<p>Would someone explain to me what is so great about Amherst? Bonus points if you can manage to do it without 1) mentionng their USNews ranking, or, 2) that they have more money than G_d. :)</p>
<p>you'll probably get more replies to that question on the Amherst forum</p>
<p>And, you know what? The fact that this post has been up almost an entire day, speaks volumes. :)</p>
<p>John, Amherst's endowment is roughly 1 billion, Swat's is 1.1. Swat's student body is roughly 90% that of Amherst's size wise, so no matter how you cut it Swat's got more money, straight up or per capita. Mind you both are ridiculously well-endowed (some might even say like a horse), but they're no Swat :)</p>
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Would someone explain to me what is so great about Amherst?
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<p>The thing I like most about Amherst is the commitment to diversity they have shown over the past 20 years. When I was hunting for colleges in the early 1970s, it may have been the most preppy LAC in the country. I think they have to be applauded for making serious efforts in both ethnic and socio-economic diversity. </p>
<p>The downside of that is that Amherst probably lacks as defined an identity as some of the other top LACs. I think that, overall, it's probably halfway in between Williams at one extreme and Swarthmore at the other. I suspect that its student body is half Swarthmore and half Williams as well.</p>
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<p>BTW, I think your question is phrased in an untenable way. I don't believe it is possible to divorce "per student endowment" from such a discussion.</p>
<p>Interestedad, hasn't every top college and university made racial and socioeconomic diversity a priority? How is Amherst different from Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Wesleyan, Dartmouth or Haverford in this? I know some schools are more successful than others at it, but I think they're all trying pretty hard. What do you mean that Amherst students are half Williams students and half Swarthmore students? When I visited these places, Williams and Amherst could have been Middlebury or Bowdoin or Dartmouth or Colby. They did not remind me of Swarthmore. The schools I visited that were like Swarthmore were Reed, University of Chicago-more nerdy, Wesleyan-more artsy and Haverford. And all these schools looked like they have more money than they need.</p>
<p>I think I-dad pays more attention to the extremes rather than the norms. Large portions of the student bodies at Amherst, Swat, and Williams are interchangabble.</p>
<p>calswattie:</p>
<p>Yes, all of the colleges you mention have made diversity a priority. Amherst's president has been very vocal and they've done a good job increasing their diversity in all aspects. When you factor both ethnic diversity and socio-economic diversity, Swarthmore and Amherst have been two of the most successful east coast schools. So, in answering the question "what do I like about Amherst", its diversity initiatives would be high on my list.</p>
<p>The reason I mentioned two student bodies at Amherst is that the school seems to be striking in that regard. It has a very strong cohort of New England prep school kids and jocks (like Williams), but also a very large cohort of non-white and/or low income kids (like Swarthmore). This mixture shows up in the overlap schools. Amherst is one of Swat's top five "overlap" schools, but Williams isn't. Amherst's top overlap schools include both Williams and Swarthmore. I'm not saying that the campus culture at Amherst is anything like Swarthmore's. I don't think that it is. I'm just saying that a big chunk of their students who could have gone to either school.</p>
<p>The biggest difference is that Amherst seems to have a more polarized and segregated campus. It has extensive "theme" housing. A heavier drinking culture and a large number of students requesting substance-free housing. And so forth.</p>
<p>Anyway, I'm not trying to "pimp" Amherst. As a Williams alum, I took an oath to "hate" Amherst in perpetuity. I'll never forget walking around Amherst's campus when I was high schooler doing my college visits and seeing a bunch of Amherst guys in coats and ties at the bus stop. That was pretty hard core prep for the early 1970s when teen fashions were long hair and blue jeans.</p>
<p>I'm just giving credit where credit is due...they've done some things in terms of institutional mission and priorities that I applaud. Of the top LACs, I think it is probably the one that has changed the most over the last 50 years.</p>
<p>Yes, but, just to give props where props are due: no top LAC has changed more dramatically in the past 50 years than Wesleyan. Remember, fifty years ago (1956) Wesleyan was barely 1,000 students.</p>
<p>Is change judged solely by school size?</p>
<p>Of course not. Wesleyan essentially doubled in size by making the decision to admit enough women to equal the size of Bryn Mawr, something neither Amherst nor Williams were willing to take a chance on doing at the time.</p>
<p>Williams nearly doubled in size when they decided to stop discriminating against women.</p>
<p>These weren't decisions made of "free will". Not reducing the male enrollment was a concession made to get the alumni to dragged along kicking and screaming into the 20th century.</p>
<p>Doubling in size actually hurt these schools over the short-term by diluting the power of the endowments.</p>
<p>Yeah, yeah, yeah; we get it. You're obsessed with endowments. There's something almost Oedipal about this, ID.;)</p>
<p>what hasn't been mentioned for a while, is that SWAT ROCKS>>>> whoo hoo.</p>
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Yeah, yeah, yeah; we get it. You're obsessed with endowments.
