.
@cobrat , finally, a response. Thank you.
“Degree of academic challenge/pacing.”
Your experience is very anecdotal (which is ok; so is mine), but it’s heavy to “this one classmate”, and those seem like isolated incidents. Maybe your Oberlin classmate focused him/herself at UT Austin. Maybe your top 30 classmate had other issues going on that distracted him/her from school work. I’m sure you’ll eliminate these things as “known items,” but I’ll tell you now I’d be skeptical of that much insight from anyone.
Don’t get wrong. I’m as big a champion of the LAC model as they come. But the top 30 includes some damn good schools, and I have a hard time believing someone who had the academic chops to get into one transferred to Oberlin and got their rear ends handed to them simply based on academic preparedness and ability to withstand rigor. I just don’t buy it.
I also don’t view UT Austin as the kind of place people go to cruise through school. Certainly a more academically diverse population, but I think that, all else being equal, someone who can yank a 3.9 from UT Austin can hold their own at a good LAC.
Again, I go back to this: some schools are particularly well known for their rigor. As for the rest, I think we generalize, and in so doing conflate selectivity with difficulty, which is a mistake. They don’t get much more selective than Stanford, and yet, it’s not a hard place to graduate from once you get in. Swarthmore? Yes. Both have talented student bodies - but one wants their school to be a sweat shop, and the other has a much different approach and culture.
So, back to the original topic - which classmate of yours, or which HS friend had a cousin whose extended family told you about how rigorous it is at Smith? Because I’ve never heard anyone make a point that Smith is particularly rigorous. I’ve heard it about Wellesley, and to a lesser extent about Bryn Mawr. But not Smith.
I have to agree with @MiddleburyDad2. Skidmore, in a relatively short time, has entered a more selective sphere and is attracting many of the same types of kids that would also be looking at Smith. And as the parent of a current Skidmore student who attended a rigorous high school, I can attest to the fact that Skidmore classes do tend to be rigorous. Are they as rigorous as Smith’s? Don’t know, because my child did not look at Smith. And I’m sure it has everything to do with individual classes taken at each school rather than the school as a whole.
Skidmore students get great jobs and also get into med school, law school, business school, and other graduate programs. There’s nothing “second-tier” about it.
“Don’t know, because my child did not look at Smith. And I’m sure it has everything to do with individual classes taken at each school rather than the school as a whole.”
Not only that, but even if your child did look at Smith, you still wouldn’t know.
I agree, too, that generally speaking it’s mostly a function of what you study at a particular place, and as far as generalizing about the whole school, that only seems to make sense if it falls into one of the two categories I’ve described in my other posts - either referencing a school that is simply notorious for its rigor or comparing two very very academically disparate schools and assigning one more rigor than the other).
But just running around assuming that, say, a Smith College is more academically rigorous than, say, a Skidmore College because “for decades and decades it had a reputation” is just basically talk with no substance.
I believe Wellesley College is a very rigorous place to obtain an education, any education, because it’s reputation for rigor is really out there … it comes up over and over and over again. Smith? I’ve literally never heard anyone say it before.
My information comes from academics who sent their children to Smith and had them as grad student advisees, employers…including older relatives who employed Smith grads over the last several decades, and dozens of HS* classmates and alums who attended Smith and peer academic institutions…including Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Barnard.
What’s YOUR basis for that statement and setting it apart from Smith and peer elite Women’s colleges/LACs?
From what I’ve heard from dozens of HS classmates and colleagues who are Wellesley alums…including an ex I dated in late undergrad…its academics is elite…but not set nearly as far apart from Smith and its academically elite peers as you make it seem. Most of them regarded Smith as a peer elite Women’s college/LAC.
The same cannot be said of comparing schools like Smith, Middlebury, or Barnard vs…say LACs like my alma mater, Kenyon, or Skidmore. Even just 2 decades ago as there was a notable difference in the quality of the pool of students accepted/admitted to the former vs the latter.
- My public magnet HS sends somewhere between 15-30 students each to Wellesley, Smith, and peer elite colleges each year.
Wellesley has a high mid range ACT of 29-33, but low average GPA at graduation of 3.31, and has a grade deflation so that the average GPA in classes may be no higher than 3.33 (with exceptions). Students have to be high up on the curve (which composed of very strong students) to get an A.
Smith has no grade deflation policy.
On that basis, elite colleges like Cornell, Swat, Caltech, CMU, etc along with ones not considered as much like Reed would be Wellesley’s academic peers.
Using SAT/ACTs as proxy measurements of student academic strength as undergrads is flawed. All it measures is the strength of the students when they took it in mid-late HS before undergrad.
Once they matriculate as undergrads, they should no longer be factors like one’s HS GPA/class ranking.
