<p>I opened the online version of my favorite news publication a few minutes and was thoroughly pleased to find an insightful article about--you guessed it- Swarthmore!</p>
<p>Is the pull of an Ivy school lessening - or is it just that much harder to get into one?</p>
<p>Read it here: <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0412/p01s04-legn.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0412/p01s04-legn.html</a></p>
<p>Thanks for the link, Commongi.</p>
<p>ha ha ha, that thread is funny</p>
<p>Wow, I definitely saw "Lin Gyi" under the Swat website for accepted students and I recognized the name in the article. Good for her!! That is really awesome.</p>
<p>This article wasn't very good at all. It would have been far more effective if she'd actually gotten into Harvard. Read the end- she didn't. This is not to say that Swarthmore isn't a great school- I think it's wonderful. I just don't think the article did as good a job as it might have.</p>
<p>I agree Elizabeth. The title is totally misleading if she didn't actually get in there.</p>
<p>I just read the ending. Yeah, the article could have been different, but whatever. It just emphasizes that certain students mindfully seek a better fit rather than a flashier name. I've talked to Lin and she's a very nice girl. On the Swarthmore accepted students board, there are others who likewise preferred Swat. One girl chose it over Columbia and Berkeley (not naming anyone), among others.</p>
<p>Woo! Pretty bold of Ms. Gyi to choose not to attend a college that didn't accept her. That's about the worst example of Not Choosing Harvard that the reporter could have come up with. To begin with, CC itself is littered with examples of kids who, possibly as rejection disappointment defense mechanism, decide in advance that they wouldn't go to HYPS even if they got in. But once the fat envelope actually arrives all that thinking goes right out the window. Who is to say what Ms. Gyi would have done if she had actually had Harvard as one of her choices?</p>
<p>There are many real examples of kids who in fact do not choose HYPSM. With a yield of ~80%, there are hundreds of kids who turn down Harvard every year. Write an article about one of them.</p>
<p>HAHAHA I couldn't agree more, coureur!</p>
<p>And I'm a great example of what you're talking about.. I never thought that I would even <em>consider</em> Harvard until that e-mail came... and now I love the place! :D</p>
<p>Well, after spending two days and nights on Harvard's campus last week, my son ultimately decided on Harvard over Swarthmore and Amherst (for reasons that, if anyone's interested, are detailed in a posting [#69] on the Harvard/LACs thread on the Harvard board). But, I'll tell you, one of many things that I truly admire about the Swarthmore community, as reflected on this board and even on this thread, is that you rarely encounter the sort of seemingly frantic defensiveness - and aggressiveness - that are frequently found on the Harvard board. </p>
<p>Take the last two posts on this thread. While I don't think that either of them is off-base, I can assure you that posts of this sort would have drawn all sorts of immediate fire on the Harvard board. But here? Well, two days have now gone by, and no one has seen any need to respond as if Swarthmore had been attacked (which it hasn't) and needed to be defended (which it doesn't).</p>
<p>I dunno: Maybe the Harvard folks, with all the battering that Harvard takes in the media and elsewhere, have reasons to be a bit, uh, touchy. But in what I assume will be my last post on this board, I simply want to say how much I value, and appreciate, both the content and the tone that I have found here: informative, civil, and unfailingly helpful and supportive.</p>
<p>Best of luck to all of you!</p>
<p>Best of luck to your son, Epistrophy! Good luck with his career in college and afterwards.</p>
<p>Epistrophy:</p>
<p>You raise an interesting point and one that goes back generations. When I was looking at Harvard compared to small LACs back in the stone age, it was always in the back of my mind that, if I chose Harvard, would it be because of the "prestige"? </p>
<p>Many kids, such as your son, choose Harvard because they have considered their options in depth and decided that it offers the right blend of characteristics for them as an individual. However, there are also many students who choose it because it is "Harvard". So, there is some sensitivity to that issue.</p>
<p>Because the top LACs offer an odd combination of superb undergrad education while not being widely known in the general population, you tend to get a self-selected pool of kids (and parents) who are comfortable with making the choice for internally-motivated reasons. There's a degree of self-confidence inherent in that choice. I have to admit that there is even a little bit of reverse-snobbery in the LAC crowd. Kind off like knowing about that small, off-the-beaten-track restaurant with the terrific chef.</p>
<p>I would say that the major area of defensiveness among the liberal arts college crowd is when students or parents don't even know what the colleges are: for example, when they sound like they think the entire curriculum consists of sitting around doing paintings of Hillary Clinton!</p>
<p>Anyway, best of luck to Epistrophy, Jr. The most important thing is that he is excited about his choice and looking forward to an exciting new experience. I think that goes a long way towards making freshman year fun.</p>
<p>"The most important thing is that he is excited about his choice and looking forward to an exciting new experience. I think that goes a long way towards making freshman year fun."</p>
<p>Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. Sometimes, amidst all the seriousness and striving that tend to accompany the college chase, "fun" seems almost to get lost. How sad. As the late George Plimpton put it: "There are people who would perhaps call me a dilettante, because it looks as though I'm having too much fun. I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun."</p>
<p>There should be an anthology of people who studied at prestigious universities and then transferred to LACs and vice versa, to see what they think.</p>
<p>I for one would be curious as to whether the quality of my education would be substantially different at an LAC.</p>
<p>Although not a direct undergrad comparison, the numbers of LAC students going on to grad schools in academic departments at major research universities is quite large, most of whom end up doing a stint as TAs at the universities. It's a pretty common path and really takes advantage of the best of both worlds -- undergrad at a "boutique school" LAC and grad school with all the resources of a research university.</p>
<p>Thomas Cech has a fantastic essay on the topic. He was a Chem major at Grinnell, then got his PhD at Berkeley before winning the Nobel Prize for his research:</p>
<p>Interesteddad, you forgot Cech's latest position as Director(?) of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. :) Not bad for a LAC grad.</p>
<p>I remembered Epistrophy's post #10 on this thread when I came across this thread in the Yale forum:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=59028%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=59028</a></p>
<p>Interesting....I wonder when the obsession with prestige ends? Sophomore year? Junior? Senior? Never?</p>
<p>I'm a sophomore (and one term paper away from becoming a junior) and I'm still obsessed :-D</p>