OP said a “cool college town” is also OK, if not urban. So that opens things up quite a lot.
Research opportunities abound at most decent LACs, some host their own (paid) summer research programs, so you might add that as something to consider.
There are web sites that list active Hillels and the LAcs on at least one that meet your other criteria are Amherst (which is in the same college town as UMass so there are some 30K students running around, more if you count the nearby womens colleges and Hampshire, and UMass has a large Hillel also), Williams (cool college town is a matter of taste here, small geographically beautiful mountain town is what I’d call it), Carleton and more here:
@wisteria100, nope you seem to be missing my point as I would agree without a doubt that Williams and Amherst are stronger academically then Hamilton, I did not say better - it has little to do with where my DD’s are attending.
Test optional accounts for people who because of a myriad of valid reasons scored lower than would have been possible if all things were equal and it’s a great way to account for that student population as they are just as qualified and will be just as successful - that said no one would omit a test score if it was higher.
The right school is different for everyone - I wasn’t projecting onto anyone else. In my twin DD’s case, it was the school with the highest scores all else being equal. Did they really want to go to Williams - yup, but they didn’t get in - oh well.
Realistically, there aren’t many options here. LACs tend to be non-urban, and they aren’t large enough to create a cool college town vibe on their own.
Amherst College could work, because the UMass-Amherst campus nearby is definitely large enough to establish a college town atmosphere. Amherst is small but there are far more students in the local 5-College consortium, as noted above.
The Bi-Colleges (Bryn Mawr and Haverford) could work. Collectively (and it is reasonable to treat them collectively, due to their proximity) they have over 2,500 undergrads, with easy train access to Philadelphia. Swarthmore is theoretically linked as well, but in practice is more isolated.
Wellesley and Barnard are single-sex. Barnard probably feels more co-ed than Wellesley, due to the close relationship with Columbia.
Outside of the northeast, there’s Colorado College (in Colorado Springs) and Macalester (in St. Paul). The OP has ruled out Reed (too hippy) and the Claremonts and Oxy (too Californian).
The OP’s criteria just aren’t great fits for LACs, so the OP may need to expand beyond LACs and start looking at small universities. If Wellesley is attractive, then consider Tufts, Brandeis, or Brown, for example.
@corbett, agree, maybe we should develop this prototype throughout the country - who knows maybe we could both do a great thing and make a ton of money like Al Gore did!
Ripped out of context, but I wanted to challenge what’s stated here (which may or may not be what was intended, I can’t actually tell): A school having higher-stats students does not necessarily indicate stronger academics. There may be a correlation and there may not, but I suspect that even if there is one, it’s weak.
LACs are basically selling the on-campus experience, with your professors and a small group of talented classmates, both inside and outside of the classroom. The off-campus experience isn’t typically prioritized.
For the past several years, the #1 LAC as ranked by USNews has been Williams. And Williams probably has one of the least exciting off-campus scenes in the country – no Starbucks, no first-run movies, not even a 24-hour convenience store. If you live in California, there’s probably a nondescript strip mall near your house with a drug store or Trader Joe’s, along with a donut place and Asian food, maybe a pizza or taco joint, and a gas station on the corner. Well, that strip mall may offer more services than Williamstown.
Yet Williams gets a perfect score of 100 with USNews, making it effectively the benchmark that other LACs are compared against. This is not to say that the rankings are definitive (they aren’t); the point is that the absence of a vibrant off-campus environment is not necessarily a problem in the LAC universe. It would be possible to make the same point with other highly ranked LACs, like Middlebury or Kenyon or Mt Holyoke or Grinnell. In fact, it’s possible that the lack of a cool off-campus scene may actually be a plus for a LAC, because it strengthens the sense of on-campus community.
This doesn’t mean that anyone who wants access to the big city or a hip college town vibe is wrong. It just means that LACs may not provide what they are looking for.
“And Williams has one of the least exciting off-campus scenes in the country – no Starbucks, no first-run movies, not even a 24-hour convenience store.”
Depends on one’s idea of “cool” I guess. For some, easy access to nature and hiking is way cooler than strip mall businesses. Williams also has surprisingly good access to the arts and culture. Plus, Williamstown does have coffee shops, Mexican, good pizza joints, Thai, Sushi, Indian, etc. - pretty much at least one of everything.
I personally am in full agreement. Williamstown is wedged between the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Taconic Range of New York, and the Berkshires of Massachusetts; how cool is that? However, only “some” see it that way, not “most”.