I don’t quite see lumping STEM focused schools (like Cal Tech) with Wellesley, but most of the schools you mention are absolutely academic peers of Wellesley. In some ways, they’re peers of Smith and Skidmore too, but I believe rigor varies more between the two groups than between the individual colleges within a group.
If you’re not going to use stats from the end of high school, then how on Earth do you plan to measure strength of the student body as a whole?
@Consolation, I think they do. Maybe someone who has a child at Smith could weigh in?
@cobrat ,
My information comes from college counselors, prep school guidance counselors, IB program directors, graduates, children’s classmates, time spent with coaches recruiting my kid, my experience as an employer, my connections in law school admissions and time spent in the law in Palo Alto and Seattle, a profession and two locations where your alma mater really matters. One bit of specific information that has come my way from all of that is what @usualhopeful mentioned re grade deflation. Another bit comes from counselors who spend time with admissions officers all over the country. From them, I’ve learned that one of the reasons Wellesley is hesitant to go test optional (they consider it often) is that they still believe that the tests protect students who might not be up to handling the rigor that they know is there from being admitted … they don’t want a kid to struggle there. They know they are a hard place to go to school and they account for it. Much like Swarthmore, but probably to a lesser degree of intensity
That’s the best I can do. I didn’t say I was going to try and prove it. My entire thesis has been, “how do we really know?” And, honestly, I don’t really know. I said I believed it, but I don’t really know. I also don’t believe for one minute that you really have a bead on Skidmore’s academic rigor either. Not really anyway.
Leaving the rigor discussion behind with the dead horse, look, we’re talking about a college with an admission rate of over 40% and a 50th percentile ACT score of 30 after years of being test optional. It has an old name that used to mean something more than it does now. Skidmore has a new name, a 28 median ACT w/o the benefit of test optional elimination of low scores until this year and an admission rate in the high 30% range. Are these schools really that different in terms of who is there? I don’t think so, even if Bing Crosby mentioned Smith in White Christmas.
Smith is more like Bryn Mawr (a fine school) and MHC than it is like Wellesley, which really is the undisputed top dawg among the sisters and one of the best LACs in the country.
I just think you’re working too hard here, and in the process taking me with you. 
Someone mentioned that Skidmore’ tuition is really high. Yes, it kind-of is. I have sticker shock and I have just finished paying 4 years at Vanderbilt.
D was accepted at arguably more “elite” and “academically rigorous” schools than Skidmore but in the end, it was all about FIT. She was a STRIDE recipient at Smith and after turning them down and choosing Skidmore, was offered a “trial year”. We never did find out what that entailed but they sure wanted her there. There is a noticeable difference in the feel of the two schools and I strongly believe that they are so different in feel that if you fit at Skid you won’t fit at Smith and vice versa. Of course, you have the all women’s college v. coed but it goes much further than that. To read some of these posts, I’d have to say that the fact that some choose Smith just because of its prior reputation is part of that difference. Few are choosing Skid because it is widely known and accepted as a top tier LAC and maybe that is a good thing. I know now that D would have been miserable at Smith and a few of the other schools she may have accepted a spot at. And then again, love the school that loves you back was our motto.
On a side note, in reference to Smith and rigor. The basis behind the “leaked” letters, is that Smith is accepting students into the social work program, who are not prepared to handle the rigor. Putting aside the sturm und drang of race, the concerns with rigor are interesting, based on the current discussion.
Leaked Faculty Letters and Race at Smith
I just wanted to point out that it is a bit fruitless to compare Smith and Skidmore’s acceptance rate as an indication of prestige, seeing as basically 1/2 of all college applicants are unable to apply to Smith (thus bringing the acceptance rate up) versus 100% of the population at Skidmore. That’s akin to comparing apples to oranges.
I do agree with Middleburydad’s opinion that Wellesley is a cut above the rest of the 7 Sisters colleges; however, I have found the names of Bryn Mawr/Mount Holyoke/Smith/Barnard to travel just as well as Wellesley when talking to the non-academic adults in my life. Almost every adult that I’ve talked to has known the Mount Holyoke name (and also that it’s a women’s college), including some people that I didn’t expect. Of course, this evidence is all anecdotal.
Honestly, I find that most people who chose to attend a women’s college didn’t choose it because they found it to be “prestigious” and “a top LAC”, but rather because they found it to be a fit with their values, interests, and future goals.
Another note on women’s colleges applications rate: in addition to being open to only 50% of applicants, many women in this day and age simply cannot see themselves at a single sex institution, thereby further depressing the numbers. My oldest found Bryn Mawr plenty rigorous. I have another one heading to Mount Holyoke this fall. I guess I’m biased. I will say I did not like Smith when visiting.
Aging Smithie here. I found Smith to be a terrific experience for me and a great education. Having said that, my DD (also Class of 2015 hence my screen name) wouldn’t consider it. She chose Emory and there were many times I bemoaned the lack of advising and love of learning there. She would have gotten a better education at Smith.