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<p>It's not me. It was the conclusion of a working paper written by Prof. Gordon Winston of the Williams Economics Department on finance of higher education. Comparing Williams economic peformance in the 1980s to Swarthmore, Amherst, and Wellesley, the paper concluded that the rapid expansion of the student body in the 1970s had diluted Williams' endowment and resulted in lower rates of spending and saving. The paper specifically cited holding enrollment down as a contributing factor to financial strength.</p>
<p>Williams reversed its trend by not increasing enrollment at all for last 10 or 15 years. Normally, a college would increase enrollment incrementally to match endowment growth.</p>
<p>Wait a minute. It took a Williams professor to figure out that per capita spending and per capita endowment may go down during periods of enrollment growth? That doesn't exactly come as earth shaking news. It's called efficiency. It also doesn't explain how Williams "suffered" during the period in question? Did the grass on Sawyer green not get cut as often? Did they substitute powdered milk in the Baxter dining hall? The whole thing is a bit mysterious.</p>
<p>The two biggest variables in a college's operating budget are faculty salaries and financial aid revenue discounts. In fact, Williams fell behind its competitors in these areas during the period under consideration (late 1980s), with increasing class sizes and the need to enroll a higher percentage of "full-pay" students.</p>
<p>Williams still lags behind both Amherst and Swarthmore on both. By holding enrollment to a fixed level for more than a decade, Williams has closed the gap in per student endowment, per student spending has increased, and it is closing the gap on class size and socio-economic diversity.</p>
<p>And yet, in all the time I've been on this board, I've never once read a post that said, "I'm going to Amherst, their classes are smaller than Williams'." Are all of these people just stupid?</p>
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Are all of these people just stupid?
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<p>No. I think consumers are actually very perceptive. They want to shop where they get the best deal. Pomona, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams are four of the five wealthiest LACs (in per student endowment) in the country and among the very wealthiest schools (of any size). The impact of that wealth on student spending over a long period of time attracts customer demand.</p>
<p>As I've said many times: put a $69,000 Mercedes on sale for $28,000 and watch the customers line up around the block to buy. Those figures are Swat's annual per student spending and average annual per student charges (after discounts). </p>
<p>Quite a few of the top-10 LACs spend $25,000 less per student per year, but charge close to the same average price. For example, Haverford spends $14,000 less per student per year but collects a higher average price from its students than Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Subisidizing student spending is what endowments are all about.</p>
<p>ID - I reiterate, not once in nearly three years of CC board surfing have I heard a 17 y/o say, "I'm going to Williams (or Amherst or Haverford) because they're more highly endowed than Middlebury and Bowdoin." In fact, something about the mere thought of a 17 y/o repeating that sentence, I find faintly disturbing. :p</p>
<p>And yet, if I ask you what difference it all makes? You go back to student:faculty ratio. Even a cursory reading of the last USNews rankings reveals that fifteen of the top twenty LACs have pretty much the same ratios. Where is all of this extra money going?</p>