Yeah but the nondescript SoCal strip mall has one of everything too. And the ethnic food at the strip mall is probably better and cheaper.
@CrewDad, thanks the heads up - I meant the top 25%. @Corbett, agree and that’s why this thread is luckily just about the LAC experience, which with the exception of a handful of schools, is typically not an urban experience. And Williams was just one example - I could have said Harvey Mudd, although that was never considered by DD’s.
Among the “top” ~50 LACs, I don’t see very great differences in overall academic strength. Consortium relationships distinguish a few of them. There may be non-academic differences that enable some colleges to draw more top students. Nevertheless, most LACs share a similar set of academic features (such as small class sizes, total focus on undergrads, and total or near-total focus on the liberal arts). The “top” schools all draw from the same labor pool of people with PhDs from top research universities. Most of them have 1500-3000 students, libraries with hundreds of thousands of volumes, ~new science centers, and study abroad programs. Compared to the top ~50 universities, more of the top ~50 LACs claim to cover 100% of demonstrated financial need (or close to it) for all students.
There may be significant differences in the strength of specific programs such as environmental science.
Some colleges have locations or facilities that are better suited than others (almost regardless of the school’s selectivity, wealth, and prestige) for field study of specific ecosystems. Eckerd College is beautifully situated for the study of marine science. So is College of the Atlantic. Colorado College has an interesting location at the intersection of alpine and prairie ecosystems; geological formations in the nearby Rockies offer excellent field sites for earth scientists. Connecticut College claims an excellent program in freshwater botany (reflecting its coastal location as well as the interests of one influential biology professor). Many other LACs aren’t so ideally located if you want to do field work in those areas (but might be better located if you wanted to focus on political/policy aspects of environmental studies or lab research.) If you’re mostly interested in laboratory research, big endowments or the ability to win research grants probably matter (but in winning grants, even the most prestigious LACs don’t seem to compete easily with the Ivies+ and major state universities.)
@tk21769, I’m assuming you haven’t been keeping up with the top LAC’s today as yes laboratory research opportunities are plentiful as a result of most having much bigger endowments per students than most research universities, and yes grants are received consistently and yes prestigious science awards are a plenty.
I agree that you want to be in a place where you are surrounded by peers in the intellectual sense. I think that’s important. But the problem with assigning a metric of academic strength based on test scores is prone to inaccuracy. Once you get to 1420 you hit the 97th percentile. That’s pretty high. So while the difference between a 1450 and a 1550 seems huge to some, it really is not all that different. Is someone who takes the SAT 3x with lots of tutoring and scores a 1550 thru super scoring, really ‘smarter’ than the kid who takes it once, gets a 1480 and then stops because he now wants to focus on winning his state model UN championship? Once you get to a certain level, they’re all smart! If you were sitting in class and the kid next to you was the 1480 and the kid on the other side was the 1560, I doubt you could pick who was who. Now I give kudos to the kid who can score a 1600 with no prep as a sophomore, but beyond that, there is really a lot of hair splitting going on here.
@agree on the hairsplitting concern, unless the hair is as wide as a celery stalk as some top-50 LAC’s have bottom 25% SAT’s in the high 1200’s which is more than splitting a hair - doesn’t mean they aren’t great, but I say it’s a different student profile for those that scored 1500 first sitting.
With due respect, many of the factors suggested in #75 (test prep, etc.) average out across student populations. If scoring results were to be regarded as an indication of the academic preparation of incoming students — and therefore perhaps indicative of the classroom experience – then significant differences between schools should probably not be regarded as inconsequential.
Unfortunately, when @Chembiodad posted some scoring figures, they seem to have been received personally, when he simply reported accurately from respective Common Data Sets. As with some others, I disagreed with the “without a doubt . . . stronger academically” assertion. However, testing scores on some level contribute to people’s understanding of which colleges are academic peers of others. Denying their relevance completely would be to deny (as might be someone’s choice) what seems to be common currency elsewhere on CC.
@merc81 agree with you, though don’t view the difference between 98th percentile and 99th percentile to be all that significant. But between 80th and 97th - yes that is significant.
Especially when stats mean American standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, you really can’t infer academic rigor from the entering student body stats as those tests are ridiculously easy compared to the tests that a student would encounter at a rigorous program/school.
When what’s compared is minimum A-Level requirements (as is the case in the UK), then you can make a case about the difference in academic rigor